DURHAM -- On Thursday, the Hayti Heritage Film Festival will continue its mission of showing the finest in black independent cinema to Triangle filmgoers - as well as reminding said filmgoers that this thing happens every year.
After the image overhaul that the festival (formerly the Black Diaspora Film Festival) received last year, first-timers were blown away - mostly because they didn't know it existed.
"There were people who were actually from the Raleigh-Durham area who didn't even know that there was a film festival at Hayti," says Durham filmmaker and festival co-chairwoman Angela Ray, "So for whatever reason, when it was the Black Diaspora Film Festival, the branding wasn't reaching the masses."
Ray, who organizes the festival along with fellow Durham filmmaker Dilsey Davis, said that finding films for this year's festival has been an almost Herculean task.
"There just weren't a whole lot of films that came out last year post our festival and February 2009, a lot of independent films," she says. "I don't know if it's the economy, you know, that's making it a little difficult for people to get their films made. That's kind of what we surmised. It's probably just another consequence of the tough economy for everything, including people who are trying to get films made."
Nevertheless, the festival rounded up six features (as well as a not-yet-disclosed number of shorts) to screen during the four-day fest, which takes place at Durham's Hayti Heritage Center.
"There were some films that we had heard about that we decided we wanted to definitely screen," Ray said, "and so we proactively approached those filmmakers. But then we also received some submissions."
For its free, community-night screening on Thursday, the festival got "The Providence Effect," a documentary on a K-12 school in Chicago's impoverished West Side that has been successfully sending graduating seniors to college for three decades.
Another film they sought is the Friday opening-night film "Mississippi Damned," a fact-based drama about a trio of poor, black youths who struggle to escape their family's cycle of physical and sexual abuse.
Although the movie is set in rural Mississippi, it was shot inside state lines, mostly in Rocky Mount and Ahoskie and Cofield in Hertford County.
"We turned a little bit of North Carolina into Mississippi for a couple of months," says Morgan Stiff, who produced the film with her father, N.C. State University math professor Lee V. Stiff. "The community rallied behind us, many serving as extras in the film or even working as production assistants or stand-ins."
The Charlotte-born, Raleigh-raised Stiff (who will be attending the festival along with the film's writer and director, Tina Mabry) is looking forward to seeing the film in the Triangle.
"It just seems right to come back to my home state that not only fostered my interest in film and television but was so hospitable to us during shooting, and the state that has so many ties that made this film possible," Stiff said.
Student filmmakers will have a chance to shine at the Hayti fest. Last year, the festival conceived a "financial film challenge," in which students were asked to make short films relating to some of the financial challenges facing the country. This year, the fest is broadening its subject matter and giving students a chance to make films and have them be part of a workshop. "The nice thing about the film challenge and workshop is when their films screen, they'll actually get feedback, like instantly," Ray says. "That's a little bit different from other film festivals. Either people win or they don't. Whereas this one, they actually will get some feedback on what they could've done better."
But the main priority is to remind local African-Americans that the Hayti Heritage Film Festival has been around for 15 years - and will continue to be around as long as they are willing to show up. "One of the things that we learned in general - this is a very general statement, so I wanna make sure that it comes across as a general statement - is that many people in the African-American community do not know what a film festival is for," Ray said. "And so, many people really didn't know that the film festival was open for anyone to see a film."
As a wise man once said, if you don't know, now you know.
