It seems the nature of the beast: Those who run alternative/underground film festivals are fated to make films themselves. So it was with Matthew T.; so it is with Independent Pictures.

Perhaps you know them better as the Ohio Independent Film Festival, a grass-roots cinema group that has put on exhibitions and workshops since humble beginnings (as the four-times-a-year Off-Hollywood Flick Fest), born in a Tremont storefront in 1994. With a strong emphasis on made-in-Ohio film, video and scriptwriting, co-founders Bernadette Gillota and Annetta Marion have presented countless short subjects and features, including Matthew T.'s early works (Matthew T. also moonlights as the OIFF's projectionist).

"We showed Matthew how to run a film festival," says Marion. But Marion and Gillota felt the name Ohio Independent Film Festival kept the focus too much on their annual November blast at the Cleveland Public Theatre, especially now that the OIFF runs special events and programs all year long. A selection of OIFF shorts has been screening this summer in Playhouse Square and on Adelphia Cable, and this month the group continues to teach local students nuts-and-bolts crew work, in an educational film-production training program in association with the Cleveland Municipal School District and the United Labor Agency.

And Annetta and Bernadette (plus the folks at MDI Films, a local production company closely affiliated with the OIFF) now facilitate emerging filmmakers through grants and line-producing. Hence the need for an identity change. "We actually produce the films with some low-budget filmmakers, independent people. The name 'Independent Pictures' more accurately reflects that," Marion says.

In what Marion calls a pure coincidence, a day after the OIFF formally announced its new name and mission at a late-July movie networking party, the Cleveland Film Society (who put on the lavish Cleveland International Film Festival in Tower City every March) formally disbanded its own five-year-old production and education wing, Cleveland Filmmakers. The streamlined CFS will continue to hold yearly Midwest Filmmaking Conferences as an adjunct to the International Film Festival, as well as "quarterly mixers" for those interested in getting into film. But otherwise, outgoing Cleveland Filmmakers chief Mara Evans has ceded the playing field wholly to Independent Pictures as Northern Ohio's only official training ground for the care and nurturing of the next Jeff Krulik or Robert Banks.

Or Annetta Marion and Bernadette Gillota, who in the last few years have gotten back into the swing of shooting their own films, after having exhibited and enabled so many others.

For more information on the programs and membership benefits offered by the revamped Independent Pictures, check out www.ohiofilms.com, or telephone the IP offices at (216) 651-7315.

Reel Independents
THE INDIE FIVE
by CHARLES CASSADY JR.

THEY WORK AS OFFICE TEMPS, WEB DESIGNERS AND ACCOUNTANTS. BUT THESE CLEVELANDERS' REAL PASSION IS MAKING FILMS

Every so often, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and Movieline magazines do the world a favor by publishing their "Power 100" lists of entertainment personalities. Now, here is the first-ever Free Times Impoverished Handful, a casual survey of local indie filmmakers.

Marcus Cook
Age: 28
Residence: Cleveland Heights
Education: Ohio School of Broadcasting
A manager at a local Regal Cinemas multiplex, Cook once co-hosted one of the few on-air Cleveland radio talk shows devoted to movies. Under the aegis of his Head 2 Head Productions, he's made a feature on digital video, Love in a Straightjacket, now viewable on the World Wide Web. Currently, writer-director Cook is in pre-production (raising money) for Dead Planet, a video horror-action-science fiction feature he describes as "sort of Dawn of the Dead meets Mad Max," shooting possibly this fall at locations around the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, with a cast of B-movie scream queens and character-actor stalwarts like Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes) and Reggie Bannister (Phantasm) on tap. Check out www.clevelandfx.com for more information.

DOES HE CONSIDER HIMSELF UNDERGROUND?
"George Lucas independent. I'd rather be mainstream -- independent leading to
mainsteam."

Laura Paglin
Age: 37
Residence: Cleveland Heights
Education: Grinnell College, Iowa; Cleveland Institute of Music.
No formal film training
A filmmaker since her high-school days in Oregon, Paglin and her Creative Filmmaker Associates have spent the past several years working on her first feature, Nightowls of Coventry, a comedy-drama set in and around an all-night greasy-spoon diner at the burnt-out tail end of the hippie era; through the stories of its downtrending denizens, Paglin intends to offer a dramatic snapshot of the famously counterculture titular Cleveland neighborhood. Its Super 16mm footage now in the can, Nightowls is being scored and edited in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

DOES SHE CONSIDER HERSELF UNDERGROUND?
"I'd rather not be. I feel as if I'm kind of digging myself into a hole. I'd rather be aboveground, where people can see me or my work. The more the merrier, after all that effort."

Robert C. Banks Jr.
Age: 35
Residence: Cleveland
Education: "Entirely self-taught," with one year at the Cleveland Institute of Art, two years in the United States Air Force
For 10 years, he's been at the forefront as Cleveland's most prominent DIY avant-garde/experimental filmmaker (and journeyman cinematographer), with his works not only exhibited stateside -- even at Sundance -- but also in retrospectives at international film festivals. A believer in the superiority of celluloid over video, Banks shoots, distorts, scratches, animates and draws directly on 8mm, Super 8mm, 16mm and, lately, 35mm formats, and has recently begun to try narrative. Despite his eminence (or perhaps because of it), he's chronically short on time and financing. Recently busy shooting a trailer for the Chicago Underground Film Festival, completing his detective short Crime Drunks, and planning to teach an editing course.

DOES HE CONSIDER HIMSELF UNDERGROUND?
"I'm not underground -- I'm underprivileged. I want people to see my stuff, too, but I want them to see it for the right reasons. I love the medium of cinema. Basically, I want to express my joy, and I want to share it with the masses. And that's the way a filmmaker should be. Underground is not so much where your film is as it's where you're at. It doesn't matter if it's London, Paris, Peru or wherever, as long as you've got a camera."

Shawn Wickens
Age: 26
Residence: Cleveland (Ohio City)
Education: Cleveland State University (master's in applied communications and methodology)
Affiliated with the MDI Film group, Wickens instituted a Summer Movie Boycott Marathon, as a way to raise money for the Ohio Independent Film Festival; since this May and running through November, he accepts pledges -- any amount -- for not seeing any new mainstream features in theaters (he will permit himself revivals or indie fare at the Cedar Lee, Madstone Centrum or the Cleveland Cinematheque). So far, he's accrued about $120; call (216) 621-4326 to join the non-telethon. As a filmmaker, Wickens has directed John Doe's A Business Day and is "going to start editing a bicycle messenger documentary that should have been finished a year and a half ago. I was operating on a budget of about 20 bucks." Works days as a temp, nights at public-access cable.

DOES HE CONSIDER HIMSELF UNDERGROUND?
"I guess I sort of go on both sides of the spectrum with that. I'd hesitate to consider myself 'underground,' because it's a term people have jumped on -- that and 'independent' -- and claimed themselves as [such] when they shouldn't have."

Johnny Wu
Age: 35
Residence: Cleveland
Education: Cleveland State University (MBA)
A martial artist and member of the International Karate and Kickboxing Hall of Fame, Wu has been making documentaries and narrative film since 1998. One of the founders of Media Design Imaging (MDI), a multimedia production outfit in the CSU area, he collaborates on website and DVD short-subject anthologies compiled by the online collective IndieClub. Current projects include the John Doe shorts (antics, usually unhappy ones, of an archetypal Everyman) and a dark comedy titled Warped Boxes. On the back burner, he's got MDI's Twisted, an ambitious 16mm first feature, a transgendered, multicultural martial-arts romance with thriller overtones (all that and based on fact, too!). Day jobs include accounting, web development, surveying, and commuting to Los Angeles to help run the site www.hollywoodcharities.com.

DOES HE CONSIDER HIMSELF UNDERGROUND?
"That's a tough question. Depending on the project I'm working on ... Some people think 'underground' is a cheap, sleazy kind of filmmaking. I think I'm more an independent filmmaker than cheap and sleazy."