A Ready-Made Community

Picture this: You're an aspiring filmmaker from a foreign country visiting Austin for the first time. Maybe you speak the language, maybe you don't. Possibly you've got some contacts, possibly not. It's intimidating, maybe, but you're buoyed by the fact that you know what you want to do and why you're here. The only problem is, now that you are here, you aren't so sure where exactly it is you ought to go. That oversized backpack slung over your shoulder, the one packed to bursting with your secondhand Mac, your thirdhand Sony HVR HD1000, and your (thankfully) new travel toothbrush, is getting mighty heavy and, damn, it's hot out.

Don't freak. You're in Austin and you're in luck, thanks to the Austin School of Film's Filmmakers' Connection program (www.austinfilmschool.org/filmmakers-connection), an "international cinema network" that aims to serve as an all-purpose hub for new arrivals to Cinema City. The program, in operation for two years now, allows newcomers, transient or otherwise, the chance to intern and to utilize the school's cameras, computers, and gear. It's even gone so far as to find places for people to stay while they're in town. Think of it as a filmmaker's hostel minus the creepy Eli Roth-isms.

As ASoF co-Founder and Executive Director Anne Kelley rightly notes, "I started recognizing that there were people coming to Austin from other countries and just dropping by [the ASoF offices]. We'd talk to them, tell them where we thought they should go and what we thought they should do, and eventually I said, 'You know, maybe we should have more for them to do right here. Maybe we could make this the destination.'"

And so it is. To date, ASoF's Filmmakers' Connection has, purely by word of mouth, hosted and helped aspiring filmmakers from Turkey, Mexico, Portugal, Peru, Chile, Belgium, Hungary, France, the UK, Canada, and, in the case of the teen-aged Mateo Ybarra, Switzerland.

"A couple of years ago I received a desperate call from a parent in Geneva who said, 'My son is in Austin where he's been interning at Troublemaker Studios and his internship ran out earlier than we thought. He's 16, we're trying to let him stay in Austin, can he do something with you guys?'" Kelly explains. "So we went and picked him up, found him a place to stay, and had him shoot some shorts, participate in some classes, and then help other kids. As soon as we saw what level he was working at we thought, 'Forget about Troublemaker, intern for us.'"

Reached via email at his home back in Switzerland, Ybarra has nothing but praise for the Filmmakers' Connection program: "At ASoF, the fact that really impressed me was the motivation of the people there. How they all were implicated in filmmaking. The contact is easy and people were really pleased to help you in your projects. So, the whole approach to [making movies in Austin] is kind of different from Switzerland, where it is really more difficult to find people ready to help you or [people who have] the knowledge in filmmaking. In Switzerland, you have to work harder by yourself, and there is less possibility of [the exchange of ideas]."

That exchange of ideas goes to the core of what Kelley believes the Filmmakers' Connection program should be about. In a very real way, the program is an echo of the old punk-rock, DIY ethos that sent thousands of studded and Mohawked kids on tour in the 1980s – long before the Internet made touring considerably less stressful – to faraway places where, often as not, they were lucky to find a sympathetic and like-minded couch to kip down overnight, much less someone who spoke their language. Film and music have never been particularly beholden to borders; art is stateless, an argot that, by definition, artists everywhere understand.

Kelley, an ex-punk-rock-band manager herself, concurs. "We aim to be a place where filmmakers or artists who may be thinking about coming to Austin can come to do research, get an internship, and really just have a base to work from and a definite thing to do. We can tell them where to go and show them the ropes here in Austin, as opposed to them just staying in a hotel and being a tourist. We help them enmesh themselves in this world that we know already."