[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGE Jennifer Burchett”][/title]
As an artist, Brandon Chase Goldsmith sees things other people don’t see. As a documentary film maker, he finds many of those things in the places and people right under the noses of the rest of us.
Take his adopted hometown of Fort Smith, a place many Arkansans regard only for its frontier and military pedigree. Brandon appreciates this side of the community’s story as much as the next person, but he’ll see that and raise you a rich heritage in the arts, too. In fact, he says, you can’t talk about one without talking about the other.
“Fort Smith has this history of the arts in the downtown area,” he says. “During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the steam ferries and the trains brought the opera houses and the theatres to town.
“Later, when we had the Fort Chaffee military base, downtown Fort Smith was littered with movie theaters. If you see any old building with an ‘L’ on it, that’s an old movie theater. And you can see, they are everywhere downtown. When the military base closed, it killed all of the theaters.”
Brandon talks about such things with the gravitas of a scholar and the zeal of a tent preacher. It’s a unique gift, this ability to simultaneously educate and inspire his audience, that makes him a compelling film maker. And it’s the fife with which he has led a community band of similarly merry dreamers down the path to the Fort Smith International Film Festival, which becomes a reality this summer.
“I have lived in San Antonio, Phoenix and Memphis and I’ve been involved with the arts scenes in all three of those cities,” he says. “When I came to Fort Smith, I saw things like The Unexpected and The Peacemaker Festival, but one of the things we didn’t have in this area around here was a film festival.
“About two years ago, I started thinking well, what would it take to make a film festival happen in Fort Smith? Those ideas started marinating and we started working on that goal.”
Brandon’s first step was to create the River Valley Film Society, an organization that serves several purposes. Primarily, the society brought together people of various skills, talents, and interests in film, but its role as a catalyst for a festival always resided within its DNA. Brandon used it to show community movers and shakers how to get involved.
“The first step was setting up that network, so that there was a place where filmmakers and film fans could start getting together for projects and having outlets where we could show films and discuss them,” he says. “Every month I showed works from local filmmakers and it was really fun. We started having these film society showings regularly and in doing that, the conversation always came around to taking this to the next level and doing a film festival.”
Jennifer Burchett, a writer, and veteran of nonprofit work was one of the people who shared Brandon’s vision for a festival and was among the first to sign on to help the concept take shape and become a reality.
“I knew Brandon as a business associate around town. We always kind of hung out in the same group and we had a lot of similar business activities,” she says. “He told me he was turning the group into a nonprofit and I think the first words out of my mouth were, ‘I want to be part of it.’ I knew right away that it was something that I really wanted to do.”
One by one, the effort attracted the kind of community heavyweights needed to accomplish its goal, from local press to community event organizers to officials in City Hall. Support was so enthusiastic, in fact, the film festival might have debuted by now had it not been for a generational pandemic played out on the world stage last year.
As it was, covid-19 gave the group the time it needed to legally form as a nonprofit, while at the same time pushing ahead with plans for the 2021 inaugural event. Despite the many uncertainties over what covid restrictions might look like, Brandon says pushing forward a year in advance wasn’t as without-a-net as it sounds.
“As a fan of film festivals, myself, I had seen the direction that these events were going last year,” he says. “You had some film festivals that completely shut down and closed. And then you had, throughout the pandemic, organizers who were figuring out solutions to showing their films online and streaming them.
“Seeing all of that, we weren’t just jumping in without a safety cord. We saw that we could have a contingency plan if we needed it; if covid continued to be bad in 2021, we could just do our first year in an all-streaming format.”
The same can be said for the “international” element of the festival. Brandon, Jennifer, and the rest of the event’s board of directors didn’t have a sixth sense for what travel restrictions would be like in 2021, so they reached out to the closest sovereign nation they could find.
“The thinking behind this being international came from one of my documentary projects,” Brandon says. “I put together the story of one of the biggest gun fights in the Wild West that’s never been put on film before. And that happened in the Cherokee Nation. I worked with the Cherokee Nation Film Office to get my actors for that.
“That got me thinking, you know what? The Supreme Court ruled the U.S. treaties with tribes are still in place and that the Cherokee still own the land that’s right on the other side of the river. So, if look at it that way, that river is an international border; you’ve got the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.”
Jennifer, who serves as the film festival’s artistic director, also notes the inclusion of the Cherokee Nation is in step with the ethos of the event, recognizing the work of all artists and film makers.
“Fort Smith has always been a border town, so this is a way for us to acknowledge an autonomous community right across the border,” she says. “It’s something that reflects the essence of what we want to be as a festival. We want to be a platform for diversity across the board.
“A lot of times, when people think about diversity, it’s really easy to think about it as far as just the other person. Ok, well, it’s someone who’s different. Well, diversity is another way of saying ‘everyone’ because we’re all different. So, it is a platform where anybody can participate.
“The theme of the festival is ‘Through Their Eyes’ by which we chose to highlight categories that are either underrepresented in the scope of filmmaking, or that we thought gave us a unique voice that would be representative of where we are right now in our society. Works by people of color and indigenous people are something we knew early on we wanted to have as a central part of our festival.”
As it turned out, the international component extended well beyond the participation of Fort Smith’s indigenous neighbors to the west. In fact, one of the things organizers were not expecting was the deluge of entrants the festival attracted, films submitted from thirty-three countries in all. Organizers also reached out to Fort Smith’s sister city of Cisterna, Italy, to forge a global relationship bound by film.
“I happened to find out their film festival is the month before ours,” Brandon says. “We were able to get in contact through Mayor George McGill and former Mayor Sandy Sanders, with the people who originally set up the twinning of the cities of Cisterna and Fort Smith.
“Jennifer, Clay Pruitt and I served as jurors for their festival and they’re picking a team of three to be jurors at our film festival. In the future, we hope that partnership will help us attract more films from abroad. We’re bringing the world to Fort Smith, but the way that I look at it is that we’re actually showing Fort Smith off to the world.”
Fort Smith International Film Festival
August 13-14, 2021
Downtown Fort Smith, Arkansas
fortsmithfilm.com
