We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tashina Southard a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tashina, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Sometimes when I tell people that horror movies matter, they look at me like I have three heads. But they do. In my opinion, Horror, more than many other genres holds up a mirror to the anxieties and changes happening in our society.

About 10 years ago I created a horror web series. When I founded it I wanted to be a writer/director, which is how I think most filmmakers start. But I set an ambitious goal for myself. I wanted to release a new short film every week. To do that I had to bring in other writers and directors as well. These creatives brought ideas and perspectives I never would have imagined. It felt more fulfilling to support and collaborate with these artists than simply creating my own work and ideas. And it set me on a path towards producing and working in production that I am still on today.

Last summer my industry went on strike, leaving those of us who work in film and are immersed in media at a creative and professional standstill. I took the downtime to re-examine my goals and look at other ways to achieve them outside of employment in the film industry. I thought a lot about how what I loved was sharing and curating stories, showing people new things, and supporting my fellow artists.

Motivated by my passion for storytelling and a desire to showcase diverse narratives I created the Anthology Film Festival. I curated a set of amazing films that touched on heartache and grief. That looked at our relationship to work, to sex, to technology, and trauma. Films that let people be scared in a safe way, and a chance to feel their repressed anxiety and get a release.

During the submission process for the festival, I started getting emails from filmmakers in Iran asking for waivers. These filmmakers, constrained by sanctions and censorship, still worked passionately to create films. They told me about permits they had to get from the government to make any film. They told me about the limitations to what they could film, and about losing licenses. They told me about being banned from making films in their country and then making them anyway. They sent me films that were banned, that would land them in jail or worse if they screened in Iran. We programmed a block of underground and independent Iranian cinema.

We screened films about ghosts and grief that had our audience in tears. In the Q&A with filmmakers audience members shared their own experiences with grief and loss – all from a ghost story. We also had jump scares, comedy, and fair amount of gore (it is a horror festival after all) Ultimately we were able to showcase a broad slice of our shared human experience through scary movies.

The other goal of the festival is to help films find distribution and help build income streams for the filmmakers. Short films especially can often be a huge expense with no payoff. It’s very “art for art’s sake” but art takes financial patronage and support. We’ve started taking the first steps towards making this a reality and hopefully supporting filmmakers to keep creating stories. There are a few things we want to do better, but year one built a solid foundation to keep doing this work.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I did not take a path straight to film. I knew I wanted to be involved early on, but I didn’t know it was something a person like me could do as a career. I studied art and made short films. I worked as a chef, I worked on corporate creative teams, and as a creative director. All that time, I would take my time off to go work on films. I would cash out my vacation days to go PA on a set or shoot a documentary. At 34 I decided to go to grad school for film. It’s an industry where you absolutely don’t need degrees, but it helped me tremendously. Not just the curriculum, but an understanding of what that career could look like. I started working before I finished and defended my thesis via Zoom from the production offices on Macgyver.

Whether I’m working in a support position or producing indie work, I think my background in other industries strengthens my problem-solving skills on set. That’s most of what creative producing is, locating resources and solving problems. The rest is elevating the work. Film is collaborative, so you have to always be looking for what you can add that still is in keeping with your director’s vision.

It’s one part figuring out what to add to support the director’s vision and one part clearing the way for that vision to be realized. If your directors are worried about the logistics or budget the end result won’t be as strong. I work to take things off their plate so they can focus on the creative decisions and know everything else is on track.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Take creative jobs seriously. It would be amazing for society to understand that art adds value to our culture and is a legitimate profession. It takes years of discipline and practice to build creative skill sets. If someone spends years learning how to wire a house or the ins and outs of bookkeeping, we would never ask them for free work because they “love what they do”. We compensate them for their skills. When we as a society view creative work as just a hobby or expect everything to be a passion project with no economic return, we relegate art-making and creativity only to economically privileged perspectives. Taking it seriously is more than just supporting with how we spend our dollars. It’s asking for a shift in how we perceive creative careers. Outside of this, improvements to arts education and community art would be huge. There is a long list of researched benefits for arts education in the community, fostering an appreciation for creative work early is good for both the students and the creatives in the community.
We should also be teaching students early on about creative careers, and what the possibilities look like. I didn’t know anyone who made a living on a film set until I was well into my 20s. I took time off to PA on feature sets for fun, like a hobby because I didn’t understand creative paths any other way at the time. As a society, we could do so much more to show people the opportunities available in creative fields. Going back to taking creative careers seriously, there are lucrative paths that already exist, but we don’t show potential creative professionals what doors to walk through to find them by labeling the work as unserious.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I graduated into the Great Recession, so I was broke for most of my twenties. I was determined to change that. I worked like mad and saved every extra cent I had for a year. I had more money in savings than I had ever had in my life. And then my apartment building caught on fire, twice in the same day. I found myself staying in someone’s spare room and losing half my belongings. It took every penny I had saved to get a new place to live and not even replace what I had lost. It was really scary to know all the financial incentives of my work could be gone in a day. Instead of becoming hopeless watching what felt like all my work disappear, I decided to shift my perspective. Every time I felt down about it, I focused on how lucky I was I had the funds to start over, even if it took all of them. And I started rebuilding that fund again. Within a few years, I had paid off debt, bought my first house, and found ways to increase my income and devote more time to my creative journey.

The goals that started the process seem so small now. Since then I’ve made more in a day than the amount that the fire drained from my accounts, and it took me a year to save. And so many milestones, financial and creative, felt the same way once I pushed past them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.anthologyfilmfestival.com/
• Instagram: tashina.southard
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tashina-southard-916828155

Image Credits
1 2 3-Julius Jones 4-Julius Jones