Movie buffs in the River Valley and beyond can now secure their seats for an upcoming showcase of films from around the world.
Tickets for the second Fort Smith International Film Festival went on sale June 14. The festival will be held downtown Aug. 26-27 at TempleLive.
Brandon Goldsmith, president of the River Valley Film Society and executive director of the film festival, says he loves films and wants everyone else to love them, too. To him, the festival is a way to help both facilitate that and grow the creative economy in the River Valley.
Goldsmith argues that a distinguishing factor about film is it incorporates a wide range of other art forms, such as music, acting, writing, painting and design. Encouraging people to do this through the film festival will encourage the creative economy in the area to grow, which will grow the creatives here. Goldsmith believes this will allow the culture to truly come alive due to it allowing people to tell their stories.
Tim Jacobsen, executive director of the Fort Smith Convention and Visitors Bureau, says he believes the event helps cultivate the city's brand to be more inclusive of arts and entertainment. This is important in selling an overall destination to people from outside the area. He also expects to see "nothing but increases" from the festival every year in terms of attendance and economic impact for the city given its prior success.
"They do a very good job on putting it together and executing the event," Jacobsen says.
Goldsmith says more than 400 people attended the first festival last year. He hopes that figure will at least double for this year's event barring any further surges of the covid-19 pandemic.
Advance general admission tickets for the festival are available through the event's website, FortSmithFilm.com, for $10, according to Goldsmith. This does not include a $2.50 TempleLive facility fee and a processing fee.
A limited quantity of VIP tickets is also available for $30 each on top of the other fees. Goldsmith says these will afford moviegoers their first choice of seating to watch the films that will be shown during the event, as well as access to the filmmakers and actors, among other things. TempleLive has four rooms in which films will be screened.
Moviegoers can also pay $15 for general admission on the days of the festival.
Clay Pruitt, programming director for the festival, says a team of more than 30 volunteers screened the films submitted for the event between Feb. 4 through June 3. The hope was an overall better selection of films for this year compared to last year, when the screening process involved only a handful of people from the River Valley Film Society.
Goldsmith says the submissions during this time totaled 364 films from 51 countries, in addition to entries from the Choctaw and Cherokee nations. That includes short and feature-length films, films focused on people of color and Indigenous people, music videos, animation shorts, high school and college student shorts and documentary shorts and features.
Pruitt noted there were significantly more feature-length submissions this time around than last year, resulting in more hours of content. The film screening process began in March, and the next step is for the festival to determine which films are going to be shown during the event, which entails creating the entire schedule for it.
"We may find ourselves at some point going through all the films and going, 'I need a five- to seven-minute comedy to fit in this slot right here, what is the best comedy that we have that'll fit in this slot,'" Goldsmith says. "What we do is we do blocks of time, so we may do an hour block of comedy, and our films are all the way from two minutes long to two hours long."
Goldsmith says the films that will be shown will be eligible for cash prizes, trophies and scholarships from the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. The organizers have until the beginning of July to notify filmmakers their work has been selected. The final lineup of films will be announced in August.
The theme for this year's film festival is "Borderlands," defined by festival organizers as the place where the stories of peoples' lives exist while also referencing Fort Smith's history as a border town.
Brandon Chase Goldsmith (right) and Clay Pruitt, both with the River Valley Film Society, deliver opening remarks June 16 at a monthly film series called Borderlands, showcasing some of the movies screened at last year’s Fort Smith International Film Festival. "Borderlands" is also the theme of this year’s festival, set to take place Aug. 26-27 at TempleLive. Tickets went on sale on June 14. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Hank Layton)