The Boomtown Film Society will host the annual Boomtown Film and Music Festival, Feb. 19-22. The festival includes screenings of independent films, live music by Southeast Texas bands, workshops and opportunities to meet filmmakers.
The festival will hold events at the Jefferson Theater, the Texas Energy Museum and the Tyrell Historical Library. Festival director Stephanie Orta said she is excited that the festival will collaborate with the Beaumont Public Library system.
“I utilize the festival to learn more and more,” she said. “If you are interested in how things are done in the industry, our workshops are very informative.”
The workshops will touch on topics including animation and music in film, Orta said.
“I, myself, am not a movie geek,” she said. “So, getting into the workshops, it was really eye opening for me, especially with animation. We did a stop motion workshop last year, and it was just so cool.”
Lamar University film professor O’Brien Stanley will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement award at the ceremony, Feb. 21, at the Jefferson Theater.
“I’m undeserving,” he said. “Gee, I’m honored to tell you the truth. I’m really honored. I’ve been associated with this film festival for a good while, in one form or another. It’s had a big impact on my life and I have loved being connected to it.”
Stanley helped start the film program at Lamar in 1998 and in 2000, he co-founded the “Spindletop Lamar University Film Festival.”
“We ran that until 2006 and we stopped doing it, because it was kind of too much for us,” he said. “Former students picked it up. They said, ‘We don’t want the festival to stop.’ So, they started the Boomtown Festival.”
Stanley said filmmakers and artists come from all over to submit their work to the festival.
“The creativity you’re seeing is fantastic — they really are polished films,” he said. “They get national filmmakers that are trying to work their way to Hollywood or New York, wherever they want to make films.
Red beak Productions, Lamar’s film club, are an important part of the festival, Orta said.
“Red Beak has shown up as volunteers and has wiped the floor in participation,” she said. “Whether it be the music video challenge, the 48-hour challenge or documenting the festival itself. I mean, this is their history — it’s the beginning of their careers.”
The festival showcases the results of the 48-hour Film Race, an event where participants write, shoot, edit and submit a short film in two days using certain prompts.
“We had to incorporate oil in some way into our film and then also emulate another director,” Adam Baeza, Beaumont senior, said. “I’m really interested to see how other people take those few guidelines and make something out of it, because that’s a very hard thing to do,”
Baeza is Red Beak Productions’ president. He has been involved with the festival for three years.
“You see movies coming out at all these big movie theaters, so that kind of leaves local films and smaller budget films out in the dust,” he said. “This festival was a way for talent to get recognition and to have an audience for once. That’s really why we do this — we want to share that art with other people.”
Baeza said the festival is a great way for students to find entertainment in Beaumont.
“People complain about Beaumont not having a lot,” he said. “We’re not Houston, where we have the Galleria, IMAX theaters or huge concert halls. But this festival brings together a bunch of people who demonstrate that there is stuff going on. There is life in Beaumont, Texas. There’s movies being made in your backyard. There are bands and concerts that happen every week at a little record shop.”
Stanley said he recommends Lamar students get involved with the festival.
“My students get to go see films that they wouldn’t otherwise get to see, and they get to use the festival as a networking opportunity to get into the business themselves,” Stanley said. “It’s just a fantastic event.”
Attendees will have opportunities to meet artists and independent filmmakers throughout the event, Orta said.
“We had a couple of artists that were from big cities, and they come down here, and they’re like, ‘We didn’t think y’all were gonna be this rad,’” Orta said. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, what’d you think?’ You don’t have to go to New York, you don’t have to go to Los Angeles, you don’t have to leave across the world — (you can) find it here.”
Tickets are available in three packages: a $15 day-pass, a $30 festival pass or a $60 VIP pass. For more information, visit boomtownfestival.com.
