Caroline King can trace her roots back to the theater.
She’s always loved performing – there’s a photo of her as a little girl, standing on a picnic table and putting on a show for a rapt audience of stuffed animals and American Girl dolls. Her parents, she says, would always say: that girl needs to be on a stage.
But lately, performing has taken a backseat for King. Instead, for the past eight years she’s been trying to find ways to let other artists get their time in the limelight as the CEO of Cinema Life, a collective of independent film festivals and film events that aim to highlight Georgia’s indie film scene. On opening night of the Georgia Shorts Film Festival on June 19, King received a proclamation from Fulton County honoring her efforts.
“I’m proud of myself, I’m proud of my team,” she said. “I’m proud of how far we’ve come. I’m proud of every friend, filmmaker, everybody that moved forward with us and has made it happen. It’s a huge honor.”
Cinema Life is the force behind festivals like the Atlanta Comedy Film Festival, the Atlanta Women’s Film Festival, the Southern Horror Film Festival, and more. When King founded Cinema Life in 2018, it operated out of Wild Heaven Beer in the West End, but has since moved most programming to 7 Stages Theatre in Little Five Points.
King has always said that she wants Cinema Life festivals to be prestigious without being pretentious – to create a platform to showcase talented filmmakers in an environment that doesn’t feel limiting or alienating. In short, she wants people to feel like they belong.
She remembered feeling a little on the outs when she was on the festival circuit with a short film called “Church Wives,” which she co-wrote, produced, and acted in. She loved the experience – loved seeing films and attending workshops and panels. But she still felt a sense of remove.
“Even though I was there, I didn’t feel quite like one of the cool kids that knew everybody,” she said. “I still felt like – not an outcast, because I met some really great, amazing people – but it just felt like things were so separated from the people who were presenting and the people who were attending. I wanted to create environments where you could go up and talk to the people running workshops. You could go up and talk to our panelists.”
When she started Cinema Life, she wanted to make sure that nobody ever felt like they couldn’t talk to a certain panelist, or that they couldn’t strike up a conversation with another filmmaker or festival attendee. She wanted the experience to be, first and foremost, welcoming.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she didn’t think Cinema Life would survive. But the creativity and perseverance of the community they’d already built pushed through. Remarkably, according to King, the number of submissions they were getting didn’t decrease too much from pre-pandemic levels.
“As we were getting submissions, I was seeing that people were still being really creative with the way they made films. They wanted their films to be screened.”
One of the reasons for that community comes through in King’s infectious personality. Whenever she gives a speech at one of Cinema Life’s festivals, or gives out awards at the end of the weekend, you get a sense of that little girl who so loved putting on a show. That energy permeates through the rest of the festival, creating a close-knit atmosphere you don’t get on the larger festival circuit.
According to King, when actor French Stewart appeared at this year’s Atlanta Comedy Film Festival, he made it a point to speak to everyone who came up to him. She also said that Cinema Life festivals have a plethora of repeat filmmakers who have submitted and screened their films, and artists will often meet at Cinema Life festivals and then return the next year with a film they’ve made together.
For her, those are the moments that make Cinema Life feel like a success.
“I never want anyone to feel like they don’t have enough to get to the festival, that they don’t belong in the room,” King said. “I want everybody to feel like they have a place, and they can go up to anybody and start a conversation.”
