it's a sweatshop
MAY 20, 2002 – DISTRIBUTION DEALS AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
Celebration played several market screenings at the Cannes Film Festival before “Food of Love” by Ventura Pons. Crown Films of Taiwan has agreed to distribute the films together as a package.
Daniel Stedman also signed a distribution deal with Village srl of Italy. Based in Rome, they distribute both short and feature films to the world.
‘CELEBRATION’ CONTINUES FOR WELLESLEY FILMMAKER
by Catherine Foster, Globe Staff
May 11, 2002
Page: F8 Section: Living
A 6-year-old boy, looking anxious, steps up to a microphone and looks out over a crowd of friends and relatives. He looks at his mother and then announces, “I am a homosexual.”
It’s his coming-out party, and people in the crowd erupt in cheers, shake his hand, or burst into tears. At the end, he looks a bit puzzled. This unconventional 4 1/2-minute film, “Celebration,” has won its young filmmaker a number of worldwide film festival awards and is sending him to the Cannes Film Festival. Heady honors for someone who is only 23 – and who happens to be straight.
Daniel Stedman, who spoke by phone from his home in Wellesley while preparing to leave for France, says his first film is more about identity than sexuality. “I think my film speaks to all audiences, because it’s about the struggle to find your identity in a society that expects that you will put a label on your identity, and then they judge you critically for your decision.”
For a film that’s been out only since August, “Celebration” has achieved fame quickly, winning the award for best American short film at the New York/ Avignon Film Festival, the Teddy Award from the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Audience Award from the Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.
Shooting the film took only two days, but casting took two years. “I started in the beginning of my junior year of college,” Stedman says, “but I could not find a family who would let their little boy play the part. I even paid a casting agent.”
The next year he held an audition in New York. ” I rented a studio, put ads in Backstage and Variety, and held what I thought was my all-out audition,” Stedman says. “Two children showed up.”
Perhaps that’s because the ads mentioned something about “adult content.” Still, the 7-year-old Alex H. Krinsky and his mother, Heidi, showed up. Both “were incredible,” Stedman says.
“He’s really intelligent and sophisticated. Here’s a story I tell whenever I’m asked to talk about the film: The morning before the shoot, Alex said, `If it’s hot out and I haven’t taken a bath, I’m going to say I’m a hot, dirty homosexual.’ This is straight out of the mouth of a 7-year-old! I couldn’t believe it!”
Stedman filmed the $9,000 film over two days in late August on the chapel lawn at the Belmont Hill School, which he had attended. Stedman got extras for his crowd scene by walking the streets of Boston and handing out fliers. “That was one of my greatest successes,” he says. “Seventy people arrived on a rainy day.”
They had been lured by the offer of lunch, film credit, and transportation. Did they know what they were cheering about? “No,” Stedman says. “We shot the scene of Alex making his statement separately.”
Most of the reaction to Stedman’s film has been positive, but there are dissenters. “I’ve met people who were upset about it, who thought it was ridiculous, outrageous, who thought it didn’t deserve to be made into a film,” he says.
Stedman also says he doesn’t know much about the psyche of 6-year-olds, or whether self-knowledge would be likely in one so young. “I’ve spoken with psychologists, and they’ve said it’s unlikely or rare. But there are definitely people out there who knew at an early age and who wished that they’d had a ceremony like this. And that is a great example of the ways my film has touched people.”
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com
MAY 1 – BEST SHORT FILM – AUDIENCE AWARD – TURIN, ITALY
Celebration won the Audience Award for Best Short Film at the 17th Turin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Turin hosts the largest and oldest gay and lesbian film festival in all of Europe. The Audience Award is the fourth prize won by Celebration, after the Teddy Award, Best Short in New York and the Kodak Vision Award.
APRIL 21 – BEST AMERICAN SHORT – NEW YORK/AVIGNON FILM FESTIVAL
Daniel Stedman won his second major award, The 21st Century Filmmaker Award for Best American Short at the Avignon/New York Film Festival. He was bestowed with prizes totaling $10,000 from Panavision, DuArt, LTV Laser Subtitling, The New York Observer, Cineric, The Tribeca Film Center, and Kodak. He also received the prestigious “Roger” statuette created by sculptor James Knowles to symbolize independence and creativity, and a Kodak Vision Award.
A Different Celebration
Daniel Stedman’s short is invited to the prestigious Berlin Film Fest
by MATTHEW HAYS
Montreal Mirror, January 31, 2002
Typically, short films get the short end of the deal in terms of getting seen. They occasionally appear on TV. They should be featured much more frequently as openers for feature films (instead we’re usually inundated with wretched ads). As a result, lively, funny short films often simply don’t get the attention they deserve.
Local filmmaker Daniel Stedman is getting a great shot in the arm in response to his latest four-minute short, Celebration. The film, coproduced by Thomas Haydn of DeZember Productions, has just been invited to premiere at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival early in February.
Stedman, 23, says he made Celebration because he wanted to explore ideas surrounding “finding your identity.” The film has a young, unnamed lad, looking no more than six years old, stepping out in front of a crowd at a bar-mitzvah-esque celebration. He stutters at the microphone, barely able to cough up the words he feels he must say, but eventually does: “I… I am… I am a homosexual.”
It’s a quirky little film, but it packs a wallop, toying with our expectations. “I spent two years working on the script,” reports Stedman, “and it’s only four pages long. But I really wanted to open questions up to the audience, rather than answering things for them. For me, the film is about the tragedy of having to find labels for ourselves. Then, you’re judged critically for those labels.”
For Stedman, the idea of ritual was crucial to the film. “I was thinking about certain rites of passage for young people. And definitely, bar mitzvahs came to mind. But the film really is more about labels.”
Stedman’s surreal and abstract treatment of his material does mean the project is open to interpretation. I read the film as deeply ironic, seeing as the crowd collected at the celebration responds so positively to the child’s coming out (something that doesn’t usually happen in real life). “I can see that interpretation,” says Stedman, who’s not gay himself. “I wanted the film to be both beautiful and tragic, a film about the struggle of identity.”
Though Celebration is having its world premiere in Berlin, Haydn reports the film has now confirmed its North American premiere for the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
“I’m really psyched about Berlin,” says Stedman, who will accompany his film there for its Feb. 6 debut. And Stedman, who originally heralds from Maine, credits a lot of the film’s success to Montreal’s industry atmosphere.
“There’s a great deal more support for the arts here,” he says. “There’s a lot of opportunity. Montreal is a great place to work in film. Canada, generally, is far more supportive of the arts.”
