Red carpet night in Los Anchorage

When you’ve got everything you need for your film premiere—a theater reserved, movie posters and at least a metaphorical red carpet—but your film is only 14 minutes long, how do you make a full night of the event.

If you’re in Anchorage, you invite the better part of the local film community to come together to watch not only your premiere, but a dozen or so of theirs, and before you know it, you’ve got a full house at the Alaska Experience Theater with a bustling lobby before and after.

Director Carl Weber and writer/producer/actor Jessie Wei took that tactic Saturday night to launch an Anchorage premiere of their film, *In the Now*, the screenplay for which Wei entered for consideration in next month’s Beverly Hills Film Festival. Her work was accepted, and next month she’ll be headed to California to not only try to make in-roads to benefit her career, but the Alaska film scene, as a whole.

“I just want to meet people I can collaborate with, but my biggest goal is to grow the Alaska film industry. I see a lot of talent in Alaska and we want to show the world what we can do,” Wei says. “The reality is you can make really beautiful films here for a third of the price, but a lot of people don’t do that because they don’t think we have the talent up here.”

Wei’s film, she said, was inspired by her dog, now since passed.

“It’s a sad story, a love story and we hope to make people cry,” Wei says, adding that her 9-page script took 13 rewrites. “You remove anything you don’t need and make it beautiful.”

'In the Now' is Wei’s first go at writing after acting in a number of local films, including a handful shown Saturday night. She stars opposite local actor Greg Rowland, who appeared in even more of Saturday night’s films than Wei did.

“It’s gonna feel like there’s people chopping some onions in there,” says Rowland, departing from his usual comedic role to play the anguished husband of a dying woman. “It will make everyone pretty sad if it does its job.”

Wei, who acted mostly in television commercials in her native Australia before moving to Alaska, said the intensity of the film’s scenes took their toll.

“My training is in method acting, and a few times I said to Gary, ‘I’m going to need a massage after this,’” she says. “This film makes you go to really dark places and you only want to stay there for a few seconds.”

After the show, stretched out to better than an hour-and-a-half with local films dating all the way back to the 2012 Anchorage Film Festival, 'In the Now' drew rave reviews from colleagues in its debut.

“I thought it was good enough to be a feature film already,” says Briana Thibodeaux, an actor in *Dive Back*, another film on the showcase list. “It looks like a film I would go to a regular theater and watch.”

Joshua Branstetter, the director of *Dive Back*, says events like Saturday’s are exactly what the local film scene needs.

“I really think this is the tenor of what is needed to foster something bigger. We all have unique perspectives and we all want to do something more, something different,” Branstetter says. “We want to have not just a film community, but a film industry.”

Branstetter says local cinema suffered a setback when the state legislature voted to abolish the state tax credit for filmmakers in 2016.

“Things are obviously changing in America, but the great thing is Alaska is its own thing,” he says. “Our goal is to make microbudget films … when you don’t have a million dollars you can do whatever you want. We need to push the envelope and tell crazy stories. Where can you get that? Nowhere but Alaska. We’re all big dreamers.”

Branstetter says he’s putting the finishing touches on a feature film which he hasn’t titled as yet, but another Alaska full-length feature film ready to hit the big screen on Aug. 1 premiered its trailer at Saturday’s event.

'Peaks and Valleys', directed by Michael Burns, stars Kevin T. Bennett as Jack, a loner in the Alaska wilderness, has his solitude disrupted when he rescues a young woman, played by Kitty Mahoney, from a plane crash next to his cabin.

“People are starting to take it more seriously out here. A lot more people are buying gear and getting professional about it,” Burns says of the Alaska scene. “Over the last 10 years it’s expanded so much.”

Back in her native Australia, Wei acted in a number of television commercials, but since arriving in Alaska she’s found a home for a wider range of her talents.

“The film industry is very much my love now,” Wei says. “As these films show, there’s a lot of talent here and people very passionate about what they do. What we don’t have is people coordinating things. Once we get that, we’ll have awesome content and I think the industry will say, ‘let’s go film in Alaska.’”