Behind the FICAT

an Author's Film Festival made by an author

My name is Jerzain Ortega, an Experimental Filmmaker/animator and creator of FIC AUTOR. I began my film career as a make-up artist in Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto", following this, I made a low budget/ one man crew movie and what I consider my film school: "Diary of a misfit". Then, with a 2 people crew, I made my first professional feature film: "Telephone", which had it's International Premier at Tirana International Film Festival (TIFF 21) and I won the "Best Screenplay" award, one of the only 3 awards given to feature films. Later I made "Lugubrious", with a 3 people crew and a budget of only 3,250 USD cash and premiering at Macabro FICH, the best horror film festival in Mexico.

As an animator, I'm in the making of my first animated feature, but with my first short, "Chewing-Gum", I was lucky enough to be selected in 4 of the coolest Animated film festivals like ANIBAR Animation Festival, GIFF 28 Guanajuato International Film Festival, 19th BIG CARTOON Festival, LINOLEUM Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival and ANIMA LATINA Festival de Cine de Animación Latinoamericano, were I had my International Premier.

This is my background. I have a lot of experience in Low-Budget filmmaking and working with a minimalistic crew and equipment.

I made FIC AUTOR to discover, celebrate and award filmmakers like me, who can compensate the budget with creativity, who think outside the box and create novelty images and concepts. I wanted to create a festival that I would be proud to compete in.

Who gives a cat!

When I started to look for festivals after I made my first feature film, I noticed that there was something really wrong and also something missing...

There are 13,000 film festivals. I bet 90% are scams or made by people who thought that making a film festival was an easy fast-cash business and then they gave up their values and vision after the first or second edition.

For me it was so annoying to surf FilmFreeway looking for good festivals, spending hours reading false copy-paste values, complaints about glass trophies with a price tag and discovering the existence of the online festival world... I learned a lot about this second phase of being a filmmaker and I realized that the only people who benefits from these festivals are the filmmakers who are really bad but still, they have a thousand bullshit-festival laurels on their posters and so they claim they are good directors, they get exposure by naive journalists, they get grants from the Department of Culture and they even get hired by brands.

This network is a big part of the problem Cinema is facing. There is too much content. A new pile of crappy films is made every month and out of nowhere, a new bullshit festival is born just to give a golden-star laurel to each of these films.

But this is not the only problem. On top of the 90% of these 13k film festivals, there is the remaining 10%, the good ones and among those, many are either plagued by bureaucracy or trending politics. They always benefit the superstars, the big names, just to get more sponsors and they are run by people who have never hold a camera before... People who think that the "filmmaker" with one arm, living in the mountains, deciding to make a statement about their sexuality, deserves a better chance, a spot, a voice, an extra point. They think that being woke is more important than selecting or awarding the artist who actually has something to say, who is innovating, who is taking risks and creating never seen images made with an HD camera.

In cinema, just like in any other art field, the people who are not artists are the gatekeepers for new artists. I thought that was stupid and unfair and wanted to make a change by creating FIC AUTOR, an objective festival.

It is really hard to survive without the celebrity-craver sponsors, but after many years, we're still here, finding, giving a space, celebrating, awarding and promoting new talented voices, the hidden gems of cinema around the world.

And we're not alone of course. And, yes, there are very good festival directors who might not be filmmakers themselves, but they're enthusiasts and are surrounded by professionals and have created a spotlight for the creative minds. We're starting a network with grounded and objective film festivals around the world, so we can help the filmmakers to discover valuable film festivals without the never ending scrolling on FilmFreeway.

dir. Jerzain Ortega