Alice Vol. 5 No. 2

INTERIOR
BIRMINGHAM —
FILM INDUSTRY
BY LEAH GOGGINS
A
few days before she was due on set in Naples, Florida,
Virginia Newcomb sat at one of the many tables in
Birmingham’s Pizitz Food Hall, raking her chopsticks
through a Poké bowl and settling in for her eighth
interview of the week.
“This is probably the third thing today and the eighth thing this
week where I’m talking about this kind of stuff,” Newcomb said.
“It’s my world right now.”
This kind of stuff — the burgeoning film industry bubbling up in
Alabama and how women and people of color fit into that industry
— brought Newcomb back to Birmingham from Los Angeles years
ago. Newcomb left her Alabama hometown after high school,
a scholarship to the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in
hand and a bright future ahead of her. But after about a decade in
Hollywood, it was time to come home.
After shooting a short film with her partner, Paul Hart, and
seeing it screen in several southern film festivals, Newcomb began
to realize just how many independent filmmakers were working
down south. That reassurance grounded her, but it also opened
her eyes.
“The conversations around filmmakers and stories in the South
all deeply resonated with what I realized I’ve been wanting to
do for a long time, which is amplify southern women’s voices,”
Newcomb said.
One of the festivals where Newcomb began to make new
connections is based just below the place where she’d poked at
her scallion-strewn lunch. The Sidewalk Film Center and Cinema
opened its doors on the lower level of the Pizitz building in late
2019, after 21 years of producing an annual film festival in the
streets of Birmingham. Kiwi Lanier, Sidewalk’s education and
outreach coordinator, has been around for almost a third of those
years.
“I interned here because I was trying to get out of taking classes
for college credit,” Lanier said. “so I did an internship over the
summer, and then I just didn’t leave.”
That was the summer of 2012. Lanier would go on to serve as
ticketing coordinator and education and outreach coordinator
before taking a break to attend graduate school in Texas. When
she arrived back in 2018, she took on yet another role: shorts
programmer.
“When I was programming shorts, it seemed like the female
filmmakers were trying twice as hard, and it showed,” Lanier said.
“I definitely felt like I saw that effort. I get how much harder they
have to work, so I salute them.”
In the two years that Lanier was on the shorts programming
team, the women-to-men ratio of directors on local films was
basically equal, but Lanier said she never wanted to consider
gender while making programming decisions.
“I tried to focus mostly on which shorts I enjoyed the most and
which ones I thought executed their vision the best,” Lanier said. “I
feel like programming something and saying, ‘We’re going to have
50/50 women filmmakers,’ kind of devalues what they’re making.
It’s reducing them to their gender, which is the whole thing we’re
trying to avoid.”
Megan Friend, a creative media student at The University of
Alabama, co-directed one of the many shorts that populated
Sidewalk’s 2019 lineup. It was the first time one of her films had
been accepted into the festival circuit, but she’s more than familiar
with the process of programming a festival. Friend is one of two
directors of the Black Warrior Film Festival, which takes place at
UA each spring. Black Warrior, just like Sidewalk, sports a staff of
mostly women.
30 Spring 2020