When Nicholas Mason moved to New York to try to make it as an actor in 1997, he wound up appearing in short films made by students at the city’s film schools. He wanted to see the finished products, but the directors didn’t have an answer when Mason asked where their work might screen. So Mason decided to create a venue himself by founding the Manhattan Short film festival in 1998.
Mason put out a call for entries and raised money for a prize, but he couldn’t get any information about the festival published in local newspapers. So he started reaching out to international publications, pitching the festival as a sort of olympiad, a call for filmmakers around the world to send their work to New York. He wound up with entries from 16 countries.
“I realized then that New York sells outside New York,” Mason said.
The festival’s location became especially significant in 2001, when it was scheduled for Sept. 23 in Union Square Park. The park was the closest place most people could get to Ground Zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and it became a shrine and a hub for global press. While the city was still afraid a second attack might be imminent, the parks department asked Mason to put on his film festival as scheduled.
“They wanted to get back to some normalcy and said ‘Please put that festival on,'” Mason said. “So we did and it got a lot of attention. The next year, everyone started wanting to enter this festival. It went from 300 entries to 600.”
Another big change for the festival came with the spread of DVDs, which made it much easier to distribute films. Mason took advantage of that innovation to expand the festival beyond New York in 2004, distributing DVDs with the 10 short films he and other judges had chosen as finalists and having audiences in seven U.S. cities vote for their favorites.
“I used to have it judged by celebrities and I always felt very odd about that,” Mason said. “I don’t know any celebrities. I watch sports and I watch short films. I thought rather than have celebrities judge it, we’ll have the audience judge it. In some of those places they really went for it and the festival found its voice.”
New technology also helped increase the number of entrants, as more people were able to make their own shorts.
“Digital filmmaking just changed everything,” Mason said. “People could end up making a film in their backyard about their backyard, whereever that backyard was.”
The festival has continued to expand and now includes more than 200 venues on six continents, all of which will be screening the same 10 short films between Sept. 25 and Oct. 4. This will be the fest’s first year at the Wilmette Theatre. Wendy Sharon, the theater’s executive director, said she decided to bring the fest to Wilmette after she saw it on the schedule of “highly discerning theaters” in other cities.
This year’s 10 films are “Listen” (Finland and Denmark), “Dad in Mum” (France), “Bear Story” (Chile) “Forever Over” (Germany) “Shok” (Kosovo and the United Kingdom), “Grounded” (France), “Sundown” (Turkey), “Patch” (Switzerland and Germany), “El Camino Solo” (United States) and “Bis Gleich” (Germany).
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Manhattan Short Film Festival
When: 7 p.m. Sept. 25-27 and Oct. 1; 2 p.m. Oct. 3
Where: The Wilmette Theatre, 1122 Central Ave.
Cost: $7.50-$9.50
Tickets: 847-251-7424; wilmettetheatre.com