Inaugural Heavy Metal Film Festival Planned
Los Angeles and the Downtown Independent Cinema will host the inaugural Heavy Metal Film Festival, which is slated to take place March 31 through April 3. That's also right around the time of the annual Revolver Golden Gods Awards, so downtown LA will be so metal, it'll crap iron ore this spring.
Samuel Douek -- a metalhead since he was 6 and director of the Hola México Film Festival -- conceived and is birthing the Heavy Metal Film Festival. The recent success of metal-themed films like 'Metal: A Headbanger's Journey,' 'Heavy Metal In Baghdad,' 'Anvil! The Story of Anvil,' 'Lemmy' and 'Until the Light Takes Us' proved to Douek that there is a cultural demand for a film festival of this ilk.
"I love movies and I love heavy metal," Douek told Noisecreep. "And I think this festival gives me the opportunity to work with both things. And lucky for me, there's a lot of great metal films out there, and our mission will be to find the next big filmmakers in metal."
Professional filmmakers aren't the only artists on Douek's radar for the festival. "Many bands out there are touring, recording, being followed by their camera. So we want to inspire the camera and editors to make cool films and send them to us," he said. So if you're out there collecting footage while you are on the road, you might have a place to showcase the end result.
Douek's primary objective for the still-developing Heavy Metal Film Festival is to "bring the metal community together to watch our music on the big screen. There's a bright future for metal films, and I want to have a platform to launch them, promote them and support them. I also want to have some great [question and answer sessions] with directors and maybe even some surprise guests."
Decibel magazine and Nuclear Blast Records are sponsoring the Heavy Metal Film Fest, as well.
There is still an open call for submissions, which can include full-length features, documentaries, shorts, making-of videos and live concerts. The only required theme is that the footage focus on heavy metal music. This is the Heavy Metal Film Festival, after all. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 4. The program for the Heavy Metal Film Festival will be finalized Feb. 18.