Phoenix Film Festival 2025: An Interview with Jason Carney

Flickreel talks to our old friend Jason Carney, director of the Phoenix Film Festival. With 2025 marking the festival’s 25th anniversary, we discuss what makes this year stand out, from screenings of sundance hits like The Ballad of Wallis Island to a Platoon reunion with Oliver Stone set to attend.

Q: Since this is the PFF’s 25th year, it only seems appropriate that we look back at your history with the festival. How did you first get involved? Were you there from the very beginning or did you join later down the line?

JC: I was at the first festival, but not at the very beginning. The festival was started by a couple of filmmakers, Chris LaMont and a producing partner of his and friend from high school, Greg Hall. [He] was roommates with Chris at the time and Greg was selected to be the program director. Then he asked if I wanted to come help out with the festival. I had no idea what a film festival was, but I was free that weekend. So, I just jumped right in. It was the first year, so everybody’s just jumping in and helping out where they can. Greg and I ended up doing the theater operations. Then, from there, progressively each year, I picked up a little bit more responsibility. Then in 2005, I became the executive director and here we are.

Q: Any cinema lover can volunteer to help put on a festival, but how does one become a film festival curator? 

JC: It’s part of the rising ranks through the festival process. They can volunteer to be part of our viewing committee team. We do an orientation usually around September or so. People can go to our website, sign up for future interest, and we’ll email them. They can go to an orientation and learn about the judging process and how it works. They can have input on that first level of judging, first level of review. Then, over time, they might have a chance to become a program director of a certain category or things like that. It seems to be an increasingly longer line of people wanting to do that piece. Being part of that viewing committee is really cool because you’ll watch movies and sometimes a lot of them will be selected. It’s kind of cool to get that first look at them and feel like you had an input into what got in the festival.

Q: How has Phoenix Film Fest changed since then you came on board?

JC: You know, the length of the festival and the scope. Back in the early days, it was a three-day festival. Then around 2005 or 2006, we turned into an eight-day festival. Then, we made our big move. In 2018, I believe, when we switched to 11 days and the Harkins’ Theater was remodeled and everything. So we did a whole expansion to 11 days at the same timeframe. I think we’re in a really good spot in terms of the length of the festival and our attendance continues to grow. Also, the quality and level of films. Each year that gets better and better because we build up our reputation and we get more and more access to different types of films. The submissions that we get in are a higher quality.

Q: Which memories of the festival stand out to you years later?

JC: Oh, boy. We had a screening where the father of one of the filmmakers was throwing a reception before the screening at one of the restaurants in the shopping center and he had Muhammad Ali at that dinner. So, I got to meet Muhammad Ali. That was pretty sweet. Every year there’s that we have a filmmaker dinner with all of our competition filmmakers. There’s about a dozen to you know ten to fifteen filmmakers that are there and a few of our senior staff. That’s a really great way to unwind and meet the filmmakers before everything goes crazy for them. We have it in the middle of the festival, the Thursday before the second weekend. That’s always a great experience. The highlights of the year for me in terms of the festival, you know, just getting to talk about the films and talk with the filmmakers gives me a little deeper knowledge of what went into the films. So, I can talk about them as we go into that weekend. That’s always a positive experience that we have each year. It’s one of my favorite nights of the whole experience.

Q: What is Phoenix Film Fest doing to mark this 25th anniversary? 

JC: We’re showing the best movies in the world, Nick. Is that good enough? No, I’m just kidding. We’re definitely upping the level of our events and really the quality of film. We haven’t really struggled to get the films we wanted to get for the festival. We’re really proud of the lineup and we’ve got a couple of surprises we’re adding in that’ll be nice to throw out there in the next few days. It’s going to be a really cool event. I’m really excited. We have so many films. For example, on a Saturday night, we’re showing the new Pedro Pascal movie called Freaky Tales, and it’s going against this Nic Cage movie called The Surfer. They’re head to head because we’re running out of space and it worked out that way. I think the Platoon reunion event is that night and it’s just crazy. The Film Prom is the party theme that night. 

Q: Oliver Stone himself will be at the Platoon reunion, right?

JC: When we started talking about doing the Platoon event, the goal was to always have Oliver Stone attend. To be able to have a legendary director attend the festival is so exciting for us. He’s made so many iconic films including a couple of my favorites, Wall Street” and of course Platoon. We can’t wait to hear his perspectives on Platoon and the rest of his catalog of films.

Q: The festival is opening with The Ballad of Wallis Island and closing with The Wedding Banquet, both of which were big hits at Sundance. What can you tell us about those films? 

JC: Wallis Island is a great opener. It’s charming, just delightful, nice. You can tell there’s a lot of heart in that movie. Looks very funny… That’s a great way to start the festival. The Wedding Banquet has a lot of comedy in it, but there’s a lot of like really dramatic moments. There’s a lot of depth to what’s going on in addition to the comedy that’s going on… You want to open really strong and close really strong. There’s really no better way to enter and exit the festival. I mean, I’m not mad about Sing Sing last year or CODA the other year. But if I don’t have like that Oscar movie available to me, this is a great way to go.

A: What other films are you most excited to share with audiences?

JC: The movie The Friend with Bill Murray and Naomi Watts is really good. Just a good drama with some comedy in it. We’ve got that one. Then this movie called Holland with Nicole Kidman and Matthew MacFadyen. That movie is just like a twisty, turny mystery, dark drama. I was telling my wife when I watched it, I’m like, “Oh, this happens, this happens, this happens.” And that’s halfway through the movie. So, there’s a lot of twists and turns in that movie. 

There’s like three great documentaries that we have among all of them. We have a lot of good ones, but these three just stand out. The Stamp Thief, which plays like a really true crime documentary. In Poland, this Nazi officer was basically, as they were taking away stamp collections from Jewish people that were taken to the concentration camp, this guy actually then pilfered some of the stamps from the Nazis. He allegedly had buried the stamp collections under a building in Poland and these people in the U.S. heard word of it. So, they had a camera crew and they went to go find this.

A great documentary called Speak, which is about five different high school students that are

competing in speech tournaments and it’s showing their journey on their way to the national championships. They’re very different. It’s very different. You know, really great kids and their relationships with the coaches, and their teammates, and everything. Really shines through. 

Then we have this other just powerful, riotous documentary. It’s called Deaf President Now. It comes from Apple Films and this movie is great. It’s about this dead university in 1988. They chose a hearing candidate for president rather than to qualify deaf candidates for a president to run the school. And the students revolted. It gives this perspective of five of these students and their camcorder footage everywhere from ‘88. It’s basically them now telling this story. You get to see them in this footage, but also now. Their personalities are dynamic and they still have that edge to them in terms of what they did because they basically shut down the school. They chained up the gate. They parked school buses in front of the entrance and the school was shut down for a week until it got resolved. It’s just showing what a group of young people can do. This nonsense about hearing people being any smarter or any more able than a deaf person. I think it puts that to rest and it’s great to see. Then when they were high school kids and then now, you still see that same feistiness that they’re so proud of what they did deservedly. They’re really heroes.

Q: Aside from the movies, what events are you looking forward to? 

JC: The opening night cocktail party is always great. We’ve been moving forward with this programming called More Than Movies. We have a few different events as part of that. One of the originals was the Art of the Trailer where it’s roughly about 80 to 90 minutes of all trailers historic divided up in different categories and things like that. And Monte Yazzie and Matthew Robinson, a couple of local critics, put that all together and it’s always entertaining…

Then we also have this thing called How I Made It, which is this year. We’ve done it a couple times before. It’s a short film from a filmmaker named Ben Tedesco, who did a short called Obit. It’s about a 20-minute short, but the overall presentation is dealing with mental health, and those kind of challenges on screen, and how filmmakers, and filmgoers can manage that and how they do it, especially filmmakers. They have a huge responsibility in terms of doing it the right way and portraying people properly that are going through different various stages of mental health challenges. We want to make that a thing. Let’s have other filmmakers learn from this experience and do better when they’re portraying people on screen. 

Q: In addition to being the festival’s director, you’re also the CEO and Executive Director of the Phoenix Film Foundation. Is that a full-time gig and what responsibilities does it involve year-round? 

JC: Yeah, it’s a full-time gig. We have a few things under our nonprofit, IFP Phoenix. We have film summer camps for high school students, pretty much for, I think, seven of the nine weeks of summer. So, we’re pretty covered there. Then we also have the Phoenix Film Society, which does monthly screenings twice a month of films before they come out in theaters. So, we have a discussion and everything around that revolves around that. Managing those things and getting people registered and all that goes along with that. The Phoenix Film Festival itself, you know, we start taking entries in July for next March. And really, we dive in hard right around October, November. So it’s a really hardcore seven-month process. In May, we need a break. May is kind of our slow-motion month where we’re doing a lot of reporting paperwork. Things like that to recover and start to get ready for the next great year.

The 25th Phoenix Film Festival takes place from March 27 to April 6, 2025. More information here.