To Patricia Suchy, faculty adviser of the Cinema Club, the Outhouse film festival has a fitting name.
“To me [the name] Outhouse connotes the kind of rough-and-ready, fringy feel of the student films we screen,” said Suchy in an e-mail. “It’s truly independent, and it’s often satirical, parodic, subversive and creative. That doesn’t mean the films are of low quality, it just means you don’t have to be a millionaire with highly specialized training to make a film for Outhouse.”
The Union Colonnade Theater will be transformed into a local film extravaganza with the fifth annual Outhouse Film Festival.
The festival will take place April 24 and 25, with events being put on throughout each day by the Cinema Club. There are five main feature-length films being shown, all by local filmmakers in the Baton Rouge area.
Outhouse started when Mark Landry, a former LSU student who has just finished his Master’s degree in film directing at the University of Southern California, approached Suchy, his former History of Film professor, with the idea of forming a cinema club.
At one of the meetings, Suchy said, the idea for Outhouse came up. The first Outhouse took place in the spring of 2000, and has occurred annually ever since.
“Mark was the spark that lit a fire that is still burning,” Suchy said. “The first Outhouse was a celebration of filmmaking at LSU — it was non-juried, and open only to LSU students, faculty, and staff. It was sort of a trial balloon. Who’s out there? Is there enough local stuff going on to make a festival? The answer was a huge ‘yes.’ We had over nine hours of programming that year.”
Overall, said Cinema Club president Claire Schexnayder, the average attendance is around 200, as people come and go throughout the festival.
Schexnayder is expecting around 500 people this year, because of an increase in advertising for the festival, the Cinema Club’s show on Tiger TV called “Inhouse,” and the large amount of local submissions they received.
“A lot more local groups will come out to watch their movies on the big screen,” she said.
Suchy said that Outhouse Film Festival has a large impact on Baton Rouge filmmakers.
“Baton Rouge has so many creative folks working in film and video, it’s just not particularly well-organized around an institution,” she said. “I think Outhouse has the potential to become that institution, or at least to figure importantly in it.”
Also featured at this year’s festival will be a guest speaker, Stacey Simmons, the Assistant Director for Business Relations at the Laboratory for Creative Arts and Technologies, a divison of the Center for Computation and Technology.
Schexnayder said that this year about 25 films were submitted. The major films — which are feature-length — include “Petrouchka” by Hedges Pictures, “Dracula” and “Man of the Hour” by Crane Films, “Old Clothes” by Chris and Stan Aaron, and “Everything is Everything” by Studio 8, a local comedy group.
On “Inhouse” last week, some of the filmmakers who submitted films were able to show the trailers for their films as well as discuss them.
“We’re just a bunch of guys who try to make people laugh,” said Truston Aillet of Studio 8. “Some try more than others, some succeed more than others. And it’s our dream. We live the dream.”
Kyle Crane of Crane films also talked about his two films that will be shown at the festival, “Dracula” and “Man of the Hour.”
“We had more fun making this movie than we did [with] any beforehand,” Crane said about “Man of the Hour.” “We put a lot of time, sweat and blood, literally, into ‘Man of the Hour.'”
Another feature at this year’s festival is “13 Ways to Kill a Mockingbird” by Patricia Suchy, which will be shown in the Hopkins Black Box Theatre in Coates Hall. The show is an “evening of experimental performance and installations, which explores the impact of (Harper) Lee’s novel,” according to the press release. It will also be shown April 21 to 24 at 7 p.m.
“It’s free, it’s a lot of fun, and you can see what creative minds can do when put to the test,” said Schexnayder about the festival. “I guess it’s just a break from the normal Hollywood cinema experience.”
Suchy says that students can expect the unexpected at Outhouse.
“Experiments [range] from the sublime to the scatological,” she said. “Attend because it is so very cool, and to support local and student filmmaking, and to be royally entertained for free.”
In the Outhouse Film Hestival
April 21, 2004