I was honored to be on the jury – alongside the talented Diana Peralta and Molly Veh – to select the recipient of Indie Memphis’ Women’s Short Film Grant. The criteria for this grant was pretty strict: You had to live in Memphis (or the surrounding counties), and you had to complete your projected film within 120 days of receiving the grant. The grant is “only” $5,000, but you can do a lot with 5k, particularly in Memphis. We received 31 applications, all of which included an in-depth pitch, a line-by-line budget readout, look books on occasion, and links to any previous work.
Hocking’s script – Hot Singles – (a title steeped in irony once you read the script) made all three of us jurors want to see the finished movie. That’s what we all said in our Zoom deliberation: “I so want to see this movie.” “I can’t wait to see how she does this.” “I just want to see this!”
There were many worthy applicants, but hers stood out, mainly because the three of us basically turned into potential audience members, excited and eager to see the finished product. That didn’t happen with many of the scripts. Our reaction was based firstly on the script itself, which was a very well-written and confident script. As I put in my notes: “Reading the script was a pleasure. It leapt off the page, so much so that I could practically see the finished film already.” Plus: there were no grammatical/spelling errors. Writers, this stuff matters. It’s fine if spelling is not your strong suit, but you should give your script to at least a couple of outside eyes – or a copyeditor – before you submit it anywhere.)
We also had the reaction we did to the script because of Hocking’s previous work sample, a short film she directed called The Last Fan. It gave us confidence that she could handle the challenges of her submitted script (Hot Singles takes place in a dystopian-future, which seems like it would be hard to pull off with just $5k. But The Last Fan was also a dystopian-future tale and they shot it for under $400 in a Memphis scrap yard in Memphis and it was totally believable.
Diana, Molly and I come from very different backgrounds, which I think made us very effective as a deliberating team. (You can check out all of our bios at the link above.) Diana is a filmmaker, Molly is a storyteller by trade, who also works at Milwaukee Film as the Artist Services manager. I think this diversity of experience really helped us when we sat down to discuss all of these very worthy applicants. So many talented people! Even though there can only be one winner, I am ROOTING for so many of these people.
Here is Laura Hocking’s short film The Last Fan. Enjoy. I think it’s terrific.
THE LAST FAN from oddly buoyant productions on Vimeo.
Once more for the cheap seats: Congratulations to Laura Jean Hocking, recipient of the Indie Memphis Women’s Short Film Grant. I can’t wait to see Hot Singles!
