IndieWorks

Summer 2022 Update

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It’s been a while! Here’s a bit about our 2022.

  • Both Christina & Kelsey, our CongestedCat team leaders, moved to the Hudson Valley this year! Christina & her husband Justin are in Ulster County. Kelsey & Dani are in Dutchess County (and they’re having a baby this fall!). We’re all still just a train ride away from the rest of the team in NYC and plan to continue supporting & shooting in the City, but we’re also excited to start building community and making movies Upstate! We went to our first local event last week, a panel on the state of Film and TV Production in the Hudson Valley.

  • We struggled with sticking to our weekly writing group through the second half of 2020 and 2021, but we’ve been going strong so far this year by committing to meeting at least every other week even if only one person has new pages or pitches. This approach keeps the pressure light while still encouraging creativity and collaboration amongst us.

  • We’ve all continued revising existing projects but most notably on the new side:

    • Kelsey wrote a queer holiday romcom!

    • Christina & Kelsey are writing a queer horror feature together!

      • Christina’s also in early stages of development for her next feature as writer/director, Silent Night, a horror you’ve surely heard her mention in past years. You can hear a bit about the status of that in the mid-year check-in episode of her podcast.

  • IndieWorks is still up in the air but not gone forever. The fact remains that the pandemic isn’t over and indoor gatherings continue to be risky. And with Christina, Kelsey, and Dani now out of the City, the future of IndieWorks does feel even more unclear than the last two years. But we all love screening films and building community, and it’s something we aspire to get back to when it feels feasible from a safety and bandwidth perspective. Aside from the timeline, all things we said in our blog post last year still stand. We’ve discussed what it could look like bringing IndieWorks back into Manhattan (instead of Queens) with a new venue near Penn Station; we’ve discussed what it could look like moving to a venue Upstate instead and shifting the focus of the series a bit; and we’ve discussed doing both in various combinations to support filmmakers and reach audiences in various ways. We’re intrigued by all the prospects, but nothing can really be decided and acted on until the pandemic is truly under control - which unfortunately doesn’t seem like it’s going to be anytime soon. In the meantime though, we look forward to watching what all our peers in NY are working on and supporting in ways that we’re able to from afar.

CongestedCat's 2020 Goals

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After spending our first writing group of 2020 listing our collective goals as a team for the year, we realized that we’d like to share them publicly with our community. As a company committed to transparency about our creative process and making sure we take every step intentionally & strategically, we thought it’d be helpful to us to have the accountability of our peers and to encourage them to maybe share some creative goals of their own. Our list is ambitious, and we plan to tackle it with all the effort and optimism we’ve got. Here’s to a productive and inspiring year ahead!

Production Goals

  • Attend festivals for “Affliction,” “Shadows,” and “Game Brunch” with the intention of collecting audience emails and/or meeting producers with higher access to capital for our next big project.

    • We also have cultural impact intentions with “Affliction,” to spark nuanced conversation around consent. We plan to have a short but robust festival run across ideally less-progressive cities with strong local community turnout in order to engage people and build momentum for a free online release via press that'll grant us a larger platform specifically before the general election.

  • Produce at least one new short to come out of our weekly writing group.

  • By the end of the year, be on the road to production of another feature film.

    • finish feature film script

    • feedback from potential talent

    • attach a producer

IndieWorks Goals

  • Secure a fiscal sponsor so that we can apply for the Community Arts grant from Queens Council on the Arts at the end of the year in order to rent a Queens theater for Year 8 Best of Fest and offer stipends to our volunteer staff through 2021.

  • Build enough momentum and local awareness in Sunnyside so that we can get back to our previous minimum attendance of 45 people each month, with 1/4 of the audience not affiliated with a specific film of the evening. We want to regain living by our motto, “Discover Shorts. Find an Audience. Build the Community,” on a regular basis in our new home.

IndieWorks' New Home!

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After deciding to leave our IndieWorks venue of 3 years back in May, we spent the last 3 months testing out different spaces. The historic Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side was a nice experience at our July screening, but ultimately not suitable for our longterm needs. The biggest factor being that we'd have a hard out of 9:15pm, which would mean rushing through our evenings and limiting the time we spend on the thing that makes us us, our thoughtful and thorough Q&A approach. It's possible we'll continue a collaboration with the venue in the future; but for IndieWorks’ monthly screenings, the one true home moving forward will be Sanger Hall in Sunnyside. We tested it out this month and the screening was a success!

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We were initially hesitant to go deeper into Queens beyond LIC, since that was already a big move out of originally being in the Lower East Side for 3 years at The People Lounge. But collaborating with this new space feels like the right move. After searching all over Manhattan, we came across this venue in our own backyard kind of by accident. When we reached out to the owners about what we do at IndieWorks, they said that they’ve been wanting to reach & support filmmakers with their space and offer something movie-oriented to their patrons but they hadn't been able to get something going regularly. It was like kismet! And the space is really what we’ve been looking for. We'll have the privacy and control over the room that we were lacking in the past, while still having a bar (with food now) and our non-traditional viewing space that encourages conversational Q&As and allows attendees to mingle & make connections throughout the night. It’s not as large as past spaces but it seats 60 comfortably, which works well for our programming each month (we’ll have a separate venue for our annual Best of Fest screenings). Also, it feels quite fitting considering most of the team behind our series now lives in Queens and, actually, our very first trial run screening back in June 2013 was at a little hole in the wall spot in Woodside. So it's kind of like we're finally coming back home!

Now, we do understand that this may be a bit of a longer commute for some of our regulars in other boroughs. We hope and believe that the ways we'll be able to enhance the evening will make up for it. For the commute though, here are some details to make note of: it's a 2 minute walk from the 7 train at 46th St (15 minutes from Grand Central), it's 2 stops away from G & E transfers at Court Square, and 3 stops away from W & Q transfers at Queensboro Plaza. Plus, the Q32 and Q61 buses are right around the corner (with all the transfers your heart could desire at the Jackson Heights hub a few stops deeper into Queens). So, while not as centrally located for the City as a whole as our last 2 homes were, it's not a bad ride into a great neighborhood -- with the perks of a cute cafe (with vegan-friendly desserts) next door, convenient shops on the block, and the ability for us to make IndieWorks stronger moving forward!

IndieWorks: Best of Fest Year 6 Recap

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INDIEWORKS: BEST OF FEST

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Last Tuesday was a special night at IndieWorks! We celebrated the conclusion of our 6th year! Between watching the 9 fantastic films, mingling with the talented filmmakers, and engaging with the wonderful audience, we had a ton of fun! In total, we had over 70 people in attendance and it was clear the crowd enjoyed the lineup. We hope new connections were made! There was, unfortunately, some bar noise towards the end of the night, but thankfully it didn’t disrupt the films as a whole. Please know that we’re addressing this behind the scenes and will be making an announcement regarding our venue very soon!

THANK YOU. 

To all of the incredible people involved in this community who submit their work, attend our monthly series, follow our content, and spread the word of anything IndieWorks... we truly thank you. It's been another great year of innovative, local films and filmmakers.

Six years ago, Christina decided she wanted to create a monthly film series for local independent filmmakers to showcase and discuss their work with an audience and connect with their (our) peers in a friendly, supportive, engaging and still encouragingly competitive environment. Sure enough, we made it happen and it has grown into something so wonderful, more so than we could have imagined over the past six years. It's been a real passion project from our team, and we hope it has stayed true to the ideals of helping independent filmmakers find an audience and build a network & community of likeminded, productive & talented individuals. Thank you all for being part of it! We're honored to screen & support your work! 

The full lineup & nominations can be found in our previous post.  

THE AWARDS GO TO...

AUDIENCE CHOICE: "Adult" (Tatienne Hendricks-Tellefsen & Cynthia Silver) - Wins $50 towards a Seed&Spark campaign, a free one-year subscription to Seed&Spark’s streaming platform, and script coverage from the CongestedCat team of one future short screenplay.

BEST EDITING: "Goodbye Old Friend" (Rafael De Leon Jr) - Wins $50 towards a Seed&Spark campaign, a free one-year subscription to Seed&Spark’s streaming platform, and script coverage from the CongestedCat team of one future short screenplay.

BEST ENSEMBLE: "Her Being Home" (Ellie Gravitte) - Wins $50 towards a Seed&Spark campaign, a free one-year subscription to Seed&Spark’s streaming platform, and script coverage from the CongestedCat team of one future short screenplay.

BEST WRITER/DIRECTOR: "AMYDEE" (Amy DePaola - Wins $50 towards a Seed&Spark campaign, a free one-year subscription to Seed&Spark’s streaming platform, and script coverage from the CongestedCat team of one future short screenplay.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY (Adam Volerich) & GOLDEN WHISKERS (BEST OF FEST): "We Were Kids" (Adam Taylor (Pictured: Marquis Wood)) - Wins (collectively) $250 towards a Seed&Spark campaign, a free one-year subscription to Seed&Spark’s streaming platform, a 1TB G-drive, an hour production, post-production, or marketing phone consultation from 4milecircus., script coverage from the CongestedCat team of two future short screenplays, and a day of social media promotion from the CongestedCat team.

See all the fun we had and testimonials from the filmmakers below! 

THAT'S A WRAP!

Check out the recaps from ALL 10 SCREENINGS of Year 6 of IndieWorks. 

As we take next month as an opportunity to go out and make things, we hope you will too. Our 7th Year of IndieWorks kicks off in June on the 11th, with our Pride-themed screening -- so keep in touch & stay up to date through our social media accounts. We want to see YOU at the next screening!

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Be sure to submit your films on our IndieWork page, and watch episodes of our Insider Series with the monthly Winners from all 6 years to get more insight into their screened films & upcoming work. Also, films that are available for free online from ALL 6 years are watchable on our Past Films page.