Film For Film's Sake

Offshoot Festival encourages art of moviemaking

The brand-new Bentonville Film Festival is about seeing films -- and being seen at them.

The Offshoot Film Festival, now in its sixth year, is about making films -- and encouraging filmmakers to come to Arkansas to do just that.

FAQ

Offshoot

Film Festival

WHEN — Thursday through Sept. 12

WHERE — University of Arkansas Global Campus on the Fayetteville square

COST — Festival pass $35; day passes $10-$20

INFO — seedlingfilm.com

In 2010, says Jason Suel, one of the founders of the sponsoring Seedling Film Association, "there was film here -- a bit of it. But I feel like having these film festivals -- and having them consistently -- and getting filmmakers to the area has increased the traffic. It's made them want to come back and make films here -- and inspired the local community to want to make films as well. A lot has changed. A lot of indie films are shot here every year."

Todd Kennedy Mattson is one of the filmmakers who chose Northwest Arkansas to shoot his film "Neapolitan," which will be screened this year at the Offshoot Festival.

"Basically, getting locations here was simple," says Mattson, who now lives in Northwest Arkansas. "It was mostly painless. One of the things that was so easy about it was for many things we didn't need a permit -- especially when it was private property. The owner makes the one and only necessary decision. A lot of other places, that's not so."

Also, he adds, Mark Landon Smith's Actors Casting Agency "was pretty new at that point, but he had everybody in town already -- world-class actors who just happened to be here. The talent pool here is big enough, you can actually cast here. I believe you could bring in that talent, but you don't need to."

"Neapolitan," Mattson says, was the result of cherry picking the screenplays he had written since getting involved in filmmaking in Austin, Texas. "I just stole all the best parts and jammed them all together, and somehow it worked," he says. "There's part of the film, a pivotal part, that was in the very first screenplay I ever wrote. Technically, this would be my eighth screenplay -- but the first five don't count. They're all terrible."

His first film, "Doolittle Raiders," was a documentary exploring the opposition of George W. Bush from within "Bush Country": Texas. Mattson was also shooting weddings and market research videos in Austin when he got an unusual phone call.

"It was from somebody who wanted me to show up at a house in south Austin to film rehearsals for a film being made by Richard Linklater off of a Philip K. Dick book called 'A Scanner Darkly.' This guy opens the door in cut-off shorts, flip-flops. I'm meeting my hero. This is very odd." Then Mattson met the cast -- Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves -- and over the next two years, he became convinced he too could make a feature film. "Neapolitan," he told Made In Arkansas, "has two parallel stories, one about the six kids, who inadvertently run over a homeless man, fleeing the scene, and the two police detectives, who investigate the hit-and-run crime."

"It means a lot to have my film featured [at Offshoot,]," he says. "I wanted to have an opportunity where everyone who worked on it, or knew about it, could see it -- and not only an opportunity to see it but to see it first."

Suel says one of the selling points for the film was the number of local faces in it, but it also had to live up to this year's efforts to "raise the bar."

"The [Bentonville Film Festival] has a lot of glitz and glamour associated with it, but they're still figuring out how to engage the community of Northwest Arkansas," Suel says. "That's one of our strengths. We know the community. And we're very grassroots. We want to be authentic and engage with our local filmmaking community as well as bring in filmmakers we're aspiring to be like. If anything, [BFF] has increased awareness about the indie film scene in Northwest Arkansas, something we've known for years is worth checking out."

NAN What's Up on 09/04/2015

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