In response to no desire whatsoever on the part of the filmgoing public, the Slumdance Experience has slapped together its first event in over three years: The Slumdance 2000 Online Film Festival. The online event takes place at www.slumdance.com from June 1 to June 12.
The Festival, which callously excluded filmmakers not already associated with Slumdance, features a total of four short films, each with a running time of three minutes.”Given that most people still access the Internet with a 56K modem, we decided to keep this first Online Festival short and sweet,” said Slumdance Vagrant Brian Flemming. “A visitor to our site can attend our entire Festival in a little over 12 minutes.”
But further investigation revealed another motivation for the unusually formatted Festival. Slumdance is using iCAST.com to stream its films, and each featured short in the Slumdance 2000 Online Film Festival is actually an entry in the iCAST Three Minute Film Contest. iCAST is a major commercial site with no official affiliation with Slumdance.com. Slumdance appears simply to have designed a “film festival” around the four films it entered in the iCAST contest, and thus is using iCAST to avoid the cost of streaming its own short films. “Sure, we happened to make our films to fit the parameters of the iCAST Contest,” said Flemming, defensively. “Do you think we could afford to stream films ourselves? We call ourselves Vagrants, for Christ’s sake. Why don’t you just leave me alone.”
The films in the Slumdance 2000 Online Film Festival include an action-adventure extravaganza by Mitch Watson called “And Heroes Shall Rise”; a farce by Kristi Dalven titled “The Gas Man”; and two films by Flemming, an anti-music propaganda documentary called “The Birth of Music,” and a film about two computers having sex called “Broadband Love Jones.”
