Pulling back the curtain

How film festivals decide what's in, what's out, what's just too hot.

Shooting a movie in July based on a Stephen King story that takes place in a blizzard was out. Finding the money for special effects in a low-budget movie for a King character covered in eyeballs — that was out, too.

Determined to make a film through the famous author's program for upand-coming filmmakers, Corey Norman kept reading.

He stopped at "Suffer the Little Children."

In the 1970s short story, a teacher kills her students. Maybe they're monsters. Maybe she's crazy.

"I've read a lot of King work. This was the first time I finished a story and I had to put the book down, 'Man, that was intense,'" said Norman, 35, of South Portland, who founded Bonfire Films with his wife, Haley, in 2009. "I knew right then that was the film we were going to do. It's very taboo, and very risky, and that's the kind of movies we like to make."

Some crew members were leery, given the topic. Some schools even more so.

"Finding a location was extremely difficult," he said. "Most schools, we got as far as the subject matter and we got hung up on."

Seventeen film festivals later, his 25-minute film has racked up awards and nominations including winning best short at the HorrorHound Film Festival and best director in the Horror Society Awards.

Lewiston-Auburn's Emerge Film Festival gave the film one of its coveted 40 slots — less than 2 percent of submissions are let in — which means "Suffer the Little Children" will make its Maine debut on April 30.

But only after discussion among organizers about whether or not to show it.

"There was a diversity of opinions, just like with many of our submissions, but Corey is an important Maine filmmaker and his work has a following here and around the country," said programming manager Katie Greenlaw. "We’ve heard from several people who say they are excited to see his latest work here in Maine."

It's a question most film festivals have to wrestle with: keep a potentially controversial film in or leave it out?

Last month, Robert DeNiro and organizers of the Tribeca Film Festival accepted, then dropped, a documentary that claims there's a link between vaccinations and autism.

In choosing not to show "Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Conspiracy," DeNiro was quoted as saying he'd hoped the film would encourage conversation around a "deeply personal issue." His son has autism.

"The Festival doesn't seek to avoid or shy away from controversy," DeNiro said in a statement to Rolling Stone magazine. "However, we have concerns with certain things in this film that we feel prevent us from presenting it."

Emerge doesn't have any fast and firm guidelines about content; it's more nuanced than that, Greenlaw said. Judges weigh factors such as story line, character development and technical quality.

Norman's is the first film in the festival's three-year history to prompt a programming warning that all films might not be suitable for all ages.

"I think that conversations will naturally happen after seeing a film like this," said James Harmon, a Sanford High School teacher and head of the Sanford International Film Festival, who's had experience making that in-or-out call.

He's seen Norman's "Suffer" and called it amazing.

"I imagine there's going to be chatter about it, especially around here, since we filmed it here," Harmon said.

Making the call

Festival entries typically aren't rated and don't have to worry about pulling their weight commercially, which is really freeing when it comes to organizing a lineup, said Ken Eisen, director of programming for the 18-year-old Maine International Film Festival in Waterville.

"The one wonderful thing about a film festival is that you have an audience looking to try new things and be receptive to things they have not heard of before," Eisen said. "You're only showing a film once or twice at a film festival, so it's there, it's interesting, it's exciting, or not, and then it's gone."

He also doesn't use content guidelines, saying that would be too "strangling to artistic discourse and to artistic expression."

"I've certainly shown movies that have had more explicit sexual content than some people might be comfortable with, or more violent content than some people might be comfortable with, but you just warn the audience, 'Hey, if you don't want to see this, don't come,'" Eisen said. "I think every festival programmer just has to make their own decisions as to what they're comfortable with and what they're not. I don't think I would not show a film automatically because it dealt with kids being killed; obviously that's something that can happen in the world," he said. "I think it's a question of how that's represented."

Ben Fowlie, founder and executive director of the 12-year-old, all-documentary Camden International Film Festival, said he weighs first and foremost whether showing a film could do harm. From there, he shoots for balance.

"You're taking your audience on a journey and you really have to make sure your programming is multifaceted and bringing in multiple perspectives," Fowlie said. "If we fundamentally don't believe in something, that wouldn't be a reason not to screen the work."

In the Tribeca case, maybe "Vaxxed" could have been screened with proceeds going to a children's health care organization, or maybe the screening could have been followed by a panel of experts pulled together to discuss or debunk it, he said.

Having not seen it himself, Fowlie said, it's tough to say.

"I think for us, we also have an obligation to create a platform for conversations around issues that are taboo or challenging, and film is a great way to do that because it does bring people together," he said.

Harmon made a difficult call like that last year.

His Sanford film festival was born after the Lewiston Auburn Film Festival abruptly fell apart in 2014 with its co-founder's arrest. Harmon invited filmmakers to show down there instead. It's since grown to as many as 60 movies over five days in May.

In 2015, he passed on a shaken-baby syndrome documentary specifically because of its content.

"I knew people in the area (who) had a personal connection to the topic, colleagues of mine, that I could imagine causing kind of a controversy," Harmon said. "As a festival director, it was kind of like a personal choice: Am I interested in opening this box? Is it the best thing for my community? Probably not. It didn't hurt that we had thousands of other selections to choose from."

Greenlaw said Emerge received more than 2,300 submissions and reached out to another 25 to 30 filmmakers to encourage them to submit. It did a massive cull from there, selecting films that "deliver the best festival experience possible for our audience."

"Our festival runs for three days and three nights across five film venues, so that gives us a finite number of screening hours available," she said.

Organizers are expecting more than 700 attendees over the April 28-May 1 event, its biggest turnout yet.

In addition to Norman and his Bonfire Film's reputation, "Suffer the Little Children"'s tie to Maine's Stephen King was another factor in deciding to screen it, Greenlaw said.

That tie was why Norman wanted to make it.

'Well Corey...'

Norman shot it through King's Dollar Babies program. For $1, the horror author grants filmmakers rights to shoot a movie based on one of his works, with the caveat that they can't make money on it — festival screenings only, no DVDs — and those rights expire after a year.

"Haley and I believe showing your work at festivals and spreading the gospel that is Bonfire Films is extremely important," Norman said. "That was kind of the first hope. The other was really selfish; I just wanted to make a Stephen King film and I wanted people to see it."

They raised nearly $5,700 on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo and added $3,000 of their own for the production. (The couple has spent nearly $5,000 since, traveling to festivals around the country to support it.)

"(The film's reception has) been a major worry right from the beginning," Norman said. "At the same time, in our work, we kind of trespass into the taboo quite a bit. We did a film for a competition called 'Mother' (in 2013) where we (via a mother character) kill a little girl with a pillow in real time, which was kind of our response to Casey Anthony being on the cover of every magazine we saw. It was there. We knew we were going to ruffle a lot of feathers."

Harmon reached out when he heard Norman was looking for a location. He teaches a summer film course to Sanford high-schoolers.

"Giving them a chance to interact with this professional crew I thought was a pretty golden opportunity," he said. Administrators were supportive, "with the idea it's not taking place in Sanford; it's taking place in Castle Rock Elementary."

Norman got access. Students got a view behind the scenes and his advice on their own summer flick, the hardly-light-itself "Besties," about an unbalanced girl plotting to kill her best friend.

Norman filmed over four long days using 87 child actors. In the pivotal classroom scene at the end, they ranged in age from 10 to 13, and parents were in the room, off-camera.

"We used a really cool prop gun that was filled with CO2 fluid so it gave you that realistic blow-back, but it was simply a prop," Norman said. "All the effects we chose to do digitally, that way it would be very safe for the children. I'm not going to put squib packs with small live explosives on young kids."

He said he tried to keep the mood light on set.

"When Danny Lloyd was filming for 'The Shining,' never once did he feel afraid because it was all fun and games, and that's kind of how we wanted to treat our actors, as well, so that they would come away from this knowing it was all make-believe. It came out as a good experience rather than a traumatizing one," Norman said.

What he hopes viewers take away: "In our society, one of my biggest problems, we tend to turn people that do bad things into celebrities. We turn serial killers into celebrities. It's very sickening to me. So within our work, I like to put people into these situations where they have to experience these events firsthand and maybe next time they see one of these headlines on the Internet or on the newsstands, they'll really think about what it means, and then maybe take some of the glamour that comes with that fame away."

"Suffer the Little Children" will screen only twice in Maine, at Emerge and then at the Sanford International Film Festival.

In the film's 17 out-of-state screenings so far, Norman has noticed audiences go very quiet from the start. There's dread early on. They know the worst is coming.

"So far, most of our screenings have been on the horror circuit, so for a lot of them we got, 'Man, that's twisted,'" Norman said. "We just screened at Boston Underground Film Festival. A friend of mine that's a movie critic was sitting a row behind me. As soon as it finished, the first thing he said was, 'Well, Corey, you're never baby-sitting my children.'"

Original story found at Lewiston Sun Journal.