BENTONVILLE -- Community members wondered how Bentonville Film Festival organizers would pull off the inaugural event after announcing it only four months before it began in early May 2015. The city didn't even have a movie theater.
Four years later, the event and the city have evolved. Organizers expect more than 80,000 people to attend the event Tuesday through Saturday. About 37,000 came the first year, according to the festival's website.
See today’s What’s Up! for more information on the Bentonville Film Festival.
"It was crazy putting it together in such a short time. We were excited about how the community reacted to it," Trevor Drinkwater, festival co-founder and president, said of that first year. He is also founder and CEO of Inclusion Companies, a marketing and sales firm.
Drinkwater and Academy Award-winning actress Geena Davis created the festival to champion women and diverse voices in media.
Organizers quickly discovered women weren't the only group not adequately represented in the entertainment industry. Minority groups face many of the same challenges, Drinkwater said. He said the event's messaging has been refined to highlight the need for equality in regard to gender, ethnicity, LGBTQ and differently abled people.
"The evolution came pretty quickly," Drinkwater said, noting the tagline was changed to "Include" for the second year.
A conversation between Drinkwater and Walmart's senior director of films created the spark. Drinkwater at the time worked for Los-Angeles-based ARC Entertainment, which distributes movies to theaters and retailers such as Walmart.
The Walmart director wanted more films that championed gender or diversity roles on store shelves and pitched the film festival idea to Drinkwater. Drinkwater and his colleagues reached out to some industry sources, including Davis.
Diverse event
The film festival has become more inclusive and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has anecdotal evidence of movies and other projects that have worked to change the gender discrepancy since 2015. But the situation hasn't changed enough "to really move the needle," Drinkwater said.
The institute reported 4 percent of movie directors for films released in 2014 were women and male voices in children's programming outnumbered female voices by a ratio of 3-to-1.
The institute reported women are 52 percent of all moviegoers and 51 percent of the country's population, yet male leading characters have outnumbered female main characters 2-to-1 over the past 10 years. Previous research from the institute also noted male characters spoke twice as often as female characters in the top grossing family films of 2017.
Panel discussions, films and special events with more diverse voices have gained momentum each year.
This included partnering with Walmart in 2017 to offer an internship program for 15 students from historically black colleges and universities. The program is returning this year, according to Drinkwater.
The festival's jury selected a feature film written and directed by and starring Jenna Lorenzo as the best narrative film for 2018. Lez Bomb is a comedic story following a young lesbian woman's attempts to come out to her family over the Thanksgiving holiday.
The festival's mission is to include everybody and work to help diverse voices be heard and be better represented in the media industry, Davis said.
"We always say that our mission is not to change the world," she said. "It's to show it as it is in real life, which is half female and incredibly diverse. [It's to] reflect the population."
Diverse town
Organizers have restructured the landscape of the event as Bentonville created more infrastructure for it.
The first year was spread out across the city and in Rogers, Springdale and Fayetteville, which "created less of a feel that you were at a festival," Drinkwater said.
The event this year is centralized in downtown Bentonville.
Kalene Griffith, Visit Bentonville president, said via email the festival continues to evolve and still offers regional events, such as the Filmmakers Retreat in Eureka Springs before the festival.
"We see the positive economic impact for the region as the festival develops new events like the filmmakers retreat, a program that takes a deep dive into topics for filmmakers to gain more knowledge and insight, while getting to know each other better before the bustle of the festival begins," she said.
Visit Bentonville wants to continue to see the festival grow as a destination event, she said, noting the footprint is similar to the past. The majority of the movies will be offered at Skylight Cinema, with featured events taking place at Record, 21c Museum Hotel, Compton Gardens and Lawrence Plaza.
"We anticipate that the Bentonville economic impact will be similar to BFF events in the past," she said. "Visit Bentonville sees BFF as a friend to all of Northwest Arkansas and wants it to remain accessible while keeping programming fresh each year."
Record, an event center on Southwest A Street, opened in fall 2016, providing space for film screenings, panels and other special events.
The Skylight Cinema, the city's only movie theater, opened at the end of 2017. It has six screens to show films in one location, just a few blocks from the square. Festival organizers brought in mobile theaters, called cinetransformers, to screen movies prior to Skylight's opening.
The Momentary, Crystal Bridges' contemporary art venue in Bentonville's Market District, is scheduled to open in 2020, which could provide the festival with another venue -- as could the auditorium in Thaden School, which is under construction on Southeast Eighth Street.
"There's going to be a lot of opportunities made available to us to do things that we just weren't able to do because the infrastructure wasn't built for it," Drinkwater said.
NW News on 05/05/2019