Last month, on April 23rd, 2011, Miami’s underground culture spent their evening at The Performing Arscht Center to presence the seventh screening of The Borscht Film Festival, an organization born in 2004 when a group of friends from the New World School of Arts came together to make films. Borscht Film Festival, once a school project is now a key component to the city redefining Miami’s art, film and cultural scenes.
WFK talked to some of the directors of BFF VII, see video below as we captured the director’s insight about their experience making the film, their love towards Miami and our culture.
*BORSCHT 7, the Main Screening Night for this year’s Borscht Film Festival— Miami’s fresh, local independent film festival—brought a record crowd of more than 2,100 to the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall. By 7pm, a full hour before the show began, more than 700 people stood without tickets in the stand-by line, which stretched around the Knight Concert Hall and continued two full blocks to 12th St and N. Bayshore Drive. Eventually, 350 were squeezed in from the stand-by line, and more than 350 people had to be turned away entirely.
The 1,787 who were able to make it into the theater saw 24 brand-new films about Miami made by local, cross-disciplinary artists. Most of the films (19 of the 24) were commissioned and created specifically for BORSCHT 7 by the Borscht Film Festival, in their mission to forge Miami’s cinematic identity by redefining Miami in film. Production on the commissioned films began February 7st, and wrapped on April 8th—meaning 19 films were created, shot, and edited— in less than 60 days.
The films will now be sent off to compete and screen in other film festivals the world over. A representative from Vice Magazine attended BORSCHT 7, and now two films—“I Am Your Grandma” by Jillian Mayer, and “Man O War” by Coral Morphologic + Geologist (Animal Collective), will debut Friday, April 29th on Vice Magazine’s www.viceland.com. Several films from last year’s BORSCHT 6 screened or competed at the Cannes, Sundance, and Tribeca Film Festivals, and in the Guggenheim museums in New York City, Venice, Bilbao, and Berlin.
The Borscht Film Festival, a recent recipient of a two-year, $150,000 Knights Arts Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, was incredibly grateful for the turnout. Borscht’s Milton Garcia believes “Saturday night’s amazing turnout signifies the support the community has for the deep cultural shift occurring in Miami. We are immensely proud to be a part of the wholesale redefining of our young city.”
“The overwhelming response was only matched by the filmmakers’ creativity and skill,” said Dennis Scholl, vice president/arts for Knight Foundation. “Miami is hungry for stories that truly reflect the city, and Saturday night we got them.”
*Text Provided by Borscht
Wasabi:::Fashion Aficionado/puzzle solver
Creator of Wasabi Fashion Kult. A magazine documenting how the underground culture is expressing itself through fashion, music and art 
