Taipei Times staff reporter Noah Buchan sat down with Urban Nomad founders Sean Scanlan and David Frazier at the Taipei Artists Village to discuss the Urban Nomad Film Fest.
Taipei Times: Is there a theme for this year’s festival.
David Frazier: Nah, we don’t really go with themes. Urban Nomad is sort of our general overriding theme to show independent and alternative views on cinema. So with the film Bozo Texino, Bill Daniels the director drives around the US in a van setting up a screen on top of his van showing his own film about hobo graffiti. That fits with our ethos really well. A film about Beijing punk rockers or Beijing drag queens also fits. We are just trying to show films or creations … that aren’t going to get to Taipei any other way and second of all are really in the alternative circuit — totally non-commercial, totally non-mainstream.Sean Scanlan: We have another aspect that is community-based. We try to show locally made films by people who haven’t yet made it into the festivals to give them encouragement.
PHOTO: NOAH BUCHAN, TAIPEI TIMES
DF: Local short-film directors are the backbone of the festival. At least half the program or more, if calculated by minutes, is local short films, and a huge percentage of the audience is those filmmakers.
TT: Is there generally a turnover of filmmakers year to year?
DF: There is definitely some continuity. We have several filmmakers [this year] who showed in our festival before.
SS: We always try to get new work from these people.
DF: The number of submissions probably doubled from last year to this year, meaning that among local filmmakers we have [get] a lot more name recognition.
TT: How are the films chosen?
SS: Originality. Keep the movie short — but people never really listen to that.
TT: Yes, I noticed on your Web site that if the film is under 15 minutes it has a better chance of being shown.
DF: Well, if the film is borderline and it’s two minutes, we’ll probably show it. But if it’s borderline and it’s 20 minutes we probably won’t. That’s just how it stacks up. But I think that spirit … is more important than technical polish. That being said, the technical ability of the films we are getting is increasing every year. TT: Do you network with other independent film festivals?
SS: Dave believes the future is networking with clusters of people who are interested in the same subject — the rise of Facebook and the Internet — and if we work between these networks something viable or exciting can happen.
TT: How do you network?
DF: We have good contacts now in Singapore, and the Philippines and Hong Kong is getting pretty good. And there is a good film distributor in Beijing, so part of it’s a product of traveling around and meeting people on the road and meeting people coming through Taipei. We’ve had artists from the last Taipei Biennial and the Infantization show at [Taipei’s] MOCA.
TT: Are there any trends you’ve noticed between this year’s submissions and the first year that you held the festival?
DF: What the hell did we show the first year?
SS: The camera work is getting a lot better. The images are as good as film now. The first year we had people making films on 16mm and transferring them to video.
DF: You could break it down in a couple ways. In terms of animation, everything is getting very stylized, where the style becomes more important than the story — which I would consider a negative. In terms of fiction film or narrative shorts, I would say you get a lot more directors going for genre-type stuff. We have more submissions this year by people who are making horror films, for example. Or a Jim Jarmusch art style. So I think in some sense, some of it feels a little more mainstream, though still in the territory of indie, but the exterior varnish of it is a little slicker.
SS: Yeah, people are getting clued in as to how to make a good
15-minute movie, whereas five years ago nobody really knew.
TT: How do you promote Urban Nomad?
DF: We approach film bloggers who write film blogs. We are not really interested in mainstream Taiwanese media reporting on it. In terms of getting people through the door, a good blog post is worth more than a story in a big newspaper or TV.
TT: What about networking with other countries. Do other Asian countries have a burgeoning independent film scene?
DF: Singapore has a great scene. We got a lot more submissions from Singapore this year and really high quality stuff. Almost everything we get from them looks like it’s professionally shot. Hong Kong has a kind of weak indie scene, by comparison.
SS: The Philippines is well-established.
DF: The Philippines might be the next discovery on the film festival circuit.
TT: Why do you say that?
DF: Because there is a lot of creativity and that creativity is not that well-known. In the West, they are always looking for the next big thing, and Filipino cinema or Vietnamese cinema could be the next wave.
TT: You are totally independent. What happens if the festival becomes, over a period of time, something like Spring Scream? Highly commercial with lots of people?
DF: Size involves a greater organizational effort. Our plan is to grow slowly — sustainable growth. I don’t think we want to do what Spring Scream did and go after big pop stars … if we wanted to show a Hollywood movie or a top Indie movie from Sundance, that would be far cheaper than bringing a top-tier rock band. But I think Sean’s always wanted to put on a rock concert more than a film festival.
SS: [It’s] about the energy and the excitement. I remember I was in London when Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction came out. There was a line around the block and it was like a rock concert and there was that energy. I would like to bring that into the festival. I mean film and music are very different things. Film, people usually enjoy it by themselves in a dark theater and … we are trying to change that because it’s now easier to show films outside with a bigger audience. I think there can still be that feeling of seeing something special that you won’t see again — that kind of live experience.
DF: We are the only film festival that sells beer in the theater every night. So we try to do things to make it more of a social space and not such an impersonal theater space.
TT: And that’s the idea of taking screenings out of the traditional theater?
SS: Yeah, they don’t consider the audience’s perspective. When we show films we always have to keep that in the back of our minds: are people going to walk out at some point of the movie? So we try to get the best possible screen, sound, amenities to maximize your enjoyment out of the event.
DF: If you go see a band, you might meet a cute girl or boy and hang out and talk and meet interesting people. We try to be a film festival where that could happen.
This interview has been edited and condensed..
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