By Valerie Milano and Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/15/23 – Concord Originals, the narrative content creation division of the world’s leading independent music company and licensor of stage productions, Concord, partnered with Outfest to launch a one-of-a-kind short film financing and intellectual property licensing initiative to support up-and-coming LGBTQIA+ filmmakers of color. In addition to providing financing for three short films, Concord Originals facilitated each film team’s use of one of three iconic songs from its vast well of IP into their films. After being selected at Outfest Fusion, the selected films directed by Jonathan De La Torre and Miles Lopez (Avivar), Zoë Hodge (Skate), and Chanelle Tyson (Artificial), will premiere at Outfest Los Angeles 2023 and be followed by a filmmaker Q&A. The Concords Shorts are a special set that will screen at Outfest Los Angeles on Saturday, July 15, 4:45 PM, at the Directors Guild of America Theatre 2.
In each of the films, the filmmakers were given several song choices from the Concord Catalog with the requirement that they each build their short film around the selected song. Jonathan De La Torre and Miles Lopez, in making Avivar chose “Tres Días De Carnival” (1950) featuring Cuban-American singer Celia Cruz with Johnny Pacheco.
Zoë Hodge with her film Skate followed a tantalizing lead from the original music video of Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” (1978) which featured the sexual fluid disco star performing in a roller rink. Chanelle Tyson in her short film Artificial found a way to embed the memorable theme song of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the Broadway musical Carousel (1945) by Rodgers & Hammerstein.
This is an interesting way of shifting the idea of film-making away from the standard music video model which usually features a singer or group performing live with a host of images, possibly symbolic and often random to provide a bunch of visual corollaries to the theme of the song. Here the balance is shifted to story-telling and using an iconic song to reflect the feelings of characters in a story.
In Zoë Hodge’s Skate (13 min.), a young Black man who is gay finds sanctuary at the local roller disco. Zoë grew up on Everybody Hates Chris and Jane Austen adaptations, so when she’s not reimagining trauma into rom-comedies or rom-dramas, she’s diversifying and rewriting literary classics. Creating queer, Black-centered, romantic content for the next generation is Zoë’s main driving force as a writer and filmmaker. In 2022 when she won Concord Originals x Outfest’s Pitch Contest and was given funds for her short film, Skate.
In Chanelle Tyson’s Artificial (12 min.), we encounter two young Black women whose romantic encounter is overshadowed by the two electronic devices talking to each other. Chanelle is a 2016 Outfest’s screenwriting lab fellow and produce of Sundance Development Track. Most recently, Chanelle was selected as a winner of the inaugural Concord Originals x Outfest pitch contest, from which funding was awarded for this film.
The film Avivar (15 min.) by Jonathan De La Torre and Miles Lopez tackles a much larger thematic tapestry about Mexican-American cultural norms and toxic machismo in Latino culture. At Outfest 2022, Miles Lopez and Jonathan De La Torre were announced as the first-ever recipients of the Concord Originals x Outfest short film financing and intellectual property licensing initiative, which funded and gave a platform to this new short film. Their previous short Cartas Para Axel screened at Outfest LA 2022.
The partnership of Concord with Outfest Los Angeles comes as part of Concord’s Impact Investment Initiative – a $10M fund to deploy capital into projects and companies that serve or are led by members of underrepresented and marginalized communities, in contrast to Concord’s general philanthropic efforts, the intent of the impact investing fund is to provide support and investment to projects that have commercial potential if led by folks from communities that historically have not had access to those resources.
Concord Shorts screens at Outfest in Theatre 2 of the Directors Guild of America on Saturday, July 15, at 2:45 PM. If you can’t see these fine short films in person, consider watching them online via Outfest Screening, beginning July 17 through July 23. For tickets and more information, go to: www.outfest.org.
