What is the hilo film festival? Or Why $40 million can kill a good idea.

Originally organized in 1997 by the San Francisco production company
and comedy collective Killing My Lobster the hi/lo film festival has
evolved into a major West Coast showcase for independent low-budget
film makers. The fest runs in the Haight’s historic Red Vic Movie House
and Oakland’s pizza & pub Parkway Theater for three nights of shorts,
docs, narratives, experimentals and animations.

Now in its seventh year, the hi/lo film festival continues to prove that big
imaginations are more important than fat wallets. Films featured range
from animations, short narratives and abstract imagistic explorations to
micro-features, documentaries, and uncategorizable creations. Though
in most cases they are as different and distinct as night and day, the
films all belong in the same festival. They are high concept works made
on minimal budgets that place ideas and creativity over imitation and
slickness and each, in its own way, proves that talented, dedicated
people can bring their visions to the big screen.


celebrating high concept/low budget cinema
Hi-lights of the 2004 hilo film festival:
28 films will be screened at the festival including:

11 Films by Bay Area Filmmakers
Documentaries about: competitive table setting, grown men who
collect dolls, anti-war protests in San Francisco, sex workers in
Cambodia and Alabama’s obsession with the possum.

Monster Road – the feature length documentary about claymation
savant Bruce Bickford, Monster won 1st Place in the 2004 Slamdance
Documentary Film competition and is made by Brett Ingram and Jim
Havercamp --- hilo 2001 and 2002 alums

Famous Irish Americans – an 8 minute lo-fi lecture on race in America
as told with cameos by the Love Boat’s Gavin McLeod, Miss Piggy and
Shaquille O’Neal. The film, made by University of Florida film professor
Roger Warren Beebe is his third in a hilo film festival.

Hush – one of 6 documentaries in the festival this one is made by
Stanford Department of Communication’s MFA candidate Mike Seely
and follows a group of Bay Area naturalists as they traipse through the
woods - parabolic mics - in hand in search of sounds they just don’t
hear in the Financial District.