Denver Film Festival shines a spotlight on Colorado filmmakers

Filmmaker Sheryl Glubok has noticed a pattern while showing her short film on the festival circuit.

“There’s somewhat of a seriousness bias to festivals,” Glubok said. “Which I understand. They want to pick films that people may not choose if they’re scrolling at home on their couch, you know, do I really want to sit here and see a film about human trafficking or whatever?”

This year, Glubok had something different to offer.

“Welcome to the Fishbowl,” her first feature film, is a “coming of middle-age comedy,” as the director described it, a roadtrip romp that starts in Denver and ends in Telluride.

“It’s a feel good, crowd-pleasing, potentially commercial film,” Glubok said. “So we had an interesting go with festivals.”

“Welcome to the Fishbowl” makes its Colorado debut Friday night during the Denver Film Festival, which starts Thursday. It is one of 19 home-grown films chosen to screen as part of the festival’s Colorado Spotlight, a showcase of features, shorts and documentaries curated from the nearly 100 films shown during the festival. 

Festival screentime is an important opportunity for young and emerging filmmakers to be discovered, and Glubok, 52, considers herself the latter. “You can always emerge,” she said. “That’s the point of the film.”

It was film festivals that encouraged her own career shift, film festivals where she met her production team, and film festivals where she showed the short films that would introduce her to the rest of the moviemaking world. But it’s not where she’s making any money, she said.

The Denver Film Festival is a regional festival, programmed to introduce local audiences to movies they wouldn’t otherwise get to see. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, said artistic director Matt Campbell, whose job balances buzzy special presentations, hidden gems, serious documentaries and quick, bright shorts.

Between a roster of annual festivals and the 1,400 submissions that the Denver Film Festival received, Campbell estimates he saw about 500 films this year.

But keeping track isn’t that hard, he shrugged. “You don’t need to remember the bad ones. You only need to remember the good ones.”

How does he remember the good ones? “There is a spreadsheet,” he said. It has tabs. It’s color coded.

You should be watching bad movies

When Campbell first started working with Denver Film in 2009, he sifted through hundreds of films to give them their first watch. Often none of them were picked for the festival. Those years built his stamina for screenings, he said, and also exposed him to “years and years of bad films” that honed his ability to know a good film when he’s watching it.

It’s something he recommends filmmakers do, too. 

“You shouldn’t only be watching Hollywood products if you’re going to be making an independent film. You should be watching independent films,” he said. “And bad ones, too, so you know what not to do.”

Now he’s higher up the chain, and only watches movies that make it past at least one or two screenings. He has figured out how to sideline his personal taste while he selects which films the festival will show.

This year, the festival is bringing back the True Grit Award, a $2,500 cash prize for a feature-length film produced in Colorado. They’ll also host dedicated panels and filmmaker parties for industry folks to network with their audiences and one another.

For Glubok, it was the Sundance Film Festival in 2013 that changed her trajectory. It was in Park City, Utah, where she decided, “I should be doing this. This is what I’ve wanted to do. This is what I believe I can do. And, gosh, darn it, I’m gonna do it.”

Glubok moved to Colorado that year, right as the state began to offer a 20% film tax incentive for the first time. Productions were posting up in Denver, Boulder and Aspen. A year later, in 2014, the state approved a $5 million package to lure Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” to shoot on a ranch outside of Telluride.

The state was landing films and the industry was showing promise after a decades-long lull. That incentive was expanded in 2024 to guarantee $5 million in annual incentives for four years, instead of the variable amount set each year by the state legislature.

Despite the industry-wide momentum, Glubok wasn’t sure she was ready to direct a feature-length film. She spent a few years directing shorts and cutting her teeth on the film set, making the connections that would be essential to bringing “Welcome to the Fishbowl” to the big screen more than a decade later.

Then there was the question of funding. The film world is “upside-down,” Glubok said. Streamers are paying cents on the dollar, and there’s a good chance that she will be marketing and working with theaters herself for a broader release. They were able to fund their film, “creatively,” she said, taking private equity from Colorado investors excited to see the state featured so heavily, a fiscal sponsor who can accept funds as a nonprofit donation, and the state’s current 22% tax credit.

“For me, success is obviously having a lot of people see the film, but it’s also being able to say, I paid my investors back. Now let’s go do this again,” Glubok said. “A lot of filmmakers never make a second film.”

The Denver Film Festival starts Thursday and runs until Nov. 1. You can read about all of the Colorado Spotlight Films here, and explore the full program here.