With the Wisconsin Film Festival long wrapped up and the summer blockbuster season emerging, it would seem that there is a dearth of independent film out at the moment. But this weekend independent film will be taking over the Memorial Union Play Circle as the Wisconsin Union Directorate hosts its first Mini-Indie Film Festival, showing a collection of films made outside the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.
The idea for the Mini-Indie Film Festival began with the WUD Film Committee's recent trip to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The festival is the largest gathering of independent film in the world and inspired the WUD Film Committee to attempt something similar on the UW-Madison campus, albeit on a much smaller scale. Throughout the trip, committee members looked for films that would play well on the UW-Madison campus and made connections with filmmakers in hopes of bringing the movies back to Wisconsin.
Because of these efforts, many of the films playing at the festival originally played at Sundance, including ""Crude,"" a documentary about oil contamination in Ecuador, ""The Missing Person,"" a modern film noir starring Oscar nominees Michael Shannon and Amy Ryan, and ""Prom Night in Mississippi,"" a chronicle of actor Morgan Freeman's attempt to integrate the segregated proms of a small Mississippi town.
In addition to the Sundance Film Festival, many of this new festival's roots lie in the Wisconsin Film Festival, which was originally created by UW-Madison students. One member of the Mini-Indie Film Festival's lineup, the animatronic rock band documentary ""The Rock-afire Explosion,"" was actually one of the biggest hits at the 2009 Wisconsin Film Festival.
""The students have always been a part of the Wisconsin Film Festival, but it's grown a lot larger than us, so we wanted to do something that the students have total control over,"" said Kelsey Field, director of the WUD Film Committee.
The WUD Film Committee has been planning the festival for several months and hopes to create a similar atmosphere to the Wisconsin Film Festival with patrons hopping from movie to movie and examining a swath of films they usually would not encounter. With this in mind, the committee selected a lineup full of documentaries, genre films and recent indie hits in an attempt to represent the full spectrum of independent cinema. Some of the more famous titles include ""Frozen River,"" a recent Oscar nominee for writer-director Courtney Hunt's screenplay and star Melissa Leo's lead performance, and ""Wendy and Lucy,"" which received a great deal of attention at the Independent Spirit Awards.
As a nod to the history of independent cinema, the Mini-Indie Film Festival slotted some more recognizable films for midnight screenings on Friday and Saturday in hopes of drawing in the movies' cult followings. Scheduled for Friday night is ""Let the Right One In,"" a bleak Swedish vampire film that offers a dark new twist on the traditional coming-of-age tale. As the film was released at the height of ""Twilight""-mania, it was roundly embraced by all those who prefer their vampires with a heavy dose of gore and had nothing but contempt for Edward Cullen and his chaste vampire friends, and it should appeal to those who like some horror with their indie films. To close out the festival on Saturday the committee scheduled Quentin Tarantino's ""Reservoir Dogs,"" which many credit with launching a new era of independent cinema more focused on genre films.
""We tried to complement [the other films] with films we thought people had heard of, so hopefully there are some films people will be curious about along with those people are already fans of,"" Field said.
The Mini-Indie Film Festival runs Thursday through Saturday at the Frederic March Play Circle in Memorial Union and is open to all UW-Madison students and Union guests free of charge. For more details, check out www.union.wisc.edu/film.
