The St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase is going to be a little different this year — and much of the same.
"It's in essence, the same thing, sort of," says Chris Clark, artistic director at Cinema St. Louis, which puts on the showcase. "We're celebrating local filmmakers. What's different every year is there's new films, new voices."
But this year, which is the 23rd celebration of cinema with St. Louis connections, the space that the festival will take place in has also changed. For the first time ever, Cinema St. Louis has a permanent home in the recently acquired Hi-Pointe Theatre (1005 McCausland Avenue, 314-644-1100) and a place to showcase its programs.
"We're able to spread shows out a little bit more than we might have in a paid or rented or limited-hour space," he says. "We have a little more room to breathe."
The showcase will also be holding a filmmaker lounge on the weekends in the Hi-Pointe Backlot so that people can take a break in between films. And the festival includes more pieces than ever before: There are 91 shorts and feature-length films in total this year.
"The big thing is being in our new beautiful theater," Clark says. "Everyone is excited."
The festival runs from Friday, July 21, to Sunday, July 30, and many of those 91 films are grouped into thematic programs, like animated and experimental shorts or documentary shorts. Still, there's a lot to choose from. So we picked a few to highlight a bit more in depth.
Tenuto, directed by Meg Halski
Part of the Narrative Shorts 2 program, at 4 p.m. on Sunday, July 22
A 12-minute short about a symphony violinist and husband at a country retreat, Tenuto began with director Meg Halski's admiration for Andrea Jarrett, the second violin in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
Halski proposed they collaborate — and Jarrett took her up on the offer immediately, suggesting they work around "Sonata No.5" by Eugene Ysaÿe, a difficult piece she was working on.
"I listened to the piece all weekend long, probably listened to the piece like 100 times," Halski says. "And then just dreamt on it."
Things began moving fast when Halski stumbled on Boone Monument Village in Marthasville, which had been in Daniel Boone's family for years and is now owned by Bernardo Brunetti.
"The story just revealed itself," she says, adding, "We shot over a 36-hour period and created a ghost story centered around this very haunting piece of music."
Both Jarrett and her husband, Ian Kivler (who is artistic administrator at SLSO), star in the short, which Halski says is also a story about what it's like to be in a relationship with a serious artist. There is no dialogue so that nothing interferes with the sound of Jarrett's playing. The title, Tenuto, is a musical term that means "to hold."
The short has already won awards at 7 festivals and been selected for 17 total around the world.
"It's kind of a fever dream," Halski says. "We were happy with the outcome and just decided to go for it and entered around 50 festivals."
But, she says, it's especially meaningful to show it in St. Louis, her hometown. For Halski, who has long worked in commercial and documentary filmmaking, it also represents a pivot to TV, movies and making more creative works. She recently completed the Sundance TV writers program and is in the process of working on and pitching television pilots and a feature-length horror film.
"It's just awesome to be able to produce the work here in my hometown," she says. "It's a really supportive city for creating films and stories."
9 p.m. on Friday, July 28
When Doveed Linder set out to make The Box, it was 2012, and he thought he was making a sci-fi short. Then someone suggested he make a few more shorts on the same theme and link them together into a feature-length piece.
"I thought it was a good idea because I was wanting to make my next movie," he says. "I thought it would just be something that takes a year and a half. But for a variety of reasons, it turned into an 11-year project. So I'm very happy to be showing it at the showcase."
The film, which is debuting at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase, is about a man who lives in his mother's basement and is obsessed with communicating with life outside this world. He makes contact, which leads to aliens taking humans' places in their lives.
Linder says that it's "very '80s sci-fi," and that he was initially trying to give it the vibe of an episode of The Twilight Zone.
"I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a pure sci-fi kind of guy," he says. "This just kind of evolved out of a brainstorming session. And the story kind of took itself in different directions."
Those 11 years spent working on the film looked like a lot of different things. First, he wrote and then created the chapters one by one, so it was a stop-and-start process. The editing was complicated and the film required a lot of visual effects. COVID-19 also slowed things down. Linder also got sidetracked as he took on a career as a boxing journalist and then got into training boxers. Then, just when he thought he was finished, Linder watched it and decided to recut it.
"I see it as an 11-year education," he says. "I'm proud of it."
Linder is excited to see it debut in his hometown. But he's also looking forward to working on his next project, a film titled The Driver about a boxer named Marvin Elkind, who was Jimmy Hoffa's driver and then became an informant on the mafia.
The story is as different from The Box as Linder's first film, Defiance, which played in the first-ever St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase.
"It is very different," he says. "And it's probably a story that's a little closer to my heart because I'm really big on boxing and organized crime."
Part of the Narrative Shorts 8 program, which takes place at 4 p.m. on Sunday, July 30
Eliza began with the Campbell House Museum and the story of Eliza Rone, who was enslaved by the Campbell family in the mid-1800s. Few knew that Rone was a slave, Steadman says.
"[It] interested me to tell a story from the perspective of someone who never gets their story told," Steadman says. He immediately thought of Delisa Richardson, a student in his acting program and production company Circa 87 who had been part of a writing mentorship. The two ended up both writing and directing the short together.
Writing together was a smooth process, both say, but one that required a lot of research into Rone's life and the Campbell family. Though there are limited sources remaining from that time, the two did have letters that Rone had written to Virginia Campbell.
Steadman and Richardson then had to imagine Rone's situation as an enslaved woman married to a free man with children. They thought about how if one of her kids fell sick, she would have to get permission from the Campbell family to go home to care for them.
Standing and then filming in the Campbell house was breathtaking, Richardson says. She'd think about how she was literally treading the same ground as Rone had.
"We wanted to get it right," Richardson says. "We wanted to make sure that we didn't do a white savior movie because that's been done in the past. We really wanted to give honor to Eliza and John and her family."
Part of that was respecting the space and its history. Steadman describes how the cast was discouraged from speaking between takes, except for questions for the directors, in order to stay in character. They made sure to keep things historically accurate, which meant no pierced ears, painted nails, lashes or highlights.
They would also stop filming as buses passed by, in order to keep the sound accurate.
"We were all business and really passionate about telling the story correctly," Steadman says, adding that they incorporated dialogue from a period St. Louis newspaper into the script.
Though the short has played overseas, the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase will be its U.S. debut. Both are excited for people here to see the film.
"We worked really hard on it, and the cinematography is beautiful," Richardson says. "Being in that house, where all of those characters lived, it was so special."
It's a little bit of a bittersweet moment for Steadman, though. This will be his last piece produced in St. Louis and the last effort from Circa 87 studios as he's about to relocate to the Pacific Northwest. "This was a really valuable film to end my run of a decade here in St. Louis," he says.
Steadman leaving isn't the end of filmmaking for Richardson. She and others from his classes are teaming up to keep telling stories in St. Louis.
"We're going to try to continue Dan's legacy," she says. "[We'll] find some stories here that we think need to be told."
Tickets to a single show or program are $15 or $12 for students. A five-film pass costs $65 or $50 for Cinema St. Louis members. For more details and a full program, visit cinemastlouis.org.
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