By Samar Ismail

Filmmaker and creator of Stiffed, Michael Laicini – Photo by Samar Ismail

After their movie was rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival, filmmaker Michael Laicini and producer David Amito felt heartbroken, depressed, and dejected.

Those feelings didn’t last long, as dejection turned to innovation when they decided to start their own film festival strictly for the rejected: Stiffed.

The allusion to TIFF is clear, deliberate, and meant to be in good humour. Born in a moment of misery, their film festival turned out to be a great success and gave others who had been stiffed by TIFF the opportunity to showcase their talents.

“We had these real hopes and fantasies built into TIFF accepting our film,” says Amito. “When they didn’t, when we got that standard issue TIFF rejection letter, it was really heartbreaking.” The idea of creating their own film festival was like a bolt of lightning, says Laicini. “The idea just sort of hit us.”

“What’s stopping us from showing our movie in Toronto – during the Toronto film festival and maybe even grabbing some attention away from that festival in the process? And from that thought process, we invented this film festival,” he explains.

Originally, the intention was to only screen their movie but the idea quickly evolved into something bigger. “It occurred to us that we could make this a bigger deal,” says Laicini. “There’s hundreds of people in our exact same position who just got their rejection letters.”

Laicini and Amito wanted Stiffed to be an avenue for other filmmakers rejected by TIFF to screen their movies because they know how difficult it is to break into the film industry. “You kind of already have to be a somebody to be accepted into the Toronto film festival,” says Laicini. “And it’s not always fair.”

In its first year, Stiffed was held at the Camera Bar in downtown Toronto on the last night of TIFF and featured 13 short films of different genres. One film was by Eva Ziemsen, a Humber film professor and Laicini’s former teacher. Her documentary, A Conversation with Lars von Trier, won the Stiffed Spirit Award. Ziemsen faced difficulties in the making of her documentary because main subject and namesake Lars von Trier would not agree to be interviewed – but Ziemsen persisted until she got one. Perseverance in the face of rejection resonates very clearly with the Stiffed’s message.

Ziemsen felt honoured to receive the Spirit Award and says with a laugh, “it just goes to show that it’s a very small industry and the people who you teach are the ones who are going to be letting you into their film festival.”

Laicini and Amito “didn’t pout, they didn’t take it as a negative. They created something new which probably is going to have a lot of momentum and support because they’re not alone,” Ziemsen says. “There’s many people who are rejected and to kind of celebrate the people who were not included but deserve to be shown, I think that’s such a positive outcome out of a rejection.”

Ziemsen shares that “never give up” mantra: “I think it’s really important for any filmmaker who is rejected from something to know that it’s not the end of the world – and sometimes being rejected makes you go much bigger and better than you thought you could. So sometimes a rejection will make you grow and think of a more innovative way to do something than had you been accepted.”

Photo courtesy Stiffed Film Festival

Still, Amito and Laicini respect the larger festival and made it very clear that Stiffed was not in any way meant to insult TIFF, nor do they want to be an adversary. “The reality is, we would say that if a filmmaker is starting out, there’s no way we can say just submit to Stiffed, you should submit to TIFF,” Amito says. “I mean, it’s a huge festival and it stands to give you a lot of exposure, let’s not dance around that. That’s why TIFF is great. So submit to TIFF, it’s just that if you don’t get accepted, there’s another avenue to look at.”

“We don’t care about trumping the Toronto Film Festival or being more popular or being better or any of those things,” says Laicini. “It’s not really a competition for us. How we like to look at Stiffed is not as a competitor but an extension of their film festival.”

A dream come true for Laicini would be if TIFF one day reached out to Stiffed as a sponsor. “Although we play with being combatant, antagonistic with Toronto, we ultimately just want to be their little brother,” jokes Laicini.

Laicini would like for the impact of Stiffed to be “Rockyesque. It has the quality of the underdog, as in it doesn’t matter how many times someone puts me down or says no or says that maybe I’m not good enough or whatever, I’m not going to let that stop me from doing what I want to do.”

Optimism was essential to their success. Rejection is already hard enough; Amito and Laicini only had around a month to organize the entire festival.

“It was a lot of hassle to find the venue and finally to find submissions. In under four weeks we had to put so much word out there to get people to know that there’s this other film festival,” says Laicini.“We paid for a ton of advertising; we threw posters up all over the city.”

They plastered eye-catching and iconic posters throughout Toronto. Vancouver-based graphic designer Chris von Szombathy brought the poster to life, and said it “was going to be one of those things that will definitely leave an impression. No doubt about it.” Von Szombathy says the provocative image – the CN tower and two strategically placed film reels – left a positive impression on most people. The reception was “really positive and definitely got a good laugh. I think most people really got the humour in it really, really quickly.”

In the end, Laicini and Amito ended up $2,000 in debt but they hope to attract corporate sponsorships as the festival grows. “The intention is to make it bigger, to make it more exposed and to reach more people,” says Amito. Other goals for the upcoming festival are to have it run for two days during the last weekend of TIFF, to showcase more movies from different categories, and if time and resources allow, showcase a feature length film.

Even though Stiffed is a film festival for the rejected, they also had to stiff others as well which was difficult.

“We were fully aware of the fact that we probably had to turn away people from our film festival at the end of the day and what that meant for us,” says Laicini. He explained that being rejected from a film festival does not mean you’re a bad filmmaker or your movie wasn’t good, but is an issue of practicality.

Amito explains “the reality of the situation is that we can only screen ‘X’ number of films because of the time allocations that we have, and every film festival will have to make rejections. Although in our case it is exceptionally hard to reject because we are a film festival for the rejected.”

Ultimately, Amito says “the impact of Stiffed is just to send out that kind of energy, of just make it, make it, make it, go, go, go, whether you’re rejected or accepted, just keep going. That’s the impact that we hope to get and the more exposure that we can get as a film festival, the more I think we can get that message out there.”

“The film industry is a bitter, cold, cynical place, and it’s nice to have little moments of optimism,” says Laicini. “And that’s what I think Stiffed was. It was a moment of optimism.”