Morgan Schmidt-Feng and Dennis Mohr, along with their Co-Director Katy Swailes are presenting the US Premiere at Salem Film Fest of ANTON: CIRCLING HOME, an intimate portrait of artist Anton van Dalen.
Schmidt-Feng (ON HER OWN) and Mohr (MUGSHOT) are filmmakers who both screened at SFF 2015, but their friendship extends back almost two decades. SFF Program Director Jeff Schmidt caught up with the filmmakers to talk about their friendship and filmmaking collaboration.
Jeff Schmidt: Dennis and Morgan, I was thinking we could focus first on your relationship prior to SFF 2015, how you first met back in the 2000's and then how you both ended up at SFF 2015 and became reacquainted and subsequently collaborated on THE RAVENITE and ANTON. Tell us a little bit about your filmmaking careers and how you met one another?
Morgan Schmidt-Feng: My first memory of the filmmaking process was when I was about 6 years old running around Palmer’s Motion Picture Lab in San Francisco on the weekends, while my dad (Filmmaker, Rick Schmidt) would edit and review footage from his recent low-budget feature film project, SHOW BOAT THE REMAKE 1988. In 1989 I collaborated with my father Rick Schmidt on a fictional feature called MORGAN'S CAKE. My dad convinced me to star in it even though I had never acted before. MORGAN'S CAKE had its premiere at Sundance and went on to a solid festival run, and also ran on TLC. After that early introduction to filmmaking I was hooked and enrolled in film school at CCAC in Oakland, California. After I graduated I worked on a dozen or more low budget features & docs. Lucas Film hired me as their documentary cinematographer, which is where Dennis Mohr and I first met. We stayed in touch over the years but it wasn't until 2015 at Salem that we really reconnected.
Dennis Mohr: I began making Super 8 films in grade school and continued throughout high school and college. I was always interested in comedy. After graduating from film school in 1991, I became interested in documentaries, especially subject matter focused on iconoclastic characters. My first documentary, REFLECTIONS ON A THOUGHT-O-GRAPHIC MIND told the story of a down-and-out, hard-living, ex-bellhop who claimed to be able to project his mind onto photographic film. It was the perfect combination of “truth” and tragicomedy - themes I’m once again exploring in my new films, THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE BOY JONES about Queen Victoria’s stalker and SPEAK! the history of talking dogs in Germany, 1910-1945.
I first met Morgan in 2003, at Lucasfilm, when I was invited to interview George Lucas for my documentary, REMEMBERING ARTHUR about a forgotten but influential Canadian filmmaker named Arthur Lipsett. As a young film student, George Lucas was enamoured with Lipsett’s experimental films from the 1960s. Morgan helped me with the interview and we hit it off immediately. As young independent filmmakers ourselves, Morgan and I shared the same interest in experimental arts films. We stayed in touch over the years and met again at SFF in 2015.
JS: Can you talk about your experience reconnecting at Salem Film Fest?
MS-F: We were totally surprised to see each other since we didn’t realize each of us had films selected for Salem Film Fest. SFF was the first festival following the world premiere of ON HER OWN at the 2015 Slamdance Film Festival. I really enjoyed the hospitality extended to us at SFF because it allowed me to relax enough to begin to consider starting something new in the midst of the festival run for ON HER OWN.
DM: In 2015, I walked into a screening at SFF and turned around to see Morgan in the audience. I had no idea he was going to be there, so it was exciting to meet up again and experience the festival together. One coffee led to another, and we agreed to collaborate on an idea I was developing about the mafia hangout, the Ravenite social club in NYC. I remember Morgan saying that the idea sounded familiar. Funny enough, after the film was completed in 2018, Morgan discovered some notes in his Lucasfilm archive about a pitch I made to him about THE RAVENITE. Both of us had forgotten that I had approached him about the idea some years before when we first met in 2003. It was in NYC in 2018, while filming our next collaboration, ANTON: CIRCLING HOME, that he showed me the notes.
JS: My understanding is that after the festival, you actually began working together again - can you talk about that?
MS-F: In 2015 at Salem Film Fest we hatched a plan to work together on THE RAVENITE, which was a social clubfor mobsters in New York and while we were shooting that we met the subject of our latest project together, ANTON: CIRCLING HOME a doc about
NYC East Village artist, Anton van Dalen. We actually shot THE RAVENITE interviews with Jim Jarmusch and Luc Sante in Anton's art studio.
DM: While working together on THE RAVENITE, we filmed an interview with Anton. We soon realized that Anton’s story would make a wonderful documentary on its own, so we decided to pursue that project as our next collaboration. We enlisted the help of our friends, producer Katy Swailes and editor Will Nold, who had both worked with us on THE RAVENITE, and together we all decided to “get the band back together”, so to speak. And, here we are at SFF 2021 with ANTON: CIRCLING HOME. You might say that as filmmakers, we circled back home to SFF 2021.
JS: While we're disappointed that we can't physically host you in Salem this year, we're glad to rekindle our relationship by showing ANTON virtually, can you talk about why the relationship between festivals and filmmakers is so important?
MS-F: Festivals help filmmakers connect to other filmmakers and their audience which is an invaluable means to understand how our work is perceived and what resonates for them. It's very satisfying to know how our work impacts others and can inspire us to keep working on new projects.
DM: SFF is one of the best film festivals I’ve attended. The programmers, audience and filmmakers are some of the most dedicated, appreciative and creative people I’ve met. The environment is a wonderful meeting place for like-minded independent filmmakers to get together and discuss future projects. It’s an inspiring scene and I look forward to the day we can all return in person. In the meantime, the online festival is impressive and I look forward to immersing myself in all it has to offer. Thank you for including us in 2021!
ANTON: CIRCLING HOME streams as part of Salem Film Fest from Friday, March 19 - Sunday, March 28. Tickets to view the film can be purchased here.
