5 questions for IndieFest founder-director Jeff Ross

Q: How has IndieFest changed in the years since you started it?

A: (The biggest change) in my mind since we first started — our first festival was in January of ’99 — we were only showing American indies. … I’m not sure when it changed and we started showing foreign films, but probably not long after I brought on the first programmer that wasn’t me. The first couple of years it was just me. Then this guy Bruce Fletcher came on.

Q: What do you think of the state of indie film right now?

A: I felt like it ramped up until the crash. Since 2009, we’ve had fewer submissions. In ’08 or ’09, our submissions peaked, and I can only relate that to the economics of it. People are less likely to give filmmakers money to make their movies. We definitely have some films in the festival that were made for very little money and they stand up, because of the technology. They stand up to all the ones made with bigger budgets.

Q: You alluded in the press conference to the fact that many festival films will nev- er get a theatrical run. Is that something that has been constant or is that a change?

A: I hope most of these filmmakers know that they’re not going to be getting a theatrical distribution nationwide on 1,000 screens, because that’s just so, so rare. It’s rare, like getting picked to play for the Lakers rare. The films that we’re looking for are the ones that we feel are falling through the cracks. It doesn’t mean that they absolutely won’t end up onscreen. Some of them I can definitely see playing at a Landmark or the Roxie. … But in a lot of the cases, this is the only time the films are shown big, and not in people’s homes or on their device. It seems more and more anachronistic to me that I’m in this business. It’s sort of past its prime, in a way, but people still go to the movies.

Q: What drives you to stay in the business?

A: Me, I’m all into the shared

experience. I don’t want to sell movies. Like I thought, “What if I move to L.A. and try to work in Hollywood?” But I don’t want to sell a product and that’s just a product you’ve got to go sell. It’s no different than selling shoes or toothpaste. I come from a club promoter background, when I was in my 20s, so I just like bringing people together for a shared experience. That’s what I like best about it. That’s why we do all the parties and stuff. Q: I was going to ask you about that. How important are the parties to the overall festival experience? A: The first reason I started the parties was because I wanted to give the filmmakers something to do, assuming there were out-of-town filmmakers, I wanted to have something going on. That’s what I imagined other festivals did, they would have events for them. Because I didn’t have the budget to take them to dinner or do something fancy, I thought, “I’ll throw a party. They’ll enjoy themselves. It’ll be good.” Then I discovered that people were coming to the parties and finding out about the film festival. We do this annual Big Lebowski party, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve talked to people at the event who didn’t even know there was a film festival going on. I really like using the events to reach out to a party demographic, the kind of people who I think would like these films if they just knew about (IndieFest) and considered it.