Jesse Harris, a 23-year-old Seattleite, started a nifty youth film festival called NFFTY that is unspooling its third-annual edition.
By Moira Macdonald
Seattle Times movie critic
At 23, filmmaker Jesse Harris is too old to be included in his own festival.
The National Film Festival for Talented Youth (NFFTY), whose third-annual edition unspools next weekend, showcases the work of filmmakers 22 and younger. (Its youngest participant is 7.) But don’t feel sorry for Harris — he did squeak one music video in under the wire, made when he was still 22. His festival, created in Seattle to support other young filmmakers, has grown dramatically into a one-of-a-kind celebration.
While still a student at Ballard High School, Harris completed his first feature film, the drama “Living Life.” Defying all odds, the film was picked up by a distributor and was exhibited internationally. Harris moved to Los Angeles after graduation to pursue his film career, but something unexpected happened.
“All these young filmmakers started contacting me through my film’s Web site, both locally and internationally,” he said. “They were all saying, ‘Can you help me get my film made?’ ”
That’s how the idea came for the Seattle-based nonprofit film festival for young people, complete with its own snappy acronym (pronounced “nifty”). Harris, along with fellow young filmmaker Jocelyn R.C., of Bellevue, saw that there was no comparable national event for young filmmakers and conceived the idea in 2006.
The 2007 debut of NFFTY was a one-night event, with 14 short films. In 2008, it jumped to 73 films, including several features, shown over three days. “It was really successful,” remembered Harris. “A couple thousand people came.” Soon an L.A. advisory board was established (to complement the Seattle-based board of directors), and plans for a much-bigger 2009 festival grew.
This year, NFFTY has grown to 113 films, including four full-length features, chosen from more than 400 submissions. Harris says eight countries and more than 30 states are represented. Thirty of the participating filmmakers are from Washington state — most from the Puget Sound area. Many filmmakers (including a few from overseas) will be attending the festival, some with help from a scholarship fund, and will host post-screening Q&A sessions.
The festival will open Friday at Cinerama with a collection of 10 short films (including two from local filmmakers Ben Kadie and Hannah Holtgerts) followed by a gala all-ages party. For the rest of the weekend, the locale shifts to SIFF Cinema, with themed packages of short films showing Saturday and Sunday.
The centerpiece film is a local one: 21-year-old Anthony O’Brien, of Vashon Island, wrote and directed the drama “Perfect Sport,” set in the world of high-school wrestling. NFFTY concludes Sunday night with the feature “The Reunion of Amilia Marbleberry and Marcy Stills,” from 22-year-old California filmmaker Michael Tucker.
Harris is particularly excited about the festival’s four panels this year, which he thinks will appeal to young and experienced filmmakers alike. (Panelists are industry veterans and nonprofit leaders who are, it should be noted, not subject to the under-23 age restriction.) Topics are “The Filmmaker as Dealmaker”; “What’s Left to Say? The Social Value of Filmmaking”; “The Art of Storytelling”; and “The Sound of the Story — The Power of Music in Film.”
Running NFFTY has become a full-time job for Harris, who’s back living in Seattle and who does much of the work of the festival himself, assisted by a few seasonal employees and many volunteers. A screening committee works with him to choose the festival films.
Harris has worked hard to attract sponsorships, and is proud that this year’s festival is supported by a number of familiar names: Volvo, Comcast, Vulcan, Starbucks and many others. He’s also pleased to report that this year the festival is fully green; it’s offsetting its limited carbon-monoxide emissions by buying carbon credits.
All this means that Harris doesn’t have much time for filmmaking any more, but he’s cheerfully accepting of that — running a festival, he says, is “a lot like making a film.” He envisions NFFTY, down the road, becoming like a Sundance Film Festival for young people, picturing agents and bidding wars. Soon, he hopes, “when you think of the next generation of talent, you think of our festival.”
“Who knows who’s going to pass through this festival?” he says, with an irresistibly youthful eagerness. “What if you met Steven Spielberg at 14?”
Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company
