Dennis

Avoid The Great Lakes Film Festival

"Avoid The Great Lakes Film Festival"
By Kevin Kölsch & Dennis Widmyer

The Great Lakes International Film Festival is now accepting entries for their 2008 festival and I hope that any filmmakers or screenwriters planning to enter stumble upon this article before spending their hard earned money on the submission fee. Trust me, we wish there had been an article like this last year when we were filling out our entrance form. The whole thing was a waste of money and a big headache to boot…and we were the screenplay competition winners.

That’s right, folks, just last year, the most recent festival they had, The Great Lakes International Film Festival did not grant their screenplay winners their award and prize money, yet Kelly Hecker and Steve Opsanic are still taking $55 from screenwriters for this year’s competition. I know that might not seem like the biggest deal in the world since there are probably more shady film festivals than legit ones. We also think that winning filmmakers probably cut their losses when they realize the fest they’ve gotten into and then hopefully won, is a bit of a half-assed operation and accept that they are never going to see their money. But this is not the case with The Great Lakes Film Festival. This is a festival that we researched and could not find any negative reviews of. A fest that boasts on their home page that they are one of the top 100 film festivals in the world! And we did not just write off our $500 prize money, our award plaque, and most importantly, the networking you get from festivals and industry reads and contacts they promise… after we failed to receive any of it. We spent eight months being stalled with constant excuses as to why they could not mail us the check that was supposedly already cut and that would have been handed to us had we attended the ceremony in person.

You’d think that if you ran a film festival and could not afford to pay your winners that you’d realize your venture was not proving profitable and cease to organize future fests, maybe even feeling concerned about the winners who got shafted by the unsuccessful festival. Those hopeful filmmakers who upheld their end of the bargain by paying the submission fee, but that you never paid their due award, thus breaching your end of the contract as stated by the rules and regulations cited on your own festivals website. Yet not only does The Great Lakes Film Festival continue on, hoping that this year they will get a sufficient amount of entries and festival attendees, but as an added slap in the face, on the page calling for submission, there is a link for past winners, giving the festival a sense of legitimate history.

See potential entrants… you can win. People have won before. Just not all of them have been paid.

This issue of our script being listed as a winner on their webpage brings to mind the first signs of trouble in this long, drawn out affair. For this is how we first learned we had won the script competition. A week after the festival was over, we assumed we had not won and went over to the webpage to see who had. But upon checking the site out, we were shocked to find that we were the winners! It was a little strange that no one had contacted us, yet we were happy anyway. At this point, we still assumed The Great Lakes Film Festival was a legit operation and if they listed us as their winners they had to come through with prize. Right? They couldn’t list us on their webpage and not follow through, could they?

Not only did they not follow through, but they didn’t answer any of our e-mails saying we saw we were the winners and asking them what the next step would be.

In fact it wasn’t until it was known that we were going to be in town attending The Eerie Horror Film Festival (another festival whose script competition we won), that Kelly Hecker, the festival director’s girlfriend and our ‘point of contact’ during this whole mess, wrote us to say our check would go out in the mail in a couple of weeks. Could this conveniently timed e-mail be an attempt to stop us from coming by in person? It sure seemed like it. Did it work? Nah, we decided to stop by anyway… save them the postage. It was then that we met (then) festival director, Steve Opsanic, who seemed very nervous about our surprise visit. He awkwardly double talked an excuse as to why he couldn’t give us our check in person. We gave him the benefit of the doubt and told him we’d be watching the mail for it.

It never came.

The next four months were spent sending e-mails to Kelly and Steve that either never got responded to or that Kelly finally answered, only to spin some crazy yarn about why they couldn’t send the check and that they needed until next week, the end of the month, after the New Year, etc. etc. etc. Through the majority of this, we continued to grant them the time they need, but with each excuse we lost a little patience.

During this phase, we did some research on Steve Opsanic, Kelly Hecker and the Great Lakes Film Festival. We learned that the Roadhouse Theater, where Steve works and runs the festival from, is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt – a fact that will later be confirmed by Kelly in an e-mail. It’s now that that terrible feeling of being a hopeless victim, scammed out of an entrance fee in order to help the festival director pull himself out of a hefty debt, starts to kick in. Did The Great Lakes Film Festival ever plan on paying their winners or were they just trying to raise money for their own purposes? We asked Kelly this and she assured us all the winners had been paid and that she would provide us with their contact info if we wanted to follow up. We said sure. But just like the notification that we won the contest… just like our award and the prize money… this info never came.

If we gave Kelly the benefit of the doubt and believed that all the other winners were paid, then what was the problem with us? Why was it so hard for us to receive our award? Ms. Hecker’s answer was that things with The Great Lakes Film Festival were not as black and white as we thought, since they had to deal with an ‘organization’ and were/are not authorized to cut checks themselves. I guess when you deal with an organization that deals in film festivals it could take five months to get them to cut a check for a winning contestant. Or was this just more talking in circles?

The bottom line is, it’s been a year now since we gave The Great Lakes Film Festival our $55 and we have not seen dollar one of our prize money and have long ago stopped even receiving excuses as to why it hasn’t come. I guess they are too busy collecting this year’s entrance fees.

Yet this raises an important question: If they have not paid their past winners, will they pay this year’s?

We advise you not to gamble your money and your trust on this question. Save your $55. After all, we’re contest winners who at this point, since the festivals not going to fulfill their end of the bargain, would be happy if they could just get their submission fee refunded.

May 21, 2008 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Add Comment