...in Venice, Telluride, Toronto, and for many local and regional filmmakers looking to have their work seen, in Charlotte too.
The Charlotte Film Festival kicks off Sept. 24. It doesn't have the same flair that one would come to expect from the immediate names that people conjure when they think of a film festival. But if you couple it with the cavalcade of options across the city throughout the year, a much richer tapestry unravels.
"We always thought of (the Charlotte Film Festival) as an umbrella festival," said Jay Morong, executive director of the Charlotte Film Festival and senior lecturer of film studies at UNC Charlotte.
"It's not a conclave of (the different film festivals in Charlotte), but how diverse the film ecosystem is not only in the world, but how diverse the film ecosystem is in Charlotte."
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It's easy to look right now and be liken "Is Charlotte a film festival town?" But according to Morong, that would deny nearly 25 years of history to get here.
"It's a mantra that I have been saying to people for years: you don't know how many film festivals and film series you actually have in this city. What happens is something like the Charlotte Latino Film Festival pops up and people go look at all these festivals. And no, this is just a part of CineCasual which has been going on for years.
Morong got to Charlotte in 2005, but had been loitering around the film scene for about five years up to that point.
The first version of the Charlotte Film Festival was started by local filmmaker Louis Gurgitano in 2006. His original vision was simple: create a space for Charlotte and regional-based filmmakers to screen their movies in a festival setting.
"I came back from the Asheville Film Festival in 2003 and wondered, 'Why don't we have something like this?' Because the kinds of movies we get aren't the ones I want to watch," Gurgitano told The Charlotte Observer in 2006. "So I really started the Charlotte Film Festival for me. If it's also good for Charlotte, that's great."
That first iteration of the festival featured 66 films (after receiving 312 submissions, according to Gurgitano) and spanned three uptown venues: Wachovia Playhouse at ImaginOn, Duke Power Theatre at Spirit Square and the Levine Museum of the New South.
Morong joined the festival in 2008, during its third iteration, and it continued in Gurgitano's vision until 2012. The original founder left the festival in 2010, and that year the festival adopted what is still the mission today: "Discover Different."
"We talk a lot in this city about the market for true art house and alternative films, not just the mainstream independent movies that theaters show," then-CFF operations director Rich Kennedy told The Observer in 2010. "This is just a litmus test: Does Charlotte want a film festival like this one, or not? We're about to find out."
Even today, Charlotte isn't just the film festival that holds her name. She carries multitudes.
The Charlotte Black Film Festival, the Charlotte Jewish Film Festival, the Carolina Film Festival... the list could go on.
Dennis Darrell came to Charlotte by way of New Jersey. But when he got here, he "hit the ground running," said Tre' McGriff, a close friend of Darrell's and founder of the CineOdyssey film series.
"He saw that there weren't outlets to screen Black film shorts, in particular. I happened to see (a program of his), it was a Creative Loafing thing, and I said to my wife, my girlfriend at the time, that this was pretty cool. I didn't know it was going to be a night of Black film shorts. It didn't denote that."
Darrell started with "Shorts in the Spirit," a film series that played in Spirit Square which drew a large and diverse audience. The series also brought in big-name directors, such as Charles Burnett and Tim Reid among others.
"If I bring a short film you don't like, sit for 12 minutes and you'll see something else," Darrell told the Observer in 2003. "I figure there'll be one you love, one you don't understand, one you don't care for and some in the middle."
McGriff said Darrell rented out the old Eastland Mall movie theater one weekend to screen the 2001 film, "All About You." The film played to sold-out crowds across four screenings.
"He was the go-to guy. If you needed your film marketed, if you're a Black filmmaker, if you needed your film broken into the market, he was the guy to come to."
The popularity of the first series led Darrell to create the Reel South Film Festival in 2008, which also took place in Spirit Square and came out of his Reel South film series that started in 2003. The goal was to highlight African American voices in film, but also promote those voices that are based locally.
"I'd seen what was on the Black festival circuit. I thought, 'Just let me grab movies I think are good.' Ultimately, I know what my audience would like," Darrell told The Observer in 2008.
Darrell died of a heart attack in 2010, leaving Reel South to fade away. "His heart killed him," The Observer's movie critic Lawrence Toppman said in an obituary in 2010. "...but his heart was what everyone remembered about him."
But Black film programming didn't fade away with Reel South.
The Charlotte Black Film Festival continues to program a variety of features yearly. And McGriff heads the CineOdyssey Film Festival, which is entering a new phase this year focusing on animation, and specifically Black animators.
"(Darrell) taught me how to build community, how to work with community, how to work with people to progress what I was doing," McGriff said. "Because at the time I was entrenched on the production side of film, not so much the exhibition side... Once we crossed the threshold of being able to make films, the next holy grail needed to be: where are we going to show our films?"
When Giovanna Torres and her husband Alexander Piñeres moved to Charlotte in 2015, they were seeking an option for Latino film programming and couldn't find it.
"In Connecticut, with the proximity to New York... there was more emphasis on Latino-inspired, arts and culture, Torres said. "When we moved here, we felt a bit disconnected from the arts and culture community."
In Charlotte, they found the offerings to be slim.
Starting in 1998 and running until at least 2005, UNC Charlotte worked with UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University to offer a statewide program through the Outreach Office of the Consortium in Latin American Studies called the William Wilson Brown Jr. Latin American Film and Video Festival.
The program went on for a number of years, expanding screenings to Queens University, Johnson C. Smith University and Davidson College with an emphasis on Spanish-language filmmaking.
But that was through the colleges. Torres and her husband were looking at the movie theaters.
She said the couple would trek up to Winston-Salem on the weekends if a particularly interesting Latin American film was playing at their arthouse theater. In 2016, they started the CineCasual blog to document Latin American films they were seeing at worldwide film festivals. Eventually, the blog led to a film series that screened some of their favorites for Charlotte audiences.
This year, they held the first Charlotte Latino Film Festival in a culmination of almost a decade of work to bring Latin American programming to the Charlotte area.
"I think people are trying to find that sense of belonging," Torres said.
"We're always focusing on really complicated topics, and especially with immigration, where we're focusing our time on those topics that we have to deal with every single day," she said. "But we also want to say we like our Latin American community... just (to) serve as spaces where we can celebrate our culture, our heritage, our accomplishments.
"Everyone deserves that time to just be and talk amongst community members and get to know your neighbors. And that's what we wanted."
After a few years, the Charlotte Film Festival went dormant but was resurrected again in 2015 with the help of Morong and Jennifer Bratyanski.
Each had worked with Gurgitano on the original vision of the festival and brought it back with eyes to keep that type of programming alive in Charlotte.
The revamped festival lived from 2015 until 2019 and then was brought into the Charlotte Film Society, which has hosted it ever since. The opening of the Independent Picture House in 2022 provided a permanent home for arthouse programming and a landing spot for a full-scale festival that can host a range of programming.
"The mission of the festival is the same," Morong said. "The spirit of the mission statement comes from Louis' first vision for the festival; that was his kind of spirit. We've tried in the last versions of the festival to honor that, but also expand the festival with the type of programming and what a cinema would do for programming."
No more trips up to Winston-Salem, no more trips up to the Asheville Film Festival.
The current iteration has expanded to include festival movies, such as last year's entry "Perfect Days" from director Wim Wenders, which was nominated for an Oscar. At the same time, it also has managed the spirit of its beginnings with blocks of student filmmaking, local and regional works, and partnering with other festivals across the city such as the Charlotte Latino Film Festival to boost their programming.
"I feel like now is the right time to do this work and make sure that we have a strong foundation to make it sustainable because it's just going to keep growing," Torres said.
"I get asked this question every single day. It's called the Charlotte Latino Film Festival but it's for everyone. We're not going to exclude you if you're not of Latin American heritage.
"What's been really gratifying for me has been going into the auditoriums and seeing that the rooms (are filled with) mostly Latinos, right? But we have everyone else in there too, and we have non-Latino community members who are either interested in learning (the) language or interested in widening their perspectives and just getting to know their neighbors too,
she said. "So that's been really rewarding for me."
McGriff agrees. In 2020, he pulled together the 1CLT Film Fest, which brought together multiple film festivals from across the city to program movies for folks to watch during the pandemic. It was a one-time thing for the pandemic, but people enjoyed it so much that he said there might be opportunities to bring it back again.
"I was very inspired," add McGriff said. "I didn't even know that there were that many (festivals)."
For Morong, there's always room to grow and to offer Charlotte a diversity of film.
"If you're only interested in student films, we have those. If you're only interested in local and regional films, we have those. If you're interested in the bigger art house and independent films, we have those. If you're interested in weirdo, transgressive horror stuff, we got that. We got it all covered.
"We're trying to do it all, because we're trying to show people that there is this diverse ecosystem in Charlotte of film culture."
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