Bringing in an audience for an independently operated arts event is always a challenge. When the Ridgefield Independent Film Festival (RIFF) came on the Fairfield County scene in 2016, organizers knew they were in the right place ”” but it took a while before they realized they chose the wrong time.
“For the first two years, it was held in May,” recalled Geoffrey Morris, the festival”™s executive director. “And it didn”™t get great audience participation. I got involved with it the third year and moved it to October because my feeling was in May the weather starts getting nice and people want to go outside, not inside. In October, even though the weather is still nice, people are fine to spend an afternoon indoors.”
Morris”™ hunch paid off as the festival attracted 4,000 people in 2018 and 2019, a significant growth over the preceding two years. But then came 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, which required the festival to rethink its audience participation.
“We did a virtual festival, although it was partially live,” Morris continued. “We did 35 maximum people in a room that held 150. Most visitors were virtual, but I would say 300 to 400 people came.”
For this year”™s RIFF, scheduled for Oct. 8-10, Morris and his team are planning to come to in-person screenings with a vengeance: 72 films from 26 countries screening at six venues across Ridgefield. The festival uses an online platform called Film Freeway to attract entries and Morris coordinated a seven-person team to screen all of the submissions and recommend which ones would appeal to audiences.
“As the executive director, I said to them, ”˜We want inspirational films, we want films that tell stories. And we like local filmmakers.”™”
Among the local filmmakers whose work will be screened at the festival are two Ridgefield residents: Joanna James, with “A Fine Line,” a documentary that explores why fewer than 7% of head chefs and restaurant owners are women; and Ellie Gravitte, with the narrative short “Make It Easy,” which is about a musician”™s chance encounter with a potential soulmate.
The RIFF slate is predominantly made up of short films ”” Morris acknowledged that this mini-format offers budgetary advantages to new filmmakers as well as a means of perfecting their cinematic skills before investing more time and money into feature-length works.
Morris chose the theme of “resilience” for this year”™s festival, and that spirit is on display in a wide and diverse selection of titles, including two very different interpretations about environmental challenges: “After Antarctica,” a documentary on polar explorer Will Steger”™s efforts to call attention to the damage created by climate change to the South Pole, and the Austrian production “Alles hat Grenzen Nur Der Mondfisch Nicht,” an original musical that frames the subject through provocative songs. (It loosely translates to “everything has limits, only the sunfish do not.)
Other examples of resiliency include films with protagonists that defy cultural stereotypes to create their own realities, including the Iranian import “Red Lipstick,” a drama about a woman deciding whether or not to marry; “Planet b234” which explores Latino masculinity and fatherhood; and “Authenticity,” a musical about a popular high school student who resorts to catfishing to snag the one boy in her school that she believes is genuine and sincere.
Putting together a film festival is a time-consuming and labor-intensive endeavor, and Morris starts planning one year in advance of each event.
“Sort of six months out or seven months out, there”™s a lot of planning with getting the Film Freeway platform going and making sure the dates are secure,” he said.
“And then it just rolls along with people screening films, and then three months out you”™re getting sponsors, you”™re getting your program booked together, you”™re starting to do the marketing and letting people know that it”™s happening.”
As Morris gets ready for his Oct. 8 opening night, he is confident that audience reaction will be the strongest in the event”™s five-year history.
“I”™m totally impressed by all of the films that were submitted,” he said.
