Back in the mid-1990s, as the Sundance Film Festival was reaching its peak of influence, a group of disgruntled filmmakers who were rejected by the festival decided to rent a ballroom at a Park City hotel and start their own festival in order to promote their own films and those by other rejects. Thus, the Slamdance Film Festival was born.

The idea and subsequent publicity was so good that they decided to continue running the festival even though they didn't have their own films in it anymore. Of course, the very next year movies that got rejected by Slamdance were starting their own festivals, giving birth to Slumdance, Slam Dunk, and any number of other festivals.

In Rotterdam this year, I walked past the Reject Film Festival, and when Googling that I saw that Philadelphia had its own Reject Film Festival in the late-'90s (you had to prove that your movie was rejected by bigger festivals). There is no doubt that these microfestivals have been popping up everywhere there's a festival around to reject a (usually local) film. Seattle has had its own share of satellite festivals in the post-Slamdance years, and they tend to have a shelf life of three to five years before the founders burn out. The latest is the Seattle True Independent Film Festival, also known as STIFF, which was started by Clint Berquist when his movie Swamper wasn't accepted into the Seattle International Film Festival.

STIFF is now in its third year and seems to be going strong. I spoke with Berquist at a press screening for the Christian Slater movie He Was a Quiet Man, and he told me his job brought him to other festivals like South by Southwest, which inspired him to add rock shows to this year's STIFF. For more reviews of screenings at this year's STIFF, check out this overview by Andrew Wright in the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger.

As for me, I tend to stay away from these start-up festivals. They often show really roughly put together movies that emphasize attitude over acting and story structure. At the same time, I think that these festivals are good for filmmakers. Those with completed projects can get them shown to crowds of relatively sympathetic audiences, while those who are thinking about making movies can see how little it takes to get a movie into a festival.

Of course, the longer a festival is around the better the quality of the films that are submitted and shown get, which means that if it's around long enough it too will inspire its own Slamdance-like reactionary festival. They should be so lucky.

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Andy Spletzer once programmed films for the arts space Consolidated Works, and during that time was part of Satellites: Screens from Outer Spaces.