Fred Andrews
When 62-year-old Fred Andrews died on Feb. 24 after a five-year battle with cancer, he left behind more than the nationally recognized film festival he created from scratch.
He also passed on to those who knew him a lesson in perseverance. “Can’t” was not part of his vocabulary.
In 1997, Andrews founded the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee, which since has merged with the Kansas City International Film Festival.
You’d expect a guy who founded a film festival to be some sort of cineaste. A film professor, perhaps, or a filmmaker.
Andrews was neither (though in the weeks before his death he completed a documentary about Kansas City barbecue and music). He was a big, bearded guy in jeans and plaid shirt who did tech work for Sprint.
Andrews was a film lover, but not in an academic or intellectual sense. He knew next to nothing about film theory, film production or film criticism.
He was just a guy who got a thrill from going to the movies, which is why he volunteered to work with the Kansas City Film Society.
There Andrews met local filmmakers, an underground army of aspiring moviemakers toiling in obscurity, working day jobs and devoting their weekends to capturing their dreams on film. They relied on volunteer casts and crews and financed their low-budget efforts by hook or by crook, all in the hope that someone would see their work.
“They all told me that their biggest need, other than money, is an audience,” Andrews would say. “I thought that was something we could help them with.’’
So he got to work organizing the first Jubilee, which ran for one weekend and featured 23 entries from local film and video artists.
By the second year the number of films exhibited had tripled, and Andrews had enlisted partners like the Film Society, the Independent Filmmakers Coalition, UMKC Continuing Education Arts & Sciences and the Kansas City Art Institute
By the fourth year the fest had ballooned into a nine-day extravaganza. Not only did filmmakers from all over the globe fly into town to show their movies, but the Jubilee offered seminars on cinema technology and financing geared to the needs of struggling filmmakers. (more…)
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