The Kids Are Alright, or an Abridged History of NFFTY
While walking through the streets of downtown Seattle, Jacqueline Xerri had already started to plan her next short film. Xerri, a graduate of the Florida State University film program, traveled to Washington to attend the National Film Festival for Talented Youth, commonly referred to as NFFTY, where her senior thesis had been selected to play in competition.
Titled When She Speaks, it was based on a true story where a woman was erroneously committed to a mental institution by her philandering and abusive husband. Xerri was proud of her work, having spent months producing it, but in light of the other films playing at the festival, she felt it lacked a strong personal connection. Many of the shorts she had seen during NFFTY’s opening night depicted personal stories of loss, growth, and self-identity, themes based on the experiences of the filmmakers themselves. Xerri wanted to make a film along those lines, so when she returned home, she quickly began working on a project that would be just that.
In the fall of 2019, Xerri collaborated with fellow FSU film student Raymond Knudsen to produce Monkey Bars, Xerri’s first post-grad short. The film depicts fourteen year old Maggie who becomes infatuated with a troubled boy a few years older than her. Using shifting perspectives, a divide emerges between Maggie’s romanticized reality and the unpleasant one actually taking place, emphasizing both the excitement and disappointment of being young. The film was funded in part through Kickstarter. Shot in the dead of winter. Edited during the pandemic. And now, two years on, finds itself playing at this year’s NFFTY in the ‘Growth Spurts’ section, a collection of personal coming-of-age shorts that highlights youth’s perennial growing pains.
Xerri’s return to NFFTY is one of many anecdotes in the festival's history that attests to its importance for, and influence on, young filmmakers. In fact, NFFTY is home to the largest film festival for young filmmakers anywhere in the world, and it resides here in Seattle. Each year, the four day festival showcases over 250 remarkable films from up-and-coming filmmakers ages twenty-four and under while also the providing tools and resources to help realize their next project. The film’s tagline, “Film Starts Here” feels apt given how the festival has platformed the work of future Oscar winners and industry professionals in ways few festivals are willing to. As it enters its fifteenth year, NFFTY has grown into one of the most significant, lesser known festivals in the country, and it began with someone who was once in the shoes of a young filmmaker.
To trace NFFTY’s history, you need to go back to 2007, a time that’s as close to 1992 as it is now. Nancy Pelosi had just been elected speaker of the House. Martin Scorsese finally won his (long-overdue) best picture Oscar. Steve Jobs was set to unveil the iPhone. And Jesse Harris had just moved back to Washington from L.A..
Harris is one of NFFTY’s three co-founders who ran the festival full-time for eight years as both its executive and creative director before pivoting into commercial directing. In his senior year of high school, the Ballard native convinced both his parents to give him what money they had set aside for college so he could create a feature film. Upon completion, the film was acquired by a distributer, which brought Harris to L.A. for a year of press junkets and promotion. When that ran its course, Harris found himself working busser or valet jobs while he figured out his next move.
That’s when Harris met Jocelyn R.C.. R.C. was a filmmaker at Ballard High School, Harris’s alma mater, and knew of Harris through his feature film. She initially reached out to receive filmmaking advice, but after talking and sharing in their collective interests, the two eventually realized the need for a platform that would showcase young filmmakers and their work.
This was in 2006, when the internet was hardly as we know it now. Facebook had just opened its site to the public for the first time. Youtube was only in its second year of operation. And Vimeo was still considered a pet project of College Humor, a dot-com era website that became best known for their viral online comedy skits. The internet’s framework for social discovery was still a few years away, and unless you were attending a traditional film festival, discovering talent was difficult, if unlikely. So, on their own volition, Harris and R.C. decided they would start a festival themselves.
They filed for non-profit status (with the help of Harris’s mom Kelly Reichgerdt, “NFFTY’s Silent Founder”), brought on Kyle Seago (NFFTY’s third co-founder), and began work scrounging the internet for programming. As it currently exists, NFFTY’s in-person event runs four days long, primarily occupying the SIFF Uptown, with an additional week for online streaming. This first iteration was one night only, and took place in a 381 seat auditorium within McCaw Hall, Seattle’s opera and ballet venue adjacent to the Space Needle.
“The main thing I remember from the first festival is we screened all the films off of a DVD and it was a nightmare,” Harris recalls. “We encoded our own disc and the DVD player at the theater was just not reading it well. The films would play for few minutes and then stop. It was horrific.”
“[To hold the crowd over], me and Jocelyn and Kyle would come down on the stage, and do these little comedy skits. We had already done one to open the event, so we just kept doing them. Instead of getting really annoyed, the audience really enjoyed them… they just became part of it. Eventually, the DVD started working, we were able to play all the films, and it turned out fine. But I think it just showed how special and unique this kind of atmosphere could be. It was just so pure.”
Despite its technical difficulties, the first NFFTY ended up being a huge hit. In the following year, Jocelyn and Kyle went off to college, but having seen the potential for the festival, Jesse made the decision to run the festival solo. Though it wasn’t what he had in mind for his career, it was still a way of producing something.
For the next eight years, Harris would be involved with NFFTY. The first couple seasons were put together on limited means, with Jesse raising the money, watching all the films, and organizing the festival all on his own. The festival went from one day to three, then to four. The number of films grew from thirteen the first year to seventy-three the next, then 115 and 190 in the following two years. What originally required NFFTY to mail out physical flyers to film schools in order to attract attention was now collecting hundreds of submissions each year with thousands of people in attendance. The festival’s opening night moved from McCaw Hall to the Cinerama, while regular screenings took over the SIFF Uptown. After parties were hosted anywhere from the MoPop to the top of the Space Needle. Panels were added. Galas were held. Red carpets took over lanes of traffic. The growth of the festival had turned exponential.
NFFTY settled into the format we know now around 2012, but during the fifteen years since its inception, the festival’s purpose started to change. The festival’s ascent paralleled the advent of popular video sites like YouTube and Vimeo, and the rise of social media made discovering and sharing talent an easier task than it was in 2007. Finding the next Bo Burnham, Maggie Rogers, or Dan Trachtenberg could be as happenstance as scrolling through your Facebook feed on any given day.
“When it started, it was about discovering young filmmakers and giving them a place to reach an audience.”, Harris said on the festival’s evolution. “That’s no longer the case. You can now put your your short film on Vimeo or somewhere online and probably have its be seen by a lot more people…”
Today, the festival is headed by Dan Hudson, NFFTY’s executive director. During his tenure, he, too, has seen changes in the industry’s landscape. Where NFFTY once primarily served as a platform for young filmmakers, and still is to a lesser degree, the focus has now shifted to providing better resources to filmmakers. This includes bringing in industry professionals to lead masterclasses, enabling micro-grant access, and expanding to year round events, something the festival plans on doing this fall in Los Angeles.
“I think one of big things that overarches all of the new programs, strategies and initiatives for NFFTY is asking, ‘How do we provide a better on ramp to NFFTY filmmakers that want to be filmmakers anywhere, regardless of what city they live in, or how much access to financial resources they have? How can we provide any extra wind in their sails as they're starting their careers?’”, Hudson said when asked about NFFTY’s future goals.
One of NFFTY’s constants is its indelible sense of community. Each year, hundreds of filmmakers converge on Seattle and form a “summer camp for filmmakers” in the Queen Anne neighborhood. Within that group of “campers,” it’s not uncommon for creatives to attend one year, connect with filmmakers whose films they’ve admired, and then return in the following year with a new film they made together. Inside the theater, filmmakers uphold an annual tradition of collectively mimicking a word or phrase as the festival’s trailer plays before each screening. When the films conclude, unanimous applause follows — an act of support coming from fellow filmmakers who know just how difficult it is to get these things made.
Having attended NFFTY for a few years now, I’m always struck by these sentiments. In the rat race that is the film industry, it’s notable that these filmmakers are so supportive of one another. More so, when you walk into the lobby of the Uptown, you’ll see so many kids and teens having the best weekend of their lives. The wide-eyed looks on their faces says it all: priceless.
These days the film industry frequently leaves much to be desired. Over the last decade, studio films have been increasingly, and overwhelmingly, dictated by their commercial viability. You go to a theater on any given weekend and there’s a Marvel movie siphoning audiences’ dollars while some poor independent film picked up by a national distributor struggles to break even. Considering corrosive streaming models, studio consolidation, and the decline of local theaters, it’s hard to be optimistic about the industry on any given day.
However, when I see the work coming out of NFFTY, I’m not so pessimistic. Any one of the festival’s showcases exemplifies the many talents on the horizon, and while the pervading stigma around young filmmakers is that they are too inexperienced, NFFTY films, with their endless creativity, imagination, and craft, prove quite the opposite. Their work remind me of anecdote from Orson Welles. When asked about Citizen Kane, Welles attributed his pioneering vision to his own naïveté; subverting conventional Hollywood wisdom came down to a kid who “didn't know any better” as he put it.
I like to think NFFTY filmmakers fall near this sentiment. They have all the ambition in the world to make their film and all the zeal to make it happen. Their eyes are big, their stomaches bigger, and they’re making the films of tomorrow. Though Hollywood is unlikely to change, many have tried their hand, there’s something worth believing in with these young filmmakers that ensures hope for the future of the medium. The kids are alright, and if they are, so are the movies.
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Quotes used in this article have been edited for clarity and readability.
Special thanks to Jacqueline Xerri, Raymond Knudsen, Dan Hudson, Robert Speewack, and Jesse Harris for their time, and Amy Williams & Kevin Conner for helping make this feature possible.
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