Junktown Film Festival celebrates art, storytelling

There were no Oscar-contending films or budding A-list stars at the Junktown Film Fest, which was held last weekend at the Avalon Theatre.

But there was ingenuity and passion for cinema and grassroots art. The same passion that was embodied by local legend Dalton Trumbo, whose statue sits in front of the centenarian theater and inspired the festival’s logo.

A modest crowd, 15 films and a trailer rang in the return of the regional film festival, which rebranded after a year off. The films were the brainchildren of fresh college graduates, longtime professionals and even a 12-year-old girl. And the through line for all was a love for moving pictures and storytelling.

“There are festivals and stuff where you have this fantasy of someone’s going to cut you a check and help you make your next big movie. We’ve submitted to a lot of festivals and it was really, really important to me to have the film played at a lot of regional festivals,” said Parker Croft, who directed the festival’s Best Picture winner “As Easy As Closing Your Eyes.” “The goal for me as the filmmaker is to make films and to share them with people. This is that goal being achieved. These are people that love movies and this is a movie. So if I’m sharing a film with people that love movies, that actually is the top of the mountain for me.”

Junktown is the resurrection of the Grand Junction Film Fest, which was founded in 2017 but went on hiatus for 2023. Its return coincides with a new tax incentive program from Colorado’s Office of TV and Film and the Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) that will credit filmmakers for up to 20% of qualified expenses. Productions can earn an extra 2% “if using local infrastructure, rural or marginalized urban areas,” according to the OEDIT website.

And after a year off, locals had a chance to celebrate the artistic medium.

OUT OF TOWN DRAW

Croft was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont — a far cry from the film meccas of New York and Los Angeles. He was a theater kid growing up and studied at The Conservatory in Los Angeles.

Croft, 37, had a string of supporting roles on the big and small screens beginning in the late-2000s. He had a central role in a 2009 episode of the medical drama “Nip/Tuck” and played a recurring character on the show “Once Upon a Time” in 2013.

But the small and admittedly “s********” roles, Croft’s words, came in like punches. Croft rolled with them as long as he could, until he found writing scripts to be more creatively fulfilling

Croft and Aaron Golden have worked on “As Easy As Closing Your Eyes” for years. The film is a work of dramatic speculative fiction, akin to “Black Mirror.” It explores grief, substance abuse and sibling relationships. The short film is its town within the same universe as a feature film the duo is working on, Croft said.

And regional film festivals such as Junktown play a crucial role in ensuring that up-and-comers have the opportunity to be seen. Most major filmmakers, if not all, started at the bottom.

“Nobody’s going to show up at a regional festival for anything else other than that they love movies and they want to see what’s cool and what’s going on out there,” Croft said. “When I went on my first film festival tour, I was in my early 20s. I was seeing stuff that I couldn’t believe got made. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the weirdest, coolest stuff ever.’”

Junktown’s out-of-town films fit that bill.

“Secret Menu Beauty Pageant” was a nearly 15-minute drug trip into surrealist absurdity. Think of “Tim and Eric” if it were made by some millennials in Los Angeles.

Then there was “Vas Mar,” one of the festival’s foreign language films and directed by Nima Tabandeh of Iran. It explores hope in the face of adversity. The black-and-white coloring and artistic cinematography may lead you to think its pretentious but heart blossoms throughout its 19-minute, six-second runtime.

“Wick” is a five-and-a-half minute horror film directed by Austin, Texas, 12-year-old Kayling Iris Taylor, who did have some adult help.

Another beauty of regional festivals is that it also gives natives a jumping-off point.

LOCALS SHINE

Gretchen Kowalczyk and Matt Thornton had differing paths to being two of the local filmmakers showcased.

Let’s start with Kowalczyk. She grew up in Palisade and graduated from Colorado Mesa. She submitted her senior thesis “Brain Break” for Junktown, a 4-minute-and-some-change animated short about the dreaded creative block.

Kowalczyk was spinning her tires when beginning her senior thesis and thus, “Brain Break” was conceived.

“I didn’t like my idea that I had, it wasn’t very fleshed out. It was the only thing that I had going so I thought I had to stick with it. And then I realized I didn’t have to,” Kowalczyk said. “…I started looking at things around me and stuff I would do in my everyday life and I integrated that into a story that reflected how I was feeling. I was stuck, so I made my main character feel stuck. I used her as an outlet like, ‘How can I get past this by making her get past this?’”

Kowalczyk has been drawing since she was a kid and taught herself to animate when she was around 13 years old. Animation is tedious but Kowalczyk reflected on the perseverance that the medium demands from you. She taught herself how to use the software Procreate Dreams to animate “Brain Break.” She won the festival’s “Best Animated Film” award.

Kowalczyk wasn’t planning on submitting the film to Junktown. She did so on the final day of the submission window at the behest of her professor, whom she ran into at the Fruita Film Fest.

“Supporting a local art community supports the people who want to be artists,” she said. “…If you or someone you know is into animation, definitely go for it. But go for it with the understanding that it’s going to take a lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of patience for yourself.”

Thornton is the director of development for the Avalon Theatre Foundation and had his offbeat short “Caught in the Act” shown.

Thornton has long been a visual storyteller — from shooting skate videos to working for KREX and PBS.

The cliche is that a picture is worth 1,000 words.

“And it always will be,” Thornton said.

And so long as the festival marches on, the Grand Junction community will be exposed to all sorts of stories.

“Visual storytelling is so much more impactful, especially in film, because it allows us breathing room and the opportunity to capture emotion,” Thornton said.