MICROCINEMA FESTIVAL 'SEWERFEST' CELEBRATES RISK-TAKING FILMS THAT DO NOT MAKE USE OF PROFESSIONAL EQUIPMENT
Toronto Arts Report Editor Rebeccah Love sits down with Sewerfest founder and lead programmer Alex Hennessey to learn more about this Microcinema festival.
Can you describe yourself? How did you become interested in film and cinema? What kinds of films do you gravitate towards?
I’m a boom operator and sometimes sound mixer by trade. I’ve been kicking around the Toronto film scene for about a decade at this point. As a child I always dreamed of becoming an animator. It seemed like the most free and unrestricted avenue of visual storytelling. When it came down to actually drawing and practicing, I discovered I had nothing like the requisite patience and discipline for that kind of work, so I made a pivot to live-action filmmaking.I try to watch all kinds of films, but to be honest my taste in movies has very little to do with Sewerfest. Sewerfest is not about cinema, it’s about videos. I have spent an inadvisable amount of my life trawling through Youtube looking for weird and interesting stuff. If there is a foundational text that could be credited with inspiring Sewerfest, it would have to be 450 year old plant. It’s a video about a plant that is nearly 460 years old, made by friends of festival co-founder Devin Shears.
Can you describe Sewerfest? How many years have you been organizing this event? What is microcinema and why is it important?
Sewerfest is a microcinema video party with three important rules for anyone submitting a video to the fest:
No professional equipment
No HD video unless you are shooting on your phone
No videos longer than 4 minutes.
Exceptions to all three rules have been made, but it really comes down to whether I think the video is exceptional.Once a year we screen a bunch of videos in a legion hall, and do karaoke until the end of the night. The karaoke started as just a fun way to keep the party going, but now I think it’s a really important part of the fest. Sewerfest is a karaoke approach to filmmaking. We aren’t there as professionals, we’re all just having fun entertaining our friends.
I’ve heard microcinema described two ways. One, defines it in terms of film exhibition, using a non-standard, DIY approach to display films. The other, describes it in terms of film-making using handheld consumer cameras and no crew. Sewerfest abides by both of these descriptions. I think microcinema is fantastic for encouraging people to explore risky (or just plain stupid) ideas in a low-stakes way. There's no money lost if your sewerfest video doesn't turn out the way you wanted in the edit Sewerfest has been happening about annually since 2015.
Can you describe the community you normally attract to Sewerfest? Who shows up to your event? What does it feel like to attend Sewerfest, what's the vibe?
The first few years it was literally just my classmates from TMU, but it’s grown a fair bit since we came back after the quarantine years. Quite a few people in the music scene participate. There’s often one or two music videos in the program. The room is always filled with excitement as people prepare to finally show off their video. It really is a party as much as it is a film screening.
What kinds of submissions are you most interested in? What is your curatorial process like? What are you NOT looking for?
I have basically no curatorial process. I screen pretty much everything sent to me that doesn't break the rules. Often the best videos are the ones where you can tell people had fun making it with their friends. That joy comes across on screen and is infectious.
Don't send me anything prejudiced or discriminatory. The only thing that really bums me out is when a submission is funny but the sound is inaudible. Because I will still screen it, but it will be a rough 4 minutes as people struggle to hear and understand. As a general rule, if you're speaking into a camera it should be within arms reach of you.
Can you tell me a little bit about your past submissions? What types of films have been most popular amongst your crowd? Do you see any recurring motifs?
Mostly comedy. Taken as a whole Sewerfest often feels like Youtube did in 2008, before the site cultivated such a distinct style of monetized video content. For every comedy sketch in the program, there will also be someone creating something extremely personal and experimental.I’m the only one who really has access to all the past submissions and can rewatch them, but I can confidently say that the overall quality of people’s videos is improving every year even though there’s always several newcomers submitting. It seems like over time people’s understanding of what the fest is about is becoming clearer.
How can filmmakers submit their work to your event?
You can submit a video to Sewerfest by sending a download link to sewerfest@gmail.com sometime before Oct. 11!
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