The first annual 53704 Frame By Frame Film Festival frames local hobbyists and professionals alike

Organizer and producer Karen Faster kicks off a full day of (mostly) short-film screenings at the Barrymore on November 4 from 2 to 10 p.m.

Over the past 10 months, the local film community has truly seen a renaissance after the pandemic-forced stagnation at the start of this decade. Since the beginning of 2023, Project Projection returned in seasonal installments as part of Mills Folly Microcinema at Arts + Literature Laboratory, and Encore Studio For The Performing Arts produced a black-and-white mini-festival in the winter. Over the summer, the SOGO Film Festival in Stoughton expanded to a full weekend in August for its second year, and Cinema Lanterna hosted an inaugural October screening at Madison Circus Space, amongst other 48-Hour Film Project-related events that have repeatedly popped up.

Karen Faster joins them in producing and curating a marathon-viewing fall festival at the Barrymore this Saturday, November 4, from 2 to 10 p.m. 53704 Frame By Frame Festival is an attempt to narrow the voices and creatives of one particular postal zip code on the east and northeast side of our fair city. Its neighborhoods include Emerson East, Sherman, Eken Park, Maple Woods, Truax, and Ridgewood. Think of it as a zonal microcosm of the Wisconsin Film Festival’s “Wisconsin’s Own” programming, which brings together filmmakers with connections to this state—whether they were raised here, educated here, or simply have chosen a location in Wisconsin to base their film.

On paper, Faster’s criteria reads like it would winnow the field to just a handful of submissions, but she was surprised by the response from her neighbors. “I did not anticipate the festival would fill eight hours,” she writes in an email to Tone Madison. “We [received] a total of 24 films by 22 filmmakers, which will be grouped into four sets of 75-150 minutes.” Between each of those viewing blocks, they’re allotting 15- to 30-minute breaks for audience questions. Passes for the day are $15, and the full schedule is available to view at ohioavenue.com. (Also, as Faster notes, unlike some other movie venues in the area, the Barrymore allows outside food and drink.)

Besides the all-day, one-day-only affair, what separates 53704 Frame By Frame from many of the recent aforementioned events in Madison is how “the filmmakers range in age and experience from self-taught amateurs with limited equipment to longtime professionals,” Faster writes. They often center the city of Madison and Dane County in the films themselves.

At a glance, this is most evident in Brian Kelley and the late Tom H. Garver‘s Horizon Revealed. This short film pays tribute to Garver, author and founding curator of the O. Winston Link Museum (who passed away this past June), and his efforts to help bring a photography slideshow project to fruition for west-side Horizon High School’s spring 2023 graduation. Kelley incorporates the project itself into this touching 10-minute documentary.

Mitch Dietz’s two entries in the festival also survey the lives of proactive people in the Madison sphere. He’ll publicly debut the 72-minute feature-length Hotdish Hoedown: The Endless Table, which chronicles the three-week lead-up to the 2019 edition of the grand January potluck that face of the festival Karen Faster started in the early 1990s. The minutiae behind the evolution of the annual community gathering’s Jell-O contest is a particular highlight.

Dietz’s comparatively concise Keep Spinning: A B-Side Story is all about manager and owner Steve Manley’s history in working at the State Street record store through the ups and downs in the mid-1980s through the late 2010s. Today, Manley emotionally frames the reality that “vinyl is what saved my business.” The film stops short of B-Side’s 2022 move from the 400 to 500 block of State Street (alluding to Alec Mattie’s separate documentary, Encore, on that), but captures a few employees and customers like Dave Colby and Scott Collins, who share their insights on the value of the community institution and physical media.

Other short films will see their own sort of encores at the Barrymore as part of 53704 Frame By Frame. Jackson Jarvis’ pair of narrative shorts, Neptune and Mover, were official Wisconsin Film Festival selections in 2020 (or the fragmented, streaming version of it) and 2022, respectively. Both professionally produced films exhibit an incredible command of editing and points of view, not to mention their confidently divergent tones.

The amusing and loquacious 20-minute Neptune panoramically peers into small-town Wisconsin as an adult son (Pat McCarthy) returns to take care of his aging father (Peter Knox)’s messy personal affairs and loose ends. The wordless, choreographed Mover is structured as a psychological drama of a woman (Tilly Evans-Krueger) waking up to an empty house, coming to terms with a break-up, as she literally moves on. The upturned and pent-up feeling of liberation amidst its claustrophobic framing and central character’s lingering memories plays out a bit like Adinah Dancyger’s Moving (2019) if it were made by Josephine Decker.

Michelle Marie Kelley’s two most recent shorts—the 12-minute documentary about Kristi Jo McCloskey and Luke Vanness’ backyard chicken-rearing, Full Circle and the 90-second, warm, wistful, and painstakingly Letterpress-animated Davenport—also reappear here. The former was included in the 2023 Wisconsin Film Festival in the spring and the latter in Midwest Video Poetry Festival just a few weeks ago in mid-October.

In her organizing efforts, Faster has enlisted filmmaker Gretta Wing Miller for some logistical help. Miller was further integral in realizing The World Of Jumanji by Madison East High graduate, Keasion Griffin, 53704 Frame By Frame’s fellow. Miller exclaims that, after working with Griffin at a Goodman Community Center educational program in 2019, “he totally picked up on filmmaking techniques instantly,” and not only wanted to star in something but write and direct his own film, too.

Griffin’s 45-minute narrative entry, premiering at the fest, is just the first part of a planned feature that he hopes to finish by summer 2024. Griffin himself stars as main character Lamar, who is beckoned by caterwauling animal sounds emanating from the board game in his basement. As he’s drawn to play, the game’s familiar riddles unleash jungle wildlife throughout his house and upon his two neighborhood friends Maria and John (La’Leyah McKinney and Ronnie Ricks).

Griffin got completely swept up in Joe Johnston’s original 1995 film starring Robin Williams, the first movie he recalls watching as a kid. “I watched the movie so many times that I remember every single line, sound, and music [cue]. And when I wanted to make a fan film about the movie, I wanted the film to be connected to all of the Jumanji movies [2017 and 2019 sequels] and added all into one,” he writes to Tone Madison via email. While the student film is certainly limited in its rudimentary integration of live-action footage and CG animals stampeding through the frames that Griffin has modeled, rigged, and brightened through a smartphone app, his resourcefulness and ambitions—and most importantly, an intrinsic sense of adventure—are indisputably on the screen.

In surveying the breadth of the film festival’s lineup, it is refreshing to grasp at how a small regional community is positioned here as the subject as much as their films. By putting amateur filmmakers on a level “playing” field with professionals, the 53704 Frame By Frame Festival achieves something greater than simply existing as a one-day screening event. It’s posed to be the start of a necessary dialogue between generations of filmmakers and video artists that Faster hopes can become an annual festivity, in bringing together “an eclectic [group] to share their work with a wider public,” she writes.