Eleven Festivals In, SPIFFest Still Dreams Big

This year will mark SPIFF’s 11th festival, but due to the closing of the Warner Grand Theatre for renovations in June, the festival is happening in February instead of later in the year. 

Ziggy Mrkich said the festival was supposed to have happened in November 2022 but she had to push it back to February 2023 to care for her mother in Croatia for several months. Mrkich said if she had it her way, she wouldn’t do it again in February given the schedule’s crowdedness.

Her resume includes stints as program director of the Catalina Film Festival and the Silver Lake Film Festival before founding the San Pedro International Film Festival in 2012. 

Mrkich said this year’s film offerings are mostly submissions, most of them short films in the categories of documentary, live-action, and 90-minute episodic webisodes and pilots for television. Then there is the screenplay competition, which features a lot of first-time filmmakers and screenwriters. Mrkich explained that through the years some interesting talents have come through the competition.

This go-round, some really important documentaries have been submitted to the festival including Beyond Homeless: Finding Hope and Reimagining Safety.

Director/writer Matthew Solomon, an alumnus of SPIFFest, was last at the festival with Sex, In Cars. This year his documentary film, Reimagining Safety, will be screened at the Warner Grand. 

She hoped one-day SPIFFest would grow to fill the void left by the Los Angeles Film Festival, which shut down more than four years ago, and brings attention to the arts that are produced in San Pedro and the Los Angeles Harbor Area.

At the time, the LA Film Festival’s board of directors reportedly said they were “struggling to thrive,” and concluded that the organization should explore a more nimble, sustainable form of exhibiting and celebrating independent film artists year round.

Mrkich noted that geographically, we’re not far enough out to be a destination festival like the Sundance or Palm Springs film festivals. 

“But we’re in the city of LA and I would really like the festival to become Oscar-qualifying,” she said. “But that would depend on the quality of the theaters we screen at and the number of short films we screen.” 

Mrkich noted that film lovers will always find their way to film festivals, while regular people may not always get it. But in towns that are destination festivals like Palm Springs, the surrounding community tends to love and support them. She said she has found the same to be true in San Pedro.

“I would love to build a festival into an event that is on the film festival map for Los Angeles,” Mrkich said. “That way it would make Pedro, which is always growing and developing that much more interesting for people to come down here.

“We just got to keep at it,” she said. “We’ll get there. It’ll take time and money but we’ll get there.”