Maryland Film Festival 2014 Festival Fun Facts MFF 2014 By The Numbers Overall attendance: 25,000 Overall ticket sales: $110,575 All-Access Passes Sold: 108

Total programs: 113 Added programs: 10 Films screened: 129 Feature films: 51 Short films: 78

Documentaries: 30 (22 features, 8 shorts) Foreign films: 27 (15 features, 12 shorts) Multinational films: 5

Nations and regions represented: 20 (including USA, Iran, Greece, France, Canada, UK, Italy, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Nepal, Uruguay, South Korea, Germany, Taiwan, Brazil, Hungary, Spain, Australia, and Ireland)

Added venues: 5 Total seating capacity: 30,960 Added seating capacity: 5330 Stand-by (Sold out) Programs: 14 Pct. of Programs on Stand-by: 12%

FOF Memberships sold: 76 Pct. increase over 2013: 84% Volunteers: 400+ Volunteer Hours: 4000+

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Prolific documentarian Stanley Nelson engages a FREEDOM SUMMER audience in a Q&A with MFF director Jed Dietz. Photo by Casie Smith.

CALL GIRL OF CTHULHU star Melissa O'Brien and director Chris LaMartina celebrate at the MFF Pixilated Photobooth during the Closing Night party.

A packed house for the premiere of CALL GIRL OF CTHULHU at the UB Langsdale Auditorium. This was one of 14 screenings to go on stand-by during the 2014 festival. Photo by Josh Sisk.

QUOTES “Baltimore's annual cinematic bacchanal” - Chris Kaltenbach, The Baltimore Sun “…the sixteenth annual Maryland Film Festival managed to lift Maryland…and Baltimore to Cinderella status. Anyone who was there, if just for a single film, knew they were witnessing…a World Series comeback win.” – Bob Revere, The Baltimore Sun

“Friendly, accessible and full of the city's unique personality, the Maryland Film Festival is a perfect excuse to explore the sights, sounds, tastes, cultural life and rich history of a great American city.” - Alicia Lozano, WTOP

“A couple of days in Baltimore watching a new slate of independent films left me even more optimistic…regarding the future of moviemaking and the creative energies of young, still insufficiently recognized filmmakers. There’s a separate world of cinema, beside the one that finds its way to multiplexes and, for that matter, beside the one that tends to get distributed internationally, and it includes some of the best, most original, and most forward-looking movies being made anywhere in the world today. For critics looking prophetically toward the future of the cinema, that future—more than it has been for a long time—is now. And a clear view of that future should prove equally illuminating for the cinema’s history, its most vital heritage.” - Richard Brody, The New Yorker

The Opening Night Shorts afterparty in the MICA Brown Center. Photo by Jason Putsche.

The fun-loving, hard-working 2014 MFF Screening Committee poses in front of the MICA Brown Center on opening night. Photo by Jason Putsche.

Patrons, staff, and filmmakers mingle at the always memorable Closing NIght Party in the MFF Tent VIllage. Photo by Ira Silverberg.

2014 FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS EXPANDED CAMPUS & TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM RESULT IN 2nd MOST SUCCESSFUL MFF IN HISTORY The 16th Maryland Film Festival expanded its campus significantly in 2014, adding five new venues and over 5000 seats. This progress was a welcome step towards MFF continued growth, placing Baltimore’s nationally-acclaimed festival in league with other multiple-venue festivals like South By Southwest, Toronto Film Festival, and Sundance. The new campus caught the curiosity of the community in unprecedented ways, bringing more than 25,000 visitors to the campus over the five days of the festival, and attracting more out-of-state visitors than ever before.

Adding the new venues also increased MFF audience capacity by 21% over 2013, and our audience flocked to us – the paid attendance was our second-largest in history, with a 12% increase over 2012’s then-unprecedented attendance figures. The new campus established many new partnerships (as with the Walters Art Museum, University of Baltimore, and Veolia Transportation) and served to deepen relationships with perennial partners, including the Windup Space and MICA.

RECORD-BREAKING YEAR FOR Friends of the Festival Friends of the Festival membership sales nearly doubled in 2014, with an 84% jump over 2013’s sales figures. Implementing a new sales strategy throughout the new campus, we anticipate that this increased participation in the annual individual membership program will result in increased grassroots involvement as the festival continues to grow.

The MFF Tent Village -- the heart of our annual festival -- was busier than ever with its relocation to North Avenue at the 2014 festival. Photo by Anastasia Tantaros.

Patrons await a Veolia Shuttle, one of the new services added for MFF 2014, outside one the UB Business Center. Photo by Ira Silverberg.

MFF Director Jed Dietz offers campus directions to THOU WAS MILD AND LOVELY director Josephine Decker. Photo by Anastasia Tantaros.

FILMS AND EVENTS OPENING NIGHT SHORTS Opening Night of MFF 2014, devoted as always to celebrating the best short films of the year, were hosted by noted filmmakers Alex Ross Perry (LISTEN UP PHILIP, THE COLOR WHEEL) and Martha Shane (AFTER TILLER). Sponsored by the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, the MFF Opening Night Shorts program is one of the only established film festival opening nights devoted to shorts programming. Eight shorts filmmakers

were featured in the program, and for the first time in MFF history, we were able to present an international short with the director present: the Iranian-made MORE THAN TWO HOURS was accompanied by director Ali Asgari and screenwriter Farnoosh Samadi.

CLOSING NIGHT: LITTLE ACCIDENTS Closing Night is always a special occasion, and this year’s offering was no exception: director Sarah Colangelo’s LITTLE ACCIDENTS, a recipient of our prestigious Maryland Filmmakers Fellowship award,

played to an energized audience at the MICA Brown Center as the festival wound to close. The Maryland Filmmakers Fellowship is run in conjunction with the Sundance Labs, and is awarded each year to a promising film script. The award provides $10,000 towards development of the film, and a screening in Maryland once the film has been completed. Previous winners have included Rodrigo Garcia (THINGS YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT HER), Darci and Andrew Dosunmu (MOTHER OF GEORGE), Tanya Hamilton (NIGHT CATCHES US), and Andrew Okpeaha MacLean (ON THE ICE).

SEPTEMBER MFF worked with European cultural exchange program EUNIC to bring acclaimed Greek director Penny Panayoropoulou to Baltimore from her home in Athens to host two screenings of her new feature film, SEPTEMBER.

The filmmakers and hosts of the annual MFF Opening Night Shorts program take the stage at MICA Brown Center for a Q&A. Photo by Jason Putsche.

Sara Colangelo (center) introduces her closing night screening of LITTLE ACCIDENTS with producer Jason Berman (left) and MFF director Jed Dietz. Photo by Jason Putsche.

MFF Programming Administrator Scott Braid poses for a rare photo opportunity with Greek director Penny Panayoropoulou in the MFF 2014 Tent Village. Photo by Adrian Himes.

SPECIAL SCREENINGS We offered four outdoor screenings in the Tent Village during MFF 2014, including TROUBLE AND THE SHADOWY DEATHBLOW, a comedy short directed by VEEP producer Stephanie Laing and starring Tony Hale (ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, VEEP); Robin Bell’s rock documentary POSITIVE FORCE: MORE THAN A WITNESS; and WELCOME TO DEATHFEST, Tom Grahsler & Alicia Lozano’s profile of Baltimore’s long-running heavy music festival. On Friday night, more than 100 audience members poured into the tent village for Nicholas Kovacic’s history of Baltmore beer brewing BREWMORE | BALTIMORE. The screening included beer sampling from several local breweries,

including MFF Sponsor Union Craft Brewing.

PING PONG SUMMER Michael Tully (SEPTIEN) returned to MFF with his highly anticipated Ocean City-based comedy PING PONG SUMMER, starring Susan Sarandon, Lea Thompson, and Amy Sedaris. Adding to the excitement, Tully arranged to display some of classic cars featured in his 1980’s period piece for the capacity crowd. (Extra Fun Fact: When Tully returned to Baltimore for the June premiere of PING PONG SUMMER, MFF helped arrange for him to throw out the first pitch at an Orioles game!)

SKUNK Hot off a run of her short SKUNK as part our Dramatic Shorts program, MFF Alum Annie Silverstein traveled to the Cannes Film Festival, where her film was awarded first prize by the Cinéfondation Selection committee, headed by Abbas Kiarostami. Silverstein’s previous shorts SPARK and NIGHT AT THE DANCE were programmed by MFF in 2012 and 2013. Her Cannes prize comes with a cash award of €15,000 and the guarantee that her first feature film will be presented at Cannes.

The tent village transformed into a full-house screening venue for outdoor screenings, including this screening of Nicholas Kovacic's BREWMORE | BALTIMORE. Photo by Ira Silverberg.

An eager audience fills the MICA Brown Center for the opening night of Michael Tully's Ocean City-based period comedy PING PONG SUMMER. Photo by Danielle Damico.

SKUNK director Annie Silverstein (right) poses with cast and crew at MFF 2014 before heading to win her prize at Cannes. Photo courtesy of the filmmaker.

LIQUID SKY Slava Tsukerman’s LIQUID SKY was the highest-grossing independent film of 1983, and the film’s singular reputation as a cult favorite has continued to grow. Tsukerman, along with MFF alum Clay Liford (WUSS, MY MOM SMOKES WEED) hosted a special screening of the film from the director’s own 35mm print. JOHN WATERS: ABUSE OF WEAKNESS Since MFF launched in 1999,

board member John Waters has selected a film to present and host during the festival, and our audiences are always excited to meet his challenge. Waters’ selection for 2014 was the newest film from esteemed French director, Catherine Breillat, ABUSE OF WEAKNESS; a suspenseful, loosely- autobiographical narrative of a filmmaker struggling with an opportunistic con man as she recovers from a stroke. MATMOS: BARBARELLA DJ SPOOKY: PUTNEY SWOPE Each year, MFF presents films hosted by notable figures outside of the film world, including Frank Bruni of the New York Times, Olympian Dorothy Hamill, BSO Conductor Marin Alsop, rock musicians Ian MacKaye and Bill Callahan, and authors Harvey Pekar and Laura Lippman. 2014 provided us pillars from the world of experimental music – the Baltimore-based electronic music duo Matmos, who presented a 35mm print of the sci-fi cult classic BARBARELLA and famed DJ and visual artist Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) who presented the counter-culture

classic PUTNEY SWOPE, a film so wildly popular in Baltimore upon its original release that it ran in local theaters for many consecutive years. CALL GIRL OF CTHULHU This highly-anticipated horror/comedy feature from Baltimore-based director Chris LaMartina celebrated the tight-knit arts and filmmaking community of Baltimore, premiering to packed houses in the Langsdale Auditorium at University of Baltimore, the very same theater in which John Waters first presented PINK FLAMINGOS 40 years previously.

John Waters introduces his MFF 2014 selection, Catherine Breillat's ABUSE OF WEAKNESS. Photo by Josh Sisk.

Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt of Matmos introduce their 35mm screening of BARBARELLA during MFF 2014. Photo by Josh Sisk.

MFF alum Clay Liford and legendary director Slava Tsukerman host a Q&A after a screening of the cult classic LIQUID SKY. Photo by Michael Faulkner.

The cast and crew of CALL GIRL OF CTHULHU gather at the premiere screening. Photo by Casie Smith.

FILMMAKERS FILMMAKERS TAKING CHARGE - A CONFERENCE FOR FILMMAKERS “The festival’s filmmakers’ conference brings together a large group of those involved in independent filmmaking—including directors, producers, distributors, exhibitors, programmers, publicists, performers, and even critics—for a gently guided but basically freewheeling discussion of the state of the art and the business that’s closed to the public and off the record.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker 15 May 2013 MFF alums and Opening Night Shorts hosts Alex Ross Perry (LISTEN UP PHILIP, THE COLOR WHEEL) and Martha Shane (AFTER TILLER) were invited to develop and host the fifth edition of Filmmakers Taking Charge, our annual invitational for filmmakers and film industry guests to discuss topics specifically pertinent to emerging filmmakers and exhibitors. This edition of Filmmakers Taking Charge advanced the dialogue and furthered our goal of making Maryland Film Festival a focal point for independent filmmakers to develop their skills and careers, sharing experiences in an atmosphere of autonomy and self-direction. Filmmakers Taking Charge was made accessible only to MFF 2014 filmmakers and by invitation to selected producers, critics, independent theater owners, and exhibitioners. More than 70 people attended, includingRichard Brody (The New Yorker) Cristina Cacioppo (Alamo Drafthouse NYC) Josephine Decker (THOU WAST MILD AND LOVELY) Cheryl Dunn (EVERYBODY STREET) Matt Grady (FACTORY 25) Jim Healy (Univ. of Wisconsin Cinemateque) Ann Hornaday (Washington Post) Kate Hurwitz (Cinetic) Eric Hynes (New York Times) Eric Kohn (Indiewire) Jason Ishakawa (The Film Sales Company) Michael Keegan (Roxie Theater) Adam Kersh (Brigade Marketing)

Erich Kohn (Indiewire) Toby Leonard (Belcourt Theatre) Lawrence Michael Levine (WILD CANARIES) Darius Clark Monroe (EVOLUTION OF A CRIMINAL) Jake Perlin (Artists Public Domain) Nick Pinkerton (ArtForum) Bryan Storkel (FIGHT CHURCH) Graham Swindoll (Cinema Guild) Sophia Takal (WILD CANARIES) Michael Tully (PING PONG SUMMER) Amanda Wilder (APPROACHING THE ELEPHANT) Brett Weiner (VERBATIM)

Visiting filmmakers gather for a group shot at the MFF Pixilated Photobooth during the 2014 closing night party, continuing to help build MFF's reputation as a festival for independent filmmakers to gather in a celebration of their craft.

COMMUNITY VOLUNTEERS More than 400 volunteers helped make MFF 2014 a success. This was the largest volunteer staff in MFF history, with nearly 200 new community members stepping up to help for the first time; all together volunteers devoted close to 4000 hours of their time to the film festival.

STUDENT OUTREACH MFF enjoyed more student participation than ever during the 2014 festival, with students from more than a dozen schools across the city and county participating. A special students-only roundtable discussion

hosted by festival director Jed Dietz and LITTLE ACCIDENTS director (and Maryland Filmmakers Fellowship winner) Sara Colangelo. Among the schools participating in MFF 2014 were Park School, Baltimore School for the Arts, Stevenson University, MICA, Johns Hopkins and Towson University.

A dedicated volunteer pours wine for patrons during one of several happy hour events in the MFF 2014 Tent VIllage. Photo by Anastasia Tantaros.

Box Office volunteers at the MICA Brown Center pause for a photo op. MFF 2014 attracted more volunteers -- many of them for the first time -- in our 16 year history. Photo by Ira Silverberg.