Outside of the mainstream box office, it can be difficult to engage with the wide medium of film, the team at Blue House has used their limitations as an independent cinema, to diversify their programming and offer a different experience than a local Marcus.
Their upcoming short film series, titled Bodies, examines the human body as open-ended as possible. Scheduled over two days from Sept. 11-12, it entails a stunning mix of the carnal and the spiritual, using the theme to express various perspectives. It’s anything from close-ups of the human form to multi-media productions, to dance visuals, to the “physical body” of 16 or 35 MM film.
Cream City’s film community has plenty of heavy hitters, like Milwaukee Film’s yearly festival and routine showings. However, even with their support for smaller artists, the need for more open-minded spaces for filmmakers has only grown. In the past few years, a “no competition,” city-wide alliance of “microcinemas” has expanded to satiate the local film community.
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Blue House, a local microcinema, doesn’t have a set venue. Rather, they call for film submissions, review them and showcase them to the public at rented locations across Milwaukee, making them a launch point for cinematic connections. With accessible representation as the central thesis, they champion the experimental work of emerging artists.
“Even if you don’t have much experience in having someone show your work, you want to share that with other people,” said Blue House founding member Cecilia Downey. “Bigger organizations like Milwaukee Film are wonderful and they do great work, but that’s so much harder to break into.”
When founding members Cecilia Downey, Nadja Nordstrom, Oakley Mertes and technical advisor Nathan Strickland attended UW-Milwaukee as film students, they experienced hardships in screening their work outside of campus. The competitive, expensive submission processes to festivals and screenings, created a barrier for new artists. Blue House was built to clear those barriers and invite distinct perspectives to the Milwaukee film scene.
“It’s about connecting to the identity of the work on that deep level and being able to affirm to those people that their work is worth doing and there are people who are here to receive it,” said Nordstrom.
Now a year and a half in, Blue House is focused on keeping independent film accessible to create and watch. This means free submissions and an emphasis on diverse programming opportunities for queer, neurodivergent, people of color and women’s perspectives.
“There is so much social context around bodies, but also so much artistic potential,” Nordstrom says. “We can talk about disability, we can talk about race and we can talk about gender, because those are all things inherent to what we think of as the body.”
They called for shorts 15 minutes or less, containing the body in some manner and without AI usage. After posting on an open call website, they garnered over 150 local and international submissions – a chance to balance Milwaukee creativity with global flair.
“We watch all of them and then we just go through and decide what we want for the screening,” said Downey. “From there, we decide a lineup of what films we think would speak to each other in an interesting way, ordering it is a really challenging part of it.”
After applying and receiving a grant from The Open Fund, a Wisconsin-based visual arts support program, Blue House has experienced a newfound sense of financial freedom in the execution of Bodies. Though artists have always been paid for their work, the grant serves as a consistent form of payment to artists and rented venues.
“The grant allows us to continue programming for the future,” Nordstrom says. “I think the scale we do things at makes it sustainable, we don’t have to be shelling out $10 each for the venue or figuring out how much we can afford to pay filmmakers.”
Bodies will take place outdoors at Saint Jawn Cinema, a fellow microcinema in Riverwest, on the nights of Sept. 11 and 12. Bring your own chairs, snacks and, of course, a preparation to dive into all that concerns the body.
