The Borscht Film Festival is a film festival organized by the Borscht Corporation held in Miami, Florida roughly every 18–24 months. The festival's mission is to tell Miami stories, forging the cinematic identity of the city. While most of the films screened are commissioned specifically for the festival by the Borscht Corporation, they also accept works where the subject matter or filmmaker has some tie to South Florida.
Known as "the weirdest film festival on the planet," the festival is characterized by a gonzo sensibility, sense of spectacle, and focus on regional storytelling. While critics of the festival point out its chaotic structure, they also acknowledge that it is part of an overall ethos that is "teeming with lunacy and inspired imagination." It has been lauded for its "visionary and experimental organizational methods” with Filmmaker Magazine going as far as to recognize it as the most conceptually bold film festival of its era, and also a reinvention of the concept of a film festival.
Over the years the festival grew from a small, one night underground screening of student films to an internationally recognized event that became influential in the world of independent film for its inspired programming and curation, supporting the early work of artists like Jillian Mayer, Barry Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, John Wilson, Terence Nance, Rachel Rossin, and more. Films that first played at the Borscht Festival later went on to screen at Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, SXSW, and various other festivals.
The Borscht Film Festival was founded by Lucas Levya and a group of New World School of the Arts alums in 2005.
History
2003-2004 The origins of the festival are traced to a series of events by a group of New World School of the Arts students in 2004. There was no film program at the public high school, so students from different art programs pooled equipment and resources to help each other create short films based on different challenges inspired by The Five Obstructions.
They would then host parties with names such as "Smudged" and "UnMinced" to screen the finished films for each other and their peers.
2005-2008 After graduating high school in 2005, the group continued to collaborate on videos. With most of the filmmakers attending schools out of state, and no place to showcase their movies locally, Leyva organized the first official Borscht Film Festival on December 30, 2005 at the Miami Shores Performing Arts Theater. It was hosted by a functional robot named Paris Hilton.
The 2nd Borscht Film Festival took place on August 2, 2007 at the Miami Science Museum Planetarium. Attendees were encouraged to bring sleeping bags.
By 2008 Leyva had moved back to Miami from New York. His time away made him realize the untapped cinematic potential of the city. He began collaborating with Andrew Hevia to refocus the festival on regional storytelling. They formed a collective with other like-minded artists under the CCCV (Roman numeral for 305, Miami's area code) banner and issued a manifesto.
CCCV collectively made 17 films, each about a different neighborhood in Miami, and screened them at the Tower Theater in Little Havana on December 27, 2008. The attendance at the event far exceeded capacity, which prompted a visit from the fire marshal.
2009 In 2009 they were able to procure support from a local pineapple-flavored soda called Jupiña and others to commission 5 original short films from filmmakers under the age of 30 (including the first screenplay by Tarell Alvin McCraney), each representing a different neighborhood in Miami.
They screened these shorts, as well as others from local filmmakers, at the next Borscht Film Festival. The screening sold out the 1700-seat Gusman Theater in downtown Miami, with people attempting to scalp the free tickets to those waiting outside the over-capacity venue.
The 2009 festival expanded to three days and took place November 28–30, 2009. Other programming included a symposium on locally based director Michael Bay at the fictional University of Wynwood, and a bike-in movie to see Medicine for Melancholy by Miami native Barry Jenkins at Sweat Records in Little Haiti.
Local press noted the festivals emergence from the underground. From an article titled “Borscht Film Festival is Miami's alt-culture summit” in the Miami Herald:“I've been watching culture in Miami for two decades now, and this felt like a critical mass that was new. Miami's always bred talent - but it doesn't usually manage to keep it. Too hard to get produced, too hard to make the power brokers pay attention to anything new and young, too hard to find a new space when the few available resources are taken up by figures that have been ensconced for a long time. Maybe the Borscht Festival, and its like, can change that.”The 2009 Borscht Film Festival was awarded "Best Film Festival" by the Miami New Times in their annual "Best of Miami" awards.
It marked the first time their work was noticed outside of Miami, as commissioned shorts later screened at Cannes, Tribeca and Sundance Film Festivals respectively, and Jillian Mayer’s Scenic Jogging was chosen as one of the winners of YouTube Play Creative Video Biennial and screened at Guggenheim Museums around the world.
2011: Borscht 7
In 2010, Borscht was awarded their first grant by the Knight Foundation. The 23-year-old festival director accepted the award with the Knight Foundation logo shaved into his head, which convinced CEO Alberto Ibargüen to support them. With the funding, they created a free open call for Miami movie pitches and founded the Borscht Corporation to oversee production of the commissioned films.
The 2011 festival expanded to two weekends, taking place between April 16 and April 23, 2011. Events featured a 15 foot tall piñata filled with adderall named James Francco, a campaign speech and performance by 2 Live Crew front man Uncle Luke (then running for Mayor of Miami-Dade), homemade robot battles in a thunderdome, and a stunt where in the month leading up to the festival, their offices became a public exhibition in a Wynwood art gallery where the staff of the fest lived and worked and visitors could observe them 24 hours a day.
The main night took place at the Adrienne Arsht Center, where new films premiered before a capacity crowd of 1800, with an overflow line that snaked around the block to Biscayne Boulevard.
This festival was branded Borscht 7, although it appears there were only four previous iterations of the Borscht Film Festival.
It was the first time the festival and its filmmakers were noticed by national press, including a journalist who wrote in Vice Magazine:"Miami is the surface-capable city where if you're a local or student filmmaker, one either sticks around to pursue making ads for, say, Crispin Porter, or relocates to Los Angeles or New York City (the very cities that have placed a stronghold on Miami's media and filmic iconography for decades.) Suddenly, in a single season, the place is in favor of handing $150 thousand and professional resources over to the kind of heady, collective 23-year-old energy that dependably says, "F*** Hollywood. We can do this all ourselves. Our stop signs shall be famous also." Technology and a nasty wake of dreamers have seemingly come to a head, allowing Borscht's 20-somethings to plant a flag, and allowing Miami's denizens, naturally, to realize there's money to be made, and an identity to be seized, cultivated, and home grown."The journalist also noted the unusual (at the time) practice of embracing online videos in their programming. Several of the shorts did in fact go viral on YouTube and Vimeo, and many went on to screen at other festivals around the world, including a 2nd year in a row at Sundance. The collective broke through at Sundance 2012 with a remake of La Jetée by Mayer and festival director Lucas Leyva titled Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke. They promoted the film with airbrushed posters and whoopee cushions bearing Uncle Luke's face left on theater seats before films which became highly sought after collector items, and hosting booty bass parties with Uncle Luke, who had taken them under his wing saying:"When I look at these Borscht guys, they remind me so much of myself when I was starting with music and it was unheard of to be a rapper from the South... They’re going through the same struggle right now"This and 3 other works by Mayer & Leyva were in competition at SXSW that same year, landing them a spot on Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" list. Another short, Chlorophyl, was the first movie by Barry Jenkins set in his home town, and set the stage for his return to make what would eventually become Moonlight. In contemporaneous interviews he foreshadowed his return:“I’m now working with [playwright] Tarell Alvin McCraney on a triptych feature about Liberty City that Borscht is producing, and this is the thing: Tarell and I grew up three blocks from each other. We went to the same high school. We have very similar stories and yet I’d have never met this cat were it not for Borscht."
2012: Borscht 8 In 2012, the festival was scheduled to coincide with the Mayan Apocalypse from December 12 to 21, 2012 (stylized as 12.12.12-12.21.12). It expanded to 9 days to include presentations from additional film collectives based in other regional centers, including Court 13 from New Orleans. The stated purpose of this "regional film summit" was to build community within the loose network of regional independent film centers around the world towards a new distribution model.
In the lead-up to the festival, Borscht falsely claimed that Miami Heat player Chris Bosh donated 1% of his salary to rename their event "The Bosh Film Festival." This was later revealed to be a marketing stunt in promotion of an animated film titled Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse! wherein the basketball player was posited to be a disgraced extradimensional prince pretending to be a human. When Bosh threatened legal action, the festival publicly released the cease and desist letters, digitally vandalized with the text "all life is real life" and an animated broadsword-wielding Bosh. In interviews the filmmakers claimed that the film was a documentary commissioned by Bosh himself, and that our world was in danger. The NBA responded with a cease and desist letter of their own. The filmmakers held everything they said was true somewhere in the multiverse. The controversy was the subject of an article in The Miami Herald sports section which began “Chris Bosh is definitely not a disgraced space prince. And his attorneys want to make sure he is not portrayed as one.”
Borscht then actually hosted an event during the festival called "The Bosh Film Festival" at the Miami Art Museum wherein anyone could bring their own projector and play whatever they wanted. It also hosted early musical performances by Yung Jake, Hundred Waters, and a man in an alligator costume singing ballads. The titular film did not screen at this event, perhaps for legal reasons. It did however, have a surprise screening at the main event at the opera house the following night, where the audience went wild.
When asked about the incident Chris Bosh said “Kind of left it alone, I didn’t want to get involved.”
Other festival events happened at a condemned Marine Stadium, a Jai Alai fronton, marine biology laboratory, and Versailles, where they staged Fidel Castro’s death years before it actually happened. They also played footage of psychedelic sea life on the largest permanently established projection surface in North America, hypnotized filmmaker Amy Seimetz for a Q&A of her own film, and staged a "celebrity animal petting zoo" in an independent cinema.