By Elizabeth Ladzinski
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER EAST SIDE — Look out TriBeCa, the Lower East Side has it's own film festival.
The LES Film Festival, running through March 1, looks to highlight the neighborhood as a "hotbed of creativity," according filmmaker Damon Cardasis, 28, who created the event.
"It instantly clicks with people," Cardasis said of concept of the festival, which began Feb. 8. "If you said, 'The Murray Hill Film Festival,' you would think sports bars and frat boys."
Cardasis started the festival to create an intimate environment for films such as his own 61-minute feature called "March!" to be screened. "March!" is a mock-documentary about Jennifer, an overzealous tenant who decides to battle her landlord after he takes over her apartment building to covert it into a private mansion. However, nobody joins her cause.
"It's about this girl who thinks she's this freedom fighter or the next Hilary Clinton, but then nobody shows up," Cardasis said. "She's like the Tracy Flick character from 'Election.'"
After producing the film, which cost $10,000, Cardasis, a New York native, realized that there were many other filmmakers without the means to take their low-budget masterpieces to the masses. Thus the festival was born.
Cardasis received more than 100 submissions for the festival, with films shot in locations as far away as Kenya, Latvia, Italy and Egypt. But only about 30 films will compete for the prestigious "LES Prix D'Or," a play on the Cannes Film Festival's "Palm d'Or."
Features screened during the 20-day festival have included an animated short about wanting to become vegan ("Craig & Walter"), a feature-length film about finding the African roots of Barack Obama ("My Father the Luo"), and a short film about an environmentalist who created an urban garden on the Lower East Side in 1975, only to have it demolished by the city in 1986 ("Adam Purple and the Garden of Eden").
The festival is located at Grand Opening, at 139 Norfolk St., and screenings are all BYOB, and each is followed by a Q&A and "partying" with the filmmakers. With only 30 seats available at each screening, Cardasis has made sure the screenings are intimate.
Cardasis hopes the festival will return for a second year, but no final plans have been made yet.
He shot "March!" in just seven days, and had to request days off from his job waiting tables to shoot the film. He said he's heard some laughs from the audience during the film's previous screenings, and believes low-budget filmmakers often outgun big-budget blockbusters. "If people walk out and say 'Oh, that wasn't bad,' then that's a compliment," he said.
The LES Film Festival now runs through March 1st, as an additional screening day has been added. Check out the festival's website for more information.
