Cannes Film Festival:
16-year-old filmmaker’s drama to showcase at Marché du Film
Petaluma 16-year-old is screening his film at the Marché du Film.
At 16 years old, Ethan Paisley has a lot more going on for him than most.
The budding filmmaker’s newest work, “Point 453,” will be screening at the Marché du Film (“Film Market”) at the Cannes Film Festival this month. But even that feels like just the start for Paisley and his predominantly teenage cast and crew who epitomize a generation of young artists empowered to create without hesitation.
Paisley, a Petaluma native in his junior year at Marin School of the Arts at Novato High School, began acting early on the theater stage and dabbling in film work before transitioning to making lighthearted YouTube videos as a young teen. The video service, which by no means gave him viral status, still inspired him.
During his freshman year in high school, Paisley organized a team of teens in making a 75-minute film, and soon after founded a production company, Take18 Entertainment, composed entirely of his contemporaries.
“The bottom line is I think I’m a creative person,” Paisley says, not with pretension but more of a shrug. “I’m just a natural creative, I guess you could say, in that, whenever I have an idea, I’ve just kind of learned to roll with that idea and not take no for an answer and just keep going. I don’t know. I really don’t know where it comes from. I’ve just always worked.”
Paisley’s production company offers commercial film services in the Bay Area, from advertisements to wedding services, with half of the proceeds funding narrative work such as “Point 453.”
The film is a 45-minute triptych of young-adult struggle, observing its protagonist Darren at three formative ages as he tries to cope within his emotionally dysfunctional suburban family. The project, Paisley
says, is meant to look at how undiagnosed mental illness can manifest and reverberate within a family.
While not an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, “Point 453” was accepted to screen at Marché du Film, which effectively serves as a showcase arena for films looking for distribution and networking opportunities. The acceptance, Paisley notes, comes amid a recent active effort from the festival to offer a prospective youth market that video providers such as Netflix and HBO hope to access.
“So what they’re doing now is they’re trying to pioneer this new movement where they’re actually trying to make capital off of young people producing work for young people,” Paisley says.
At the fore of this generation of budding artists would be the likes of Paisley and his fellow creatives whose projects, often powered by the outreach of social media, come from a natural instinct to act upon their inspirations. “Point 453” came out of Paisley’s own bouts with depression as a teenager and discussions he had with family about mental illness.
But their creative instincts are also paired with a precocious, can-do resourcefulness.
“I’d like to think I was a very ambitious young man in the theater arts when I was coming up through the ranks, but I don’t remember having this kind of stamina that Ethan Paisley has,” says Craig Miller, the artistic director of 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa who stars in “Point 453.”
When Paisley was 12, he was attending film mixers to network, before overseeing the fruition of his films as, what Miller calls, a one-man production team. Kiara Ramirez, the 18-year old cinematographer on “Point 453,” graduated from high school midway through her junior year to work full time, freelancing as a director on commercials and music videos.
“I remember when I first started getting into (filmmaking) I didn’t even think of age as a factor,” says Ramirez, a writer and director herself. “But then once I started getting a little bit older and started working on bigger projects, I realized most people wouldn’t take anyone serious if they were under 18.”
Despite the challenges, Paisley and Ramirez’s growing filmography has already begun to generate industry inroads. Ramirez is on her way to Los Angeles with an offer to work as a production assistant on a Warner Bros. television show, though she is considering freelancing instead.
Paisley’s recent short, “Playing the Game,” an exploration of human trafficking based on the real experiences of a friend (who co-wrote and stars), attracted the attention of director and photographer Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri. Paisley and his team are in the early stages of a script for a feature-length adaptation that Pal-Chaudhuri plans to direct.
Paisley still plans to go to college, while continuing to “make films happen.” And while Cannes serves as the de facto pinnacle of the global film festival circuit, Paisley, who plans to travel to the French coastal town for the two scheduled screenings, is simply hoping for a good learning experience.
“I have so much longer to go,” Paisley says, rejecting the idea of admiring his past work.
“What I’ve really found is, given the opportunities and the accessibility I have to certain things — I might as well make a feature film. I might as well reach out to a certain actor that I want. I mean, why not? It doesn’t hurt.”