The Arts Council of White Lake recently offered their first film screening in years. The screenings of Sundance Film Festival movies took place Thursday, Feb. 8 and Friday, Feb. 16.
“We had an interest in doing something film-related here,” said ACWL marketing and events coordinator Ian Martin. “We hadn’t done much with film and I have a background in film, so we had talked about getting a film festival that has a short tour. We did a little searching and saw that Sundance had a short tour. We reached out to them and they made it really easy to screen the films here.”
The full Sundance festival takes place annually in January in Utah and has gained a lot of attention in recent years.
“For me, film is something that I’ve always loved,” Martin said. “Many years ago, I had a chance to actually go to the Sundance Film Festival. It’s so much fun and a really cool experience. From my perspective, as soon as I went, I was interested in bringing something like that to White Lake. I knew it was something that the Arts Council was interested in doing as well. When I suggested the idea of Sundance, they were all very supportive. We used to do film screenings in the past at the Playhouse with classic films, so we wanted to consider doing something like that again and this was a little different.”
With it being a few years since White Lake’s last film viewing opportunity, the ACWL was looking for something different to offer the community. Both showings of the Sundance films sold out and have received positive feedback.
“We were testing the waters with a screening to see if there was an interest from the community,” said Martin. “We had originally only planned one screening and it sold out really quickly, then the second screening sold out really fast as well. It seems there’s enough interest in the community for us to do another film-related event in the future.”
The ACWL requested attendees take a survey after the screenings and look forward to offering some type of Q&A style discussion after future screenings.
“The response has been really positive,” Martin said. “Some of the movies are a little bit more challenging than what you might typically expect from movies. We were glad to see that people were open to talking about it and more receptive to movies that were maybe a little bit more unconventional. We’ve gotten some feedback that people would like to have a conversation afterwards...Overall, we’ve gotten really positive feedback.”
In addition to the excitement of trying something new at the ACWL, Martin shared that this has been a reflective experience from his past professional work with colleague Amy Geist. Geist helped direct and write the first film featured in this year’s Sundance lineup, “Help Me Understand.”
“When I was getting ready to promote this, I noticed that one of the producers on the first short film was someone who I worked with on a movie in Chicago many years ago,” said Martin. “It was really fun because I got to do an interview with her, and we posted that on our YouTube and Facebook pages. It was a really fun experience for me promoting it because I got to see an old face and see that they are now doing really cool projects in Los Angeles, so that was particularly rewarding for me.”
Martin’s film, “Cooke Concrete,” is available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. “It was around nine years ago,” Martin said. “It was a long process to actually film and complete the project, but we did complete it and she volunteered as a producer’s assistant. To see her now being a professional producer was really cool and rewarding. I did a Kickstarter and raised a little over $30,000 over the course of about a year, and shot the movie.”
