Orchestrating stories: St. Paul’s Film Score Fest challenges the norms of filmmaking
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On his website, St. Paul-based composer Charlie McCarron describes his film event as one of a kind.
“Film Score Fest started back in 2014,” McCarron told MPR News. He and co-founder Oanh Vu joined forces to develop a film festival with a particular challenge:
“We have a unique system for [Film Score Fest], where anyone can sign up, and they get paired up randomly with the composer ... the filmmakers have about three months to make a film. And then the composers have a month to make their scores.”
Anyone can submit to enter the film festival, as long as they meet certain criteria and deadlines. Each year has a theme. For 2023, 16 teams of filmmakers and composers created works based around “time.” All films have to be under five minutes.
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For the first time this year, Film Score Fest added another feature — scholarships to support the efforts of filmmakers of color entering the festival.
One of the recipients of the scholarship was documentarian Joua Lee Grande, whose experimental film this year explores the lives of women of color who discover in adulthood they are neurodivergent.
“There's been a huge conversation about women and the fact that girls are getting missed with ADHD diagnoses just because it's only been primarily boys that are studied. And then women discovering in adulthood,” Grande said, sharing she was recently diagnosed with ADHD. “And finally, things are clicking and making sense.”
Grande was paired with composer Olly Manning. For Manning, getting to compose the score for the film was deeply personal.
“I’m trans ... I was one of those people who people kept saying [to], ‘Oh, you don't have ADHD because of insert misconception about ADHD here.’” Manning said. “I'm also excited to see what other people were able to do with this year's theme, and what kind of stories I'm going to hear.”
While the festival provides the opportunity for small films to have an original score composed for them, it also provides the opportunity for filmmakers and composers to network.
“I found that composers tend to be solitary creatures sometimes,” McCarron said. “A lot of times, the people who meet each other during this become lifelong friends and collaborators.”
Manning adds that meeting other composers has become harder because of the pandemic.
“It was definitely more difficult for me ... I still haven't gone back to orchestra, I still haven't gone back to theater or any of that. So, this is kind of a baby step for me for like, reintroducing myself to the scene.”
As filmmaker Joua Lee Grande takes on bigger projects in the near future, she views events like Film Score Fest as a place to connect with other talents.
“I'm working on my first feature documentary where I'm actually looking for a composer. So events like this are going to be amazing because I'm going to be listening ... I see it as a really great opportunity to collaborate further in the future,” Grande said.
Film Score Fest will have the debut screenings of the 16 short films, accompanied by a live orchestra, on June 10 at the History Theatre in St. Paul.
