Filmmakers explore worldwide artistry right at home during Lynchburg Film Festival

For Sam Housman, film feels like home — literally.

He’s built the set for his 10-episode sci-fi comedy series, “Escape Pod,” in the basement of his Lynchburg house. He can see the glow of the life-size spaceship, complete with a blinking control panel and a porthole that looks out to the stars, before he reaches the bottom step. He needs to pivot a camera rig and lighting fixture out of the way to get to his washer and dryer. The laundry hamper, he said with a chuckle, is not part of the set.

Film feels like home because it’s been Housman’s passion since he was five years old, he said. As a child, he always had a VHS camcorder within reach. In 10th grade, he recorded a short film — using his grandparents’ house and a La Carreta restaurant as sets and his uncle as the star actor — and submitted it to Sundance, just to prove to himself that a future in the industry was possible. 

“I think 10th-grade Sam would see this escape pod set and be like, ‘Oh yeah, we really upped production,’” Housman said, reflecting on how far his craft has come over the past decade. “I think he’d be pretty excited about it. But then he’d be like, ‘You gotta be doing more.’”

Housman hasn’t accomplished his dream of working full-time in the film industry yet. After working a 9-to-5, he writes scripts, edits videos, and directs This is a Film About Something Productions from 5-to-9, or often later. In an industry that relies heavily on networking and name recognition, it’s hard to launch a career in Lynchburg, he said. 

“Finding the right connections is kind of hard to do in central Virginia,” he said. “I’ve got projects I want to pitch, but it’s hard to get in offices or even know who to talk to.”

That’s where the Lynchburg Film Festival comes in, Housman said. The event brings local film enthusiasts together to showcase their work, connect with each other and observe cutting-edge art from directors across the country and around the world. 

The festival will screen 40 flicks on Saturday at the Historic Academy Theatre, ranging from drama to documentary genres and hailing from over a dozen countries. Although the festival is only two years old, it is growing fast, Housman said. To compare, the Virginia Film Festival — the state’s oldest and largest event of the kind, according to the Virginia Film Office — has 88 screenings listed in its 2025 program. 

Husband-and-wife team Alex and Natalie Zhort direct the festival and say it’s a crucial resource for local filmmakers to understand the world of creatives that they’re a part of. 

“You’re here in Lynchburg making films in the backyard or down the street with what little money you have, with a lot of passion,” Alex Zhort said. “We say, ‘Here’s someone from China doing the same thing. Here’s someone from Brazil doing the same thing.’ We’re all unified in the sense that we’re independent, low-budget filmmakers trying to make a mark on something and trying to get our stories out there.” 

Bringing a world of film to Lynchburg

On Saturday, Lynchburg will have visitors from France and Philadelphia and many places in between, Zhort said, as filmmakers travel to see their work on the big screen. 

“People are learning the word ‘Lynchburg’ for the first time through the film festival,” Zhort said. 

Lynchburg doesn’t have a movie theater that shows independent films, Zhort said, so the Lynchburg Film Festival is the only place to see work that is on the cutting edge of the industry. 

While independent, international films are entertaining for any audience, they provide education and insight for rising filmmakers, Zhort said. They reveal the most current trends and styles, and show what’s possible when creativity is set free, he said. Those elements often aren’t captured in mainstream movies, which take years to be created and are controlled by big studios with prescribed goals. 

“None of the films we show are high budget, and they’re not funded by any company. So they’re truly independent films,” he said. “We’re seeing something that’s not filtered through corporate sensors or marketing tests.”

For Chris Gaumer, it doesn’t matter where in the world films come from, because they all speak to the same human experience. 

He tried to capture that in his documentary, “Six Questions,” which will be screened at the Lynchburg Film Festival. On a cross-country drive from Lynchburg to LA, Gaumer stopped 100 strangers outside gas stations, grocery stores and hotels and asked them the same series of six prompts. He edited the answers together to create a story arc for each set of responses, he said. 

“I wrote prompts that were universal but specific, where you get to really learn something about people,” Gaumer said. “Specific questions can open up what is human very quickly, and what is personal very quickly.” 

His favorite part of the festival is not that serious, though, he said as he laughed. The event is special because he gets to watch movies with people who love them as much as he does, he said. It’s a welcome burst of creativity that he can apply to his job as the M.F.A. Assistant Director at Randolph College, his writing career and his film projects, he added. 

Supporting a local film community

Housman and Gaumer presented films at last year’s festival, too, and were part of the wave of filmmakers that convinced the Zhorts how crucial a resource the festival is to the Lynchburg community. 

The Zhorts said they expected about 50 people to attend the 2024 festival; 300 packed into the theater instead. 

“All these filmmakers started coming out of the woodwork here,” Natalie Zhort said. “There’s a huge local community here that we need to promote and be able to show their films. That opportunity is pretty invaluable when you’re starting out, especially here.” 

The film festival world often isn’t accessible, Alex Zhort said. At the world’s top festivals — think Sundance and Cannes — movies need a big budget and a big studio to even be considered. At mid-tier film festivals — think, nearby, the Virginia Film Festival and Atlanta Film Festival — filmmakers often need a strong resume as a prerequisite; those events are called “marketplace festivals,” Zhort said, because they connect directors with studios and distributors that want to buy films and put them on streaming services. 

“At those, you’re trying to make a deal, you’re trying to make contacts,” Zhort said. “If you’re a nobody, it’s possible [to get in], but you need to make a really really really good film.”

Often, the only way to advance to that mid-tier level is to get experience at regional festivals, like the Lynchburg Film Festival, Zhort said. Those events offer filmmakers the opportunity to network with other creatives in the area, get ideas for how to improve or simply celebrate hard work as it’s displayed on the big screen. 

Housman said the festival provides a helpful network of the many artists it takes to pull off an independent film, including writers, editors, actors, producers and directors, that would be difficult to establish otherwise.

“People are doing great work in little old Lynchburg. It’s just eye-opening to see that this talent exists here,” he said. “And we have to be tight knit in an area of Virginia that is kind of under-represented in film.”

The network can be especially important for student filmmakers, Zhort said, who come from Liberty University’s film and cinematic arts program, Randolph College’s film and video department and other local schools’ media tracks. 

“People come out of these departments and have real talent and have a drive to make a career out of it, and that’s hard to do when you’re in a smaller town and not able to have the same resources that you might have in Atlanta or Charlotte,” he said.

About a quarter of the films at this year’s event were created by artists in the Lynchburg area, Zhort said. Even if they don’t walk away with any business cards, they get the opportunity to share their work with an audience, which is central to the creative process, he added. 

“When you screen it with an audience, it feels very different. The parts that were supposed to be funny aren’t sometimes; the parts that are supposed to be scary aren’t as scary; people laugh at a part you didn’t think was funny,” Zhort said. “Almost everyone that screens at a film festival runs home and fixes it. At least that’s what I do.”

Gathering ideas for scrappy filmmaking

Suzanne Ramsey, who wrote and directed “The Grand Hopwood Hall,” which will be screened at the festival, said she’s most excited to see how other artists make something out of nothing.

Her Wes-Anderson-style film, which was recorded at the University of Lynchburg where she works as a writer and editor in the communications department, had no budget, she said. She relied on a friend to sew elements of costumes, students and professors to volunteer as actors and staff at the school’s facilities department to take apart wood pallets so she could have material to build props. 

So, for her, “It’s just fun seeing what people can do without a budget. Maybe they’ll give me ideas for next time,” she said.

Ramsey has had many careers throughout her life: journalist, detective and office manager, to name a few. She’s held onto her hobby of film through it all, she said, because every time she volunteers to help with a project, “it’s just always the most fun thing I’ve ever done.”

That joy is tangible in “The Grand Hopwood Hall,” with Ramsey and other artists’ laughter preserved in the last scene instead of edited out, she said. They couldn’t contain their chuckles when an English professor busted out some quirky dance moves to match her eccentric character, Mrs. Pumpernickel.

“I would want to be working in film in some capacity full-time, but I don’t know if that will ever happen. If not, or until then, I’ll just take these opportunities when they present themselves,” she said. 

Housman also said there’s an art to preserving joy on set — and making something out of nothing in the process. Much of his fun came from collecting trash to recycle into his spaceship set, he said. Over the course of a year and a half, he gathered whatever unique items he could find, such as bus seats sold for $5 on Facebook Marketplace, huge styrofoam packing blocks that came in a TV box, a light-up Montessori sensory toy and trinkets from thrift stores. 

“I hope it encourages other filmmakers to just do it,” he said of his piecemeal set. “If you have something in your mind, you have to just get up and try and see what comes together.”

Looking back, and ahead, for the Lynchburg Film Festival

The festivals’ directors have needed to be scrappy, too. 

Zhort said he needed a budget of about $30,000 to pull off a “bare bones” festival this year. He only received about $9,000 from sponsors, which left the Zhort family to pay the rest on their own and reduce expenses where possible. 

If the festival can secure funding in a more sustainable way, Natalie Zhort said, “we’re wanting this to be a staple in Lynchburg and become an annual tradition.”

Both Alex and Natalie Zhort work in the film industry and have gone to festivals of all sizes and competition levels across the country. Bringing an event to Lynchburg was a happy accident at first, they said. 

“We didn’t really mean to start a festival. It just kind of evolved out of some ideas, and we moved from one step to the other, and here we are,” Alex Zhort said of the 2024 event. 

Initially, Zhort just wanted to host a watch party with his friends. He had just seen an experimental movie at a festival in New York City that impressed him, and he wanted to share it with Lynchburg film enthusiasts. 

The watch party grew as more people expressed interest in it, and the Zhorts began adding other movies to the watch list, opening a platform for submissions and finding a theater space to rent. In the end, they screened 22 films to about 300 audience members. 

“We saw how much people liked it, and how well it works here, and how everything came together,” Zhort said. “Last year, people were already saying, ‘I want to submit next year.’”

This year, the festival received about 250 submissions and will be screening a total of 40 films — some selected from the pool and others requested by special invitations from the Zhorts. 

The Zhorts said there’s too much momentum to stop now. The happy accident has adapted into a strategic mission: “Half of our days are spent talking about next year already,” Alex Zhort said in an interview just days before the Oct. 25 event. 

The Zhorts formed a nonprofit called the Lynchburg Film Institute in January to support the festival and are working on applying for 501(c)(3) status now, Natalie Zhort said. As the nonprofit collects donations, the Zhorts hope to expand programming with film workshops, director Q&As, special screenings, and more throughout the year, leading up to annual full-day festivals. 

Meanwhile, Lynchburg’s filmmakers will keep doing what they love. 

Housman is already dusting off his spaceship control panel to record a second season of “Escape Pod.”