Hot Springs native Jennifer Gerber, interim executive director of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, found her passion for acting and the arts in high school, and now it has brought her back home to her roots.
Gerber spoke to Oaklawn Rotary Club members on Monday about her past, this year's festival, and other things happening in the city and state's filmmaking scene.
"I really wanted to be part of telling stories that affected different groups of people at the same time. That's where I connected with theater," Gerber, a graduate of Lake Hamilton High School, told the Rotarians during their weekly meeting at The Hotel Hot Springs & Spa.
Out of high school, she booked her first job in Nashville and said she was "blown away" by the way movies were made and seeing a production in action.
On her first day on set, she said, "I spent the rest of the day after my scene was finished watching the director, watching the crew, and I asked a member on set, 'How do you learn how to do this?' And they said, 'Well, I went to this school in Chicago.' Within a month I had moved myself to Chicago and started attending that school, and the rest is history."
Gerber spent almost 10 years in Chicago working for commercial production companies. She also worked as a first assistant director, which she describes as "the person holding the megaphone, bossing everyone around and kind of controlling the schedule of the set, making sure everything happens on time and on schedule."
She said she was living the dream while working in Chicago but still felt something was missing because she wasn't yet telling her own stories. She then moved to New York to attend Columbia University for graduate school and said that was a life-changing experience for her.
"I was studying with Oscar-winning filmmakers that were teaching me how to make a movie. What Columbia really did for me is they really pushed personal stories. They want you to tell stories that only you can tell, and that's where I really reconnected with my roots in Arkansas," Gerber said. "I was finding in New York that whenever I would talk about my stories from growing up (in Hot Springs) that people wanted to hear them. So I started writing all these scripts and important stories that I think need to be told from a community that's truly underrepresented. So that's what brought me back here."
The last job Gerber had in New York before returning to Hot Springs was working for actor James Franco as his assistant director.
"I was on the Universal back lot running this big production, and even though I had reached this peak, I still wanted to come here after that shoot. So it wasn't that I was struggling; this was the most important thing in my life at that time," she added.
Coincidentally, Gerber returned to Hot Springs during the week of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.
"I was blown away. I was a little nervous. I was like, 'What's in Arkansas? Who are the filmmakers and am I going to find my community here?' I showed up and I found this vibrant filmmaking community. I also found filmmakers from all over the world that were here in Hot Springs that were loving it. Since then, I've been a passionate volunteer and member of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival," she said.
About a month ago, Gerber was hired as HSDFF's interim director after the previous executive director, Courtney Pledger, was selected by Gov. Asa Hutchinson to lead the Arkansas Educational Television Network.
In addition to her work with HSDFF, Gerber also teaches at the University of Central Arkansas where she started a program called Production in Action that partners students with professional filmmaking mentors. During the program, an entire school semester is dedicated to learning how to make a film and teaching the students to fulfill their individual roles. Then, a movie is made.
"From that, these students now have a relationship with professional filmmakers. I have a filmmaker from that set that's currently on a job in New York right now. I have three filmmakers from that set that are interns in Los Angeles, and all of that came out of this production action. So, I'm really starting to see that there's talent here that just needs to be developed and I want to do all I can to get these young filmmakers out there," Gerber said.
Her short film, "Expecting," was shot with her class in Hot Springs and has already traveled around the world to different film festivals. It also won the juried prize for Best Short at this year's Arkansas Shorts Festival.
Gerber is a curator for Arkansas Shorts, held in Hot Springs in the ballroom at the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa in January.
Gerber said, "Arkansas Shorts is an unforgettable experience and it's a way that you can support these homegrown films that are coming up from our community. All a filmmaker ever wants is an audience to show their work to, because they work so hard to get these movies made and all you want is for someone to watch it. The best gift you can give to these filmmakers is to come to their screening and Arkansas Shorts is an amazing opportunity for that."
This year's 26th annual HSDFF is scheduled for Oct. 6-15, and while Gerber said she cannot announce any of the headliners just yet, she added, "if we are able to secure the people that we're talking to, we're about to have some of the biggest names that we've ever had at our festival."
An exciting exhibit Gerber said she is working on securing for this year's festival is a Virtual Reality Lounge, which will allow festival guests to enter a lounge, put on a headset, and see a film from a 360-degree angle.
Volunteers are still needed for many aspects of the festival including box office sales, drivers, film introduction and general operations.
"What I've noticed about being in Arkansas is that I don't think Arkansans realize how much people are interested in this state, especially in this festival. The HSDFF is one of 38 festivals, period, that have an Academy Award-qualifying category, so basically, whoever wins our Best Short at our festival can be nominated for an Oscar. So short filmmakers really want to get into our film festival," Gerber said.
"I was at an after party at the Palm Springs Film Festival, one of the top three film festivals in the world, and a group of filmmakers figured out that I was the new executive director and I was hounded by them. These are filmmakers that are winning awards across the world, and they want to come to our festival," she added. "We try to program films for everyone, so there will be something in those hundred films that will resonate with you."
Local on 07/18/2017