I feel naked without a business card at the 17th annual Independent Feature Film Market. The festival is a chance for independent filmmakers to become dependent -- they have paid to have their films screened in hopes that a buyer will take the bait at this week-long event at Angelika Film Center in Manhattan.
But let the buyers beware - there is no slinking around incognito. Distributors are branded with a blue-coded name tag that attracts filmmakers like flypaper. Buyers tell me they've ducked into the bathroom to hide, only to have filmmakers schmooze them as they zip up. With a brown-coded press tag, I'm cast beneath the buyers but above the purple-coded untouchables -- civilians who have paid just to watch the films for a weekend.
Every filmmaker has a gimmick. Most try to seduce you with a forest of flyers, while the creators of one short hand out T-shirts. I think they should have invested their money in a better camera instead - it looks like they filmed underwater.
The menu of films is so extensive I decide which ones to watch based on the title and how many times the filmmaker assaults me with propaganda. Titles like Raw as you Wanna Be, Mary Jane's not a Virgin Anymore, Velvet Elvis and Headless Body in a Topless Bar catch my eye. Raising Heroes, a film about the first gay action hero, is equally intriguing.
When you read about the films in the market guide, they all sound worthwhile. The problem is that each filmmaker writes her own tease. If an innocent viewer were to do the write-up, it would let people know they're about to watch a series of unrelated scenes with no plot. A movie called Gratuitous Sex, for example, would have been re-titled Gratuitous Film.
I give each movie 15 minutes to stop me from walking out. With one exception, the only films that pass are shorts that are over in 15 minutes. The feature that keeps me in my seat is The Woman in the Moon. It's about a bulimic lesbian country singer, superstitious Mexican and Australian party girl all staying at a yoga ranch in the Arizona desert.
Generation X films hit the spot right now, a la Slackers and Clerks. Talk is cheap to film, and that's what Xers do best, isn't it? Without real jobs, we have lots of time to bemoan our miserable lives. I watch trailers for two Gen-X films, Drinking Games and Noho. Drinking Games is billed as a film about friendship, suicide and ice cold beer (This Big-Chill spin off asks, "What happens when six good friends start drinking beer and stop being real?"). Noho claims to be about Unemployment, Enlargement and Enlightenment. As its filmmaker put it, he wrote the script after deciding there was some validity in the fact that he was doing nothing.
The dialogue in both films is funny and real, and the writers admit stealing lines from friends. The narratives are sprinkled with pop culture references.
"There are sometimes I look at you and I think you are so hot," a guy tells a woman in Drinking Games. "And other times all I can see is that girl in The Crying Game."
The trailer for Gen-X thriller Harmony Grove begins with a melancholy girl lying in bed as a guy walks in.
"Thanks for the flowers," she says. "I put them in the biggest vase I could find, the toilet."
