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.
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.”
