The Ladies of Bushwick’s Film Festival

Kweighbaye Kotee and Laree Ross are not even 26-years-old and already they are celebrating the third year of their beloved side project, a film festival in their community, which has generated enough buzz that this year’s festivities came equipped with free beer thanks to sponsorships from Anheuser-Busch, Smuttynose Brewery, Magic Hat and Original Sin. The ladies teamed up with Sarah O’Donoghue who curated “The Sum of Nothing,” the art show inside of Lumenhouse the venue where the three-day festival took place.

We sat down with the young designer, Laree, hours prior to the doors officially opening who walked us through the preparations of the festival and how it all began. “Kweighbaye approached me, she was looking for an art director, and I love film and live in Bushwick and it just seemed like the right thing to do,” she said.

“We’ve known each other since college,” she continued, “she’s an avid film lover as am I. She had the idea and wanted me to be her business partner.” But it wasn’t all fun and games the girls hadn’t realized how much time and effort they would have to put into all of the preparations, “The first year, we didn’t know anything! It was fun because we had no expectations so when things worked out, they just did, and when they didn’t they just didn’t. But we had so much fun.” The preparations take months, “We prepare for the festival probably six months in advance. [You first have] to get the films and that takes half that time. Then the months leading to the festival are nonstop.”

The roster on this year’s festival featured, “A lot of documentaries, We actually jokingly said we should probably call ourselves the silent Bushwick Film Festival because we have so many submissions that were silent. They were all wonderful it was very difficult to choose,” she said.

Also wonderful are the documentaries that made the cut, “The documentaries are really wonderful. This week marks the 4^th anniversary of [Hurricane] Katrina and this year we have a submission titled “Wade in the Water” which follows children and [documents] their homes during the devastation.” The film described as a “poetic and devastating look at life in New Orleans through the eyes of its children” was set to premiere that Saturday. “We realized that it’s good to feature [films] that are short and then show one full-length at the end of the night. This year we had a lot more submissions” making the selection process all the more difficult.

As far as the future is concerned all the girls want is for the festival to live on and grow grander each year, “We just want to get bigger and bigger. We want everything to [eventually] be free, we want everyone to come. Even though we’re getting sponsors now we don’t want to raise any prices, we want it to be something that is accessible to all. We definitely want bigger names to get involved, to have more people [attending] and have major posters that other people can do for us,” she said with a chuckle.