Kickstarter Film Fest 2014 recap

Kickstarter Film Fest 2014 took place Friday night in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene park, the company’s fourth. It featured several selections from films, shorts, a few trailers and two musical acts.

This also marks the first year that the crowdfunding company is organizing the event in multiple cities, with festivals in Los Angeles and London coming later this year. This was also the first year that Kickstarter asked for submissions of films to the event. They got 1,068 submissions and Kickstarter staff watched all of them, said spokeswoman Julie Wood.

On the blog, the company’s film specialists recently spoke about how they put the final festival together.

“The emphasis we’ve been placing is on Kickstarter in real life,” Wood told us at the park. We also reported on the company’s partnership with the MoMA Design Store, putting crowdfunded physical goods in front of real buyers.

We spoke to one set of filmmakers before the event started, Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber. They made their first feature length film together, Tomorrow We Disappear, a film about puppet-makers in India who were being relocated out of their historic land to make way for new housing and a mall.

Weber connected the film to makers here by saying, “We are people who make things and we wanted to find other people who make things. The only difference is they’ve been making these things the same way for thousands of years.”

Goldblum added, “I feel like anyone in Brooklyn familiar with trying to make your art and having no place would be familiar with this struggle.”

By the time the first few trailers were done, the slope on the north edge of the park had completely filled, though many people trickled out before the full festival ended. The team really lucked out weather-wise, avoiding both rain and oppressive heat. Halfway through, we got a sample of Kaki King’s multimedia music show, which we previewed here.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams was among those to welcome the crowd, saying, “This was my precinct when I was a police officer. I spent 13 years on these corners in a bulletproof vest, hoping people could be here and do something like this.”

Bummed you missed it? Kickstarter partnered with VHX to stream the program online.

[slideshow_deploy id=’18164′]