Letter from the new president

Dear Members,

I'm going to kick off this blog with a formal(ish) letter.

I’m so thrilled to be heading into 2009 as the President of the IFP/Seattle Board. The NW started the year off right, with three films in Sundance and a feature and music video at Slamdance. We congratulate local directors Lynn Shelton (Humpday) and David Russo (The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle), local producer/NW Film Forum Board President Jennifer Roth (World’s Greatest Dad), Spokane's NXNW Productions (Finding Bliss) and That Go—Noel Paul and Stefan Moore—(Thunderheist's “Jerk It”) continued success.

What first attracted me to IFP in 2002 as an intern is what keeps me interested now: the organization is dedicated to connecting local filmmakers to the national independent film industry and improving our individual business savvy. While there are other amazing organizations in town (NWFF, NW Screenwriters Guild, 911 Media, etc.) that help support the creation of film and video projects and are vital to our artists and community, I hope that through IFP we can help train ourselves to be more knowledgeable on the business side of things. Film has always been an odd hybrid of art and commerce and through elevating our industry knowledge and participation, we hope to get more local artists to be taken seriously by the national film industry and audiences. As an independent filmmaker who wants to stay in Seattle yet create films that resonate beyond our boundaries, I have a personal stake in seeing this happen.

So what does this mean specifically for the organization? We will continue to offer the Spotlight Award, which I think is a fantastic and vital program for our community. We will also continue to work with local organizations and festivals to bring programs that directly connect local and national members to industry professionals, such as the NW Production Summit did in 2008. Other initiatives I look forward to bringing to our members include quarterly Film + events (see details on our January 28^th event in the next post). These events will function more as professional discussions amongst filmmaking peers rather than intro and intermediate level workshops and my hope is that we will raise the level of discourse around issues that we—NW filmmakers—find to be pertinent. I look forward to working with the IFP Board and staff to continue this mission and increase our programming to reflect the specific needs we have in the NW for our independent filmmakers.

In this vein, I hope you will take the time to fill out our survey found here. We are interested in hearing what current members, former/expired members and not-yet members are interested from IFP. We have a lofty mission and the only way we can contribute to our community is to directly help professional local filmmakers.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions or suggestions about IFP.

All the best,
Lacey Leavitt
Board President, IFP/Seattle
lacey(at)ifpseattle.org