INTERVIEW EDITED FOR CLARITY
NEUFELD: The film fest is in its third year now. How has it kind of stacked up to your expectations, I guess, you had when you first started it?
HEAD: Well, when we first started the film festival, there's about I think maybe 4,000 or more film festivals in the country and around the world. So there's a lot of film festivals for filmmakers to submit their films to. We wanted to do something to put Joplin and Webb City on the map. You know, we're growing, we're a bigger community than we used to be, and so we decided to do a festival, but do it, the first two years, we concentrated on the four states around us, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. We asked for films that were PG-13 and below that were inspiring, motivational, and, you know, good heartwarming stories. That's why we call it the Great Wonders Uplift Film Fest.
The first two years were great, so this year we decided to step out of our comfort zone a little bit and go nationwide. So we went all 50 states. That cost a little bit more money for, you know, for advertising and things like that, but we were very happy. We had submissions from all over the place and really great films. We have a judging panel. We watch every film all the way through, we score each one, and then, based on the scores of the films, we choose films that are going to be the official selections of the Uplift Film Fest.
NEUFELD: So opening it up to 50 states just gives you kind of more of a range to choose from?
HEAD: We wanted to grow the festival. We started out, we weren't sure in our first year if we'd get any submissions, to tell you the truth. But we did, and every year we've gotten around, you know, the 80 mark of submissions. So out of that, we only get to choose down around 25 to 30 out of that, so we have to screen out a lot of films that we really like, but we just can't show everything, so it's very competitive. It's all based on the scores, and it's also, we factor in, you know, does the film, does the story, fit in with the rest of the films being shown. So you're not going to see any zombie movies or slasher films or anything like that. And there's festivals for those. There’s festivals for every kind of film.
NEUFELD: Yeah. On the schedule, I was, you know, looking at the list of the films that will show and it seems they range a lot in length and then in topic as well. So what can people expect?
HEAD: Well, they can expect everything from a full length feature film, narratives and documentaries, all the way down to a little mini film that's maybe a minute and a half long, and a music video that maybe is two or three minutes. So there's all lengths. A lot of them are shorts. It could be 15 minute films, 30 minute films, there’s all lengths. But basically when you get past 50 minutes or so, that moves it into a feature length category. So anything below about 50, 55 minutes is almost in the short category. But they'll experience all sorts of films, and it's great, sometimes they’ll watch multiple films in one setting. You can experience a lot of different storytelling at one stop.
NEUFELD: Is there anything else you think people should expect when they come?
HEAD: Nothing more than, you know, there's a lot of work and effort that goes into this. I mean, there's so many hours and so much that goes into putting something like this on, and we want people to not ignore it. We want them to come out and support it and enjoy it. It's something really, once a year. I mean, if you want to go to a film festival more than once a year, you're going to have to travel outside of Joplin. So this is something, a once a year thing, that is really fun, and I think the more people experience it, the more they'll want to come back next year and the year after that and so on.
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