Tasmania based female-centric film fest launches call for submissions.
Lurking within the darkest corners of Tasmania, a gaggle of movie-minded cineastes are currently plotting and planning for the 2016 Stranger With My Face International Film Festival, an edgy horror fest that focuses primarily on films made by emerging female artists. SWMF derives its name from the novel by young adult author Lois Duncan and is the brainchild of Australian filmmakers Briony Kidd and Rebecca Thomson.
And though the SWMF team skipped this year, they’re back with a bloody vengeance and grim purpose; today, they just announced their first call for submissions. The call is open, with both feature length and short films made after January 1, 2015 eligible for consideration. The festival takes a broad approach to horror, with dark fantasy, Gothic melodrama, horror comedy, dystopian sci-fi, animation, documentary and experimental hybrids all qualifying for the selective festival lineup.
There’s a great awareness right now that women are underrepresented in the film industry and audiences are hungry for female-driven stories, says Festival Director Kidd. Combine that with the innovation characteristic of the indie horror scene currently, and were seeing an explosion of female genre talent that makes Stranger With My Face more relevant than ever.
A new addition to the festival team this year is longtime genre film programmer and writer Kier-La Janisse, author of the film memoir, HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN. Janisse is serving a residency with Stranger With My Face until July 2016. Stranger With My Face is a brilliantly-curated festival and I wanted to be a part of the enormous potential I saw here, says Janisse. With so many gutsy female-centric genre films in recent years, this is a very exciting place to be.
For submission guidelines and more festival info visit the official SWMF site.
