Volunteers Liz Cronin and Elise Mankes at SFF 2009. Photo by Dinah Cardin
Behind the scenes of the largest documentary film festival in New England is the Salem Film Force.
This is a group of volunteers who come from all over the North Shore and Boston area who are also filmmakers, college professors, high school teachers, artists, consultants and film lovers who give hours and hours of their time.
Visiting filmmakers need hotel rooms and rides to and from the airport. There are films to be chosen and underwriters to persuade, press releases to be written, schwag bags to be put together and ballots to be counted. Then there are the audience members who need a screening schedule, directions to local eateries and on and on.
Within this dedicated group, you can find Chris Gilbert, a journalist, teacher, and documentary film maker who lives in Beverly, Massachusetts. His specialty is religion reporting. Chris closely follows the development of digital media and teaches journalism ethics to juniors and seniors at various colleges. With recent college graduates in journalism, he has established a local video news reporting team covering the North Shore of Boston on Youtube.
We tracked Chris down to ask a few questions about volunteering for the festival.
Why do you volunteer for the Salem Film Festival?
Chris: Some things are handed to you on a plate. I was new to Massachusetts, a documentary film maker who makes short commissioned institutional histories, and “industrials” or PR pieces to pay the mortgage. I got to know Paul Van Ness before there was a Film Fest, we discovered that we enjoyed working together on different film projects and he made the invitation to me in the first year to join the Salem Film Fest organizing committee.
I was welcomed into a delightful group of men and women with a heart for real stories told well in film, and then the festival itself was such a boost to my own artistic ambitions it has been easy to keep at it.
Chris: Documentary film makers are an interesting lot, drawn to express themselves in an art that can hardly pay their way. Yet for the joy of discovering a story in places most of us would fail to look, they endure amazing years of adventure and often privation to get their work onto the screen.
Just to chat with these folks, who have completed their project, has been a great buzz for me. Most of the films I’ve seen at the festival have filled me with wonder at the originality, the unique vision and the skill and passion of their creators. Films like “Ghenghis Blues,” Henry Ferrini’s film on Lowell as an ode to Jack Kerouac, followed last year by his “Polis,” set in Gloucester, the hilarious Aussie documentary, “Big Dreamers”, “Buddhas lost Children,” and so many more remind why I’m about documentary work, and so I’m inspired to stay at it.
What’s the funniest story you have from working on all three years?
Chris: This year we’ve been fortunate to have the help of more than twenty new volunteers, all extending the reach of these great true stories in film to a much wider circle of people. We have a dozen extra films this year and our selectors have in my opinion aced it, with their picks for the festival, exceeding even their remarkable selections of previous years.
We have one that’s now an Oscar nominee, and another that AARP have selected as one of the four most important films of the past year. So it’s hard to know. We want the festival to remain fun and personally warm for all comers and that might become a challenge in the years ahead as the event scales up in the numbers attending, and more and more film makers come to town.
The ethos we’ve cultivated has us honoring the filmmakers, and the people attending by offering them the best hospitality we can muster. That we discover makes it a unique Festival for film makers, so word of Salem’s two Film Fests has spread on the festival circuits so that our event is now highly regarded in only its third year. Go figure!
Chris: The amazing thing about our volunteers is that they are all self starters. Once they were welcomed in and introduced as a group to our vision of serving the artists, and making sure the opportunity to see their work is widely spread, and once we laid out the areas where we needed help, it was amazing to me how immediately they put themselves into action.
Social media, phone calls and email keep the wheels turning – I’m simply a part time network resourcing person, a volunteer myself – I link people to those core committee workers (also part time volunteers) who want their assistance, and ensure the new volunteers have what they need for their tasks and an open line of friendly contact. So far it is working better than I had imagined it might – because of the new volunteers we have schools all through the region considering field trips.
Some volunteers have become advocates for particular documentaries that they know their various alma maters, clubs, societies, and ethnic groups have a natural interest in seeing. Others are making for us short promotional films and collages of the trailers for local access TV distribution. Others are assisting with publicity writing and distribution. It’s a happy team thus far. And their reward for a forty hour pre-festival effort will be an open access pass. All for the love of documentary!
– Dinah Cardin
