by NICOLE MCPHEETERS
After their film Rolling won one of four Best Picture awards and a Best Performance award at Indiana University’s local Campus Movie Fest 2018, Riley Dismore, 22, and Katherine Crump, 23, headed to the big leagues, taking their 5-minute film to the Cannes Film Festival in France.
“It felt like winning the lottery, American Idol, and getting a genie to grant your greatest wish, all in one,” Dismore says. “The whole trip was so surreal.”
Rolling was also selected as one of the 25 best films in the national Campus Movie Fest contest, a competition for college and university students around the world, making it available for viewing on Amazon Prime.
The film, shot at Western Skateland in Bloomington, centers on roller rink employee Billie. The day after closing the rink for the night with her boss, Billie begins to realize that he sexually assaulted her.
The filmmakers chose the subject matter because, they say, scenes of sexual violence are too often filmed like pornography. Their film is more realistic. The topic hit close to home for Dismore, who was raped six months prior to the release of Rolling.
“Sexual violence has nothing to do with sex,” Dismore says. “It’s an act of humiliation, degradation, and a pathetic attempt to exercise control. If more people knew that, I think there would be a lot less shame and victim blaming surrounding the issue.”
The pair enlisted the help of an all-female crew to make the film. Crump says it was not a stretch to form the matriarchal team.
“Most of the people we wanted to work with and knew would bring a lot of talent to the project just happened to be women,” Crump says. “But getting to work with a group of women who all cared so deeply about the story we were telling and respected the hand that every other person on set had in telling that story, was sort of a moment for us.”
The filmmakers will debut their next film, Rebel Girls, on September 21 at IU Cinema. Rebel Girls is a comedy that follows two unemployed friends over a 24-hour period as they scramble to avoid eviction. Once the film is finished, their production company, Film Wives, will move to Los Angeles.
For more information, visit rileydismore.com/film.
