Michele StuevenDirector/writer/producer/author Justine Bateman is bringing the Credo23 Film Festival to LA from Friday, March 28 through Sunday, March 30 at the American Legion, Post 43 in Hollywood. It’s the first official film festival to celebrate films that do not utilize any artificial intelligence.
“We’ve got some really great films,” Batman told LA Weekly in a phone call this week. “It’s easy to make decisions creatively when you have a thesis statement and a focus. Our objective at Credo 23 is no AI, no box checking, and no content, just great filmmaking. The filmmakers are not based on demographics. I do not care how tall they are. I do not care what their gender is, I do not care what the color of their skin is. I do not care who they sleep with. That’s all completely unimportant. What’s important is the work and that’s how these projects were judged.”
Justine Bateman
Bateman herself has two films on the schedule, Look and Feel, with David Duchovny and Rae Dawn Chong. There are both shorts and features like Kamakazi by Ray Smiling, Sideways For Attention by Brady Bryson, and Stakes is High from Jean-Pierre Caner. Opening night will feature a panel with Bateman and showrunner Matthew Weiner (Mad Men, The Sopranos) titled What’s Keeping You From Going Into the New?
“The business took a turn quite unfortunately and created the end of that 100-year entertainment business,” says Bateman, who earned a degree in computer science from UCLA and is the antithesis of the dingbat Mallory Keaton character she immortalized in the TV series Family Ties with Michael J. Fox.
“The film industry has been on the same track a long time but split recently for the first time,” she says. “One direction is embracing AI, churning out content instead of focusing on filmmaking, which is heading straight into a mountain. The other direction that I and other filmmakers are on is real filmmaking and reaching for the next genre in filmmaking, which I think is going to be very raw and human. So I put on a film festival that looks at those kinds of films and filmmakers that are reaching for The New. Nothing new has emerged since about 2005 or so. Studios have abandoned the business of filmmaking. Once AI destroys the film industry, there’s going to be a brand new genre that’s going to explode.”
Bateman’s passion and focus for the festival is about highlighting the true human element and veering away from the dangers she sees in current movie trends like box checking and following algorithms instead of the pure art of filmmaking.
KAMIKASE from Ray Smiling (Courtesy Credo23)
“So you’ve got a one-legged albino Alaskan lesbian and a neurodivergent agoraphobic with a three-legged dog,” says the fearlessly outspoken Bateman. ” That’s not filmmaking. I mean if you are making a film about an agoraphobic with a three legged dog and it’s a fucking banger, fine. But if you have gotten funding and distribution to film festivals for your middling film about an agoraphobic with a three-legged dog that checks all the boxes – that’s not filmmaking. That’s something else entirely. Then, on top of it, you’re going to have AI, which is like a blender that you’ve illegally dumped 100 years of filmmaking into and get a Frankenstein spoonful of that. That’s not filmmaking, either.
“When you’re making a film, you have in mind who your target audience is, and 100 percent of the time that audience is going to be humans,” she says. “You make sure the core element of your film, your thesis statement in a broad sense is true for all humans. That idea is as true now as it was 50 years ago and will be 50 years from now. I don’t care what happens in technology or wherever we go as a society – that’s always going to be true.”
See the full schedule and get tickets here.