Last month, local arts nonprofit Harvester Arts announced it was partnering with the Tallgrass Film Association to put on this year's Tallgrass Film Festival in October.
But what will that really mean?
KMUW's Fletcher Powell talked with Kristin Beal, executive director of Harvester Arts; Tom Mittlestadt, director of events and logistics for Tallgrass; and Hugo Phan, the festival's new programming lead.
The Tallgrass Film Festival will reveal the new artwork for this year's festival Friday from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at KMUW. The event is open to everyone.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Powell: Why do you feel like this new partnership makes sense?
Beal: Well, I think for me, this partnership was really about mission alignment. Harvester is about building creative capacity for the local creative community, and Tallgrass is about supporting filmmakers.
Filmmakers are creative, and they're our neighbors. It just made a lot of sense for us. The obstacle and the opportunity are kind of the same. The obstacle is, we need more local community involvement. But I also see that as the opportunity.
I'm really excited to kind of bring in my placemaking background, and really make this about Wichita and for Wichita. When I look at Tallgrass, the thing that always struck me as being so unique and special is that you would see the community really come out and act as hosts to the filmmaker community that came into town, and so I think that is a differentiator that we can really stand on and show the filmmakers that come into town what's special about Wichita.
We had an opportunity to do something similar when Visit Wichita engaged us for the TBEX conference. There's a summit every year where this group of influencers and social media bloggers and writers go to different cities. It's like a tourism thing, and that city has the opportunity to show everybody about their city and people.
We were brought on to activate the riverfront from the Hyatt to Exploration Place and involve as many local creatives as we could, and I can easily say they were blown away by Wichita. So I really want to bring that sort of energy into the Tallgrass Film Festival.
Powell: Tom, you're director of events and logistics. And I was specifically wondering, logistically, with this big change right now, how do you see that working for this year's festival? October seems far away, but you very much know it's rapidly approaching.
Mittlestadt: One thing is, we're going to be right in Old Town, which makes it a lot easier for people to get around. We don't have to worry so much about transportation during the festival. We're going to scale it down a little bit, but we're still going to have a lot of the parties and things. And the VIP Lounge will still be out there and things like that, but it's just going to be all pretty much right there in the square of Old Town.
Powell: Hugo, as I mentioned to Tom, of course, the festival is coming up quickly. What are you looking at in terms of what the programming department really needs?
Phan: What the programming department really needs right now is some pre-screeners. We need people to come and kind of help us work through film submissions and help us fulfill our obligations to the film community at large, to put together a good festival that would make Wichita proud and is a good reflection of them. And at the same time, it is a dialog between us and kind of the world.
