DEDfest Still Alive – With a Vengeance
In a flurry of complaining, local film producer Derek Clayton told the CBC that last year’s DEDfest would be its last year ever.
Yet here we are, again.
The 10th annual genre film festival now called DEDfest With a Vengeance runs Oct 19-21 at the Metro Cinema in the Garneau.
Selections include Climax (above), a nightmare of a movie about party-goers on LSD, by noted Argentine director Gaspar Noe – and it’s a musical! Also on screen will be the Edmonton-shot horror feature Extremity. Matt Dillon stars in The House That Jack Built, which was said to spur walkouts at the Cannes Film Festival. The Ranger, meanwhile, was a top pick at a number of genre film festivals – a slasher movie dealing with camping punks victimized by a psychotic park ranger.
Matt Dillon in ‘The House That Jack Built’
You sense a theme. “Genre” is code for films that will freak you out. Edmonton loves extreme metal. Why not extreme cinema?
On deciding to give it another year, Clayton says, “We got talked into it,” referring to support of the Metro Cinema Society.
This guy comes off a lot less fierce in conversation that he does on social media – but at least he cares about what he’s trying to do. “I know we said last year it was going to be that’s it,” he says. “And I think if were to have ended on a high note, we would’ve ended on a pretty high note last year. There’s a little more pressure this year. We don’t want to do it half ass, which is tougher when you’re more restrained.”
The 2018 fest will be scaled back and simpler: Three days instead of six, and a total of 10 films. Concentrated gore.
There have been highlight’s in DEDfest’s history – a tweet from Stephen King, a “Best of Edmonton” pick from Vue magazine, helping to produce a popular indie film called The Last Video Store – but a litany of woes is described. The main one is that most film festivals, indeed many festivals of any kind, cannot survive on ticket sales alone.
Punk rockers go camping and don’t come back in ‘The Ranger’
“Costs have tripled in the last five years,” Clayton says, while the Edmonton film industry seems to have taken a slight downturn. Grant funding is also down overall, though the Edmonton Arts Council (EAC) actually increased its DEDfest funding this year. Perhaps the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The producer adds that signing corporate sponsors is tricky when you book movies like Sadistic Intentions, which deals with two metal dudes who kidnap and torment a woman because they’re looking for inspiration. Things don’t end well.
What’s troubling is that Clayton has been grumbling for years now on a whole range of topics pertinent to Edmonton, and threatening to cancel the festival several times, and move to Vancouver.
We’re getting worried. Has he lost his vim? Has his hometown paled before him? Like: Are you OK, man?
He explains, “I think a lot of people get civic pride confused with almost a sort of obedience – like don’t say anything negative ever. I feel like I’m proud of my city, but I get upset seeing things done that don’t have to be done that way, and seeing bad decisions being made.”
There is hope, he says, in things like the EAC “Art of Living” proposal that seeks to help artists not be “starving artists.”
He says, “Hopefully that translates into that plan, which would be fantastic. But then the trick is getting the city council to approve more money to invest in things like DEDfest, to allow these things to grow and see the value in what everyone’s doing.”
Artists in any city give that city its culture, and that translates to real money. Edmonton already has one of the healthiest arts scenes in Canada.
On being one of these … if not starving then say “struggling” artists in Edmonton, Clayton adds, “You don’t want to lose the love for what you do. For a while there this year I got pretty down. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to watch a movie. I’m like, has this whole journey been so tough that I’ve actually lost my love for cinema? Thankfully it came back a little bit. Getting to watch such amazing films is fantastic.”
