The life of a singing cowboy, the appearance of aliens in Forest Park, the story of a woman enslaved by a prominent St. Louis family.
Those are some of the themes featured in the Whitaker St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase, an annual opportunity for filmmakers to show off their work.
The 23rd annual edition includes 91 films, including five feature-length selections. Much of the festival schedule is dedicated to an extensive collection of short films: eight programs of narrative shorts, two groupings of documentary shorts and a program including 16 animated or experimental shorts.
The event also includes master classes devoted to a Missouri Film Office program for local filmmakers, film criticism and legal issues that professionals in the industry deal with.
The festival begins Friday night and runs for two weekends. All screenings will be at the Hi-Pointe Theatre, a historic venue that festival producer Cinema St. Louis acquired late last year.
Several of this year’s films are set in St. Louis or explore local history. Director Edward T. Thornton’s documentary “Bring Dat Mono Back” looks at the now-defunct East St. Louis nightclub the Monastery. Delisa Richardson and Dan Steadman directed “Eliza,” a narrative short based on the life of Eliza Rone, a woman enslaved in 1845 by the prominent St. Louis family whose home is now the Campbell House Museum.
The festival also has original takes on familiar genres. Doveed Linder directed “The Box,” a science fiction film set in St. Louis. “Somewhere in Old Missouri” is a Western with supernatural elements and original music that Tom Boyer directed.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D. Goodwin spoke with Linder, Boyer and Boyer’s co-writer and composer, Jackson Thomas Drogo, about the work that went into their films and the idiosyncratic stories they brought to the screen.
Jeremy D. Goodwin: Doveed, you showed your debut feature film at the first Whitaker St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase in 2001. “The Box” is your second. Why are you returning now?
Doveed Linder: It would have happened a lot sooner if this film didn’t take 11 years to make.
After I directed “Defiance,” I wanted to do something very small with a fast turnaround. So I wrote this script called “The Box.” Someone suggested to me that I could take this concept, write a number of different stories, kind of pass the box around from story to story, and then I’d have a feature film. And I felt I needed to get my second film under my belt.
Goodwin: So you were right about this being a great idea for your second feature film but wrong about this being a project with a quick turnaround?
Linder: Exactly. I thought it would take maybe a year and a half to get the whole thing in the can and edited. It turned out to be 11 years.
Goodwin: What was your original idea for the film?
Linder: Basically the whole scenario at first was a dinner party. Couples discover this box in the cabinet. They don’t know what it is or where it came from. It causes a lot of distrust in the group. We start learning secrets about each individual person. And then eventually the clock turns to 11:11 p.m., and the box opens and three people go into it.
Goodwin: And we get into a larger story about an inter-dimensional invasion of St. Louis.
Linder: It was originally supposed to be a vague, ambiguous ending to a short film. But it also made for the setup of what eventually became the feature film.
Goodwin: How long was the principal photography?
Linder: It took place from December 2012 to December 2017. It’s an anthology, so that means you have multiple stories all wrapped into one.
Goodwin: You could work with just a few actors at a time and complete each section separately?
Linder: Yes. There was no finished script when we started shooting. We’d write one of the stories, cast it, shoot it, start editing it, and I would look back at what we had and start writing the next story. So it was a writing experiment in that regard.
Goodwin: Tom, your film, “Somewhere In Old Missouri,” seems to include a lot of influences. How do you describe it?
Tom Boyer: We call it a supernatural Midwestern musical. It’s a musical not so much in terms of people getting up and dancing, but it is very musical. That’s all Jackson.
Goodwin: I don’t think the time period is very spelled out, is it?
Boyer: It’s intentionally vague. We didn’t have the resources to make a really accurate period piece. We just call it "old Missouri." There’s electricity in the film, but we didn’t want anything extremely modern.
Goodwin: Jackson, how do you use music as part of the storytelling?
Jackson Thomas Drogo: The score is all original. Some of the songs we perform in the movie are renditions of old-time music from the 1800s up through the 1900s, and some are original.
There’s a Gene Autry film I saw, "The Man From Music Mountain." Something clicked inside of me, saying, why can’t I be riding a horse and singing a song? So it’s based on the concept of these singing Westerns that are no longer in the popular media, then adding the surreal aspect of the films that Tom and I enjoy and marrying that together.
Boyer: Our movie is really handmade. It doesn’t look like a Hollywood production, because it isn’t. The two guiding lights we had, besides our influences and everything we tried to reimagine, was that we wanted to make something that we would want to watch. And all we had was time and effort, so we took our time and put in all the effort we possibly could.
Drogo: I took horse-riding lessons for six months.
Goodwin: Where did you shoot the exteriors?
Boyer: We shot a lot of it at my family’s ranch, down past Montgomery City. My Uncle Steve has a log cabin, and it’s been in our family for years. It’s the log cabin you see in the movie. And with all the land around it, and the lake and the woods, when we decided that we were going to try to make a Western we felt we had locations pretty much secured.
Drogo: We shot the jail cell in a secret room beneath my grandpa’s house. During Prohibition they built a secret moonshine room that you had to take out a wall to get into. So it was cool to use a period-accurate room to turn into a jail cell.
We tried to accent our strong points. I’m a musician, and he works with film a lot. So with the constraints of the budget and the time we had, we wanted to bring forth our best.
