Independent Filmmaking in Virginia

You hear plenty about the explosion in computer technology over the past few years. You can't help but notice that what was considered adequate for your desktop a year or two ago is suddenly past passe today. Digital technology is racing forward and, by all accounts, stoking the fires of economic growth.

The wide-eyed spokesmen for this digital boom even assure us that it will dismantle the old, rigid distinctions between those who control the means of production and those who have the ingenuity and passion to create. That it will level the playing field, undercutting the power-elite and empowering the little guy.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that the little guy will have to have sufficient disposable income, the right kind of education, and the proper cultural awareness to climb aboard that victory train, we can at least begin to look at whether these changes might be democratizing, in our community, what was once the province of a well-connected few - filmmaking.

Obviously, during the past 10 years, the Virginia Film Festival has solidified itself as a venue for serious film enthusiasts in the state, and as a forum for everything from Hollywood feature film premieres to weekend revivals of near-forgotten classics. At the same time, The Virginia Film Office has established itself as an effective lure to outside production and a clearing house for film professionals who want to hook in with producers who come to film in the state.

What's less obvious is the fate of the independent filmmaker in Virginia in recent years. I'm not talking so much about those self-financers whose greatest wish is to get their gen-X extravaganza into Sundance and be whisked into a world of cell phone meetings and personal assistants. I am speaking of the very independent producer/director. The ones who have lit upon the art and craft of filmmaking as a tool that allows them to share their social consciousness and their social curiosity. Filmmakers who see film as a means of asking.

They are out there, these filmmakers, although, technically speaking, many of them are working in video. (Alright, call them "videographers" if you prefer, but the ones I know certainly, and justifiably, think of themselves as filmmakers). Digital technology has allowed them to acquire cameras and editing software that make it possible to produce broadcast quality films from home. Oh, it's still expensive enough that it requires a serious commitment. Investments in home digital video cameras and editing suites certainly run into the tens of thousands of dollars. But the cost of such equipment continues to fall, and, even now, a body of dedicated, serious artists in the state are taking advantage of the opportunities that the technology presents.

One of those is Roanoke native Kent Ayyildiz. Now living outside of Charlottesville in Albemarle County, Ayyildiz discovered his passion for filmmaking as early as 11 years old when his father taught him how to use his 8 millimeter film camera and a simple splicing machine. But it wasn't until much later that the junior Ayyildiz began to see film as a viable means for scrutinizing those corners of human experience that now motivated his adult mind -- history, culture, and social relationships.

Ayyildiz, whose father was born in Istanbul, was studying for a graduate degree in history in that Turkish city, driven there by a desire to explore and better understand his father's culture and homeland. "I had a desk that overlooked the Bosphorus, the narrow strait that juts through the city and separates Europe from Asia Minor. It was just beautiful, so cinematic. I knew then that I wanted to make documentary..." Back in the states, he studied for his MFA in film production at Colombia College in Chicago, still thinking that history would be the source from which he'd draw as a filmmaker.

But a funny thing happened on the way to becoming a chronicler of someone else's past. Ayyildiz discovered a present -- his own. "Artists by their very nature, are observers of society," observes Ayyildiz. "History is essentially just stories, and while I was in film school I learned to enjoy the more fundamental stories," the stories that confronted him each day.

Ayyildiz and his wife, Betsy, a law student at the time, were planning to have a baby. Their schedules, and the careers for which they were headed, led the couple to the notion that Kent, not Betsy, would be the primary stay-at-home parent. Ayyildiz knew that decision would be fraught with conflicts, discoveries, and the unknown. In short, just the kind of raw material you want in a film.

"I knew that in my desire to be an at home Dad, I was going to be limited in how I make films. I realized that was pretty much going to dictate my mode of production, so what I decided to do was kind of pool two worlds together." The result was Ayyildiz's award winning half-hour documentary, "Homedaddy".

As an experience for the viewer, "Homedaddy" works as a chronicle, an essay, and, most compellingly, an enquiry. Ayyildiz traces the experiences of himself, his wife Elisabeth, and the couple's baby boy, Quinn, from gestation through Quinn's toddlerhood. Sure, there are joys, the rapture of the newborn, the transfixed gaze of young parents watching their child learn to clown with them. But also there are doubts, there is befuddlement, and, above all, there is a longing for connectivity -- something to assuage the persistent sense of "otherness" that such a nontraditional choice has visited on its makers.

It's a film that celebrates parenthood, to be sure. But it's also a film that slowly ascertains the needs for, and the availability of, community. In the course of making the film and coming to grips with his sense of isolation, Ayyildiz discovered the Stay at Home Dad Fatherhood Project at Loyola University. The discovery casts a shaft of light into the lives of the family, and into the film itself. It transforms the film from an inward contemplation into an unexpected and welcome confrontation with an under-examined world. And in the encounter, Ayyildiz and his film find humor, humanity, and the healing power of shared experience.

The film won a bronze metal at the Houston International Film Festival this past fall and was shown at the Black Moriah film festival in Charlottesville in March. Ayyildiz is now planning to organize a film festival, possibly in Richmond, built around the subject of fatherhood. A higher-budget project on the history of Turkey still resides in the back of the filmmaker's mind, but in the meantime, it's the smaller stories closer to home. Says Ayyildiz, "I like to establish a rapport with the audience through the personal first, then bring in the universal." His next project, tentatively titled "The Lawn", will examine his and his neighbor's preoccupation with tending to their grassy half-acres that surround their homes.

"We're in the midst of a digital revolution that enables individuals such as myself to actually create a thirty minute documentary on a shoestring budget", Ayyildiz confirms. That revolution is providing some of the tools, it seems, but we've still got to count on the soil, the climate, the regional soul to breed individuals like Ayyildiz with the restlessness, the generosity, and the ingenuity to keep on asking.