L. Mattock Scariot , known to her friends as
“Mattie,” a Gilroy filmmaker and the current director for
the Poppy Jasper International Film Festival (PJIFF) had
big ideas for how to improve upon the festival after years of
volunteering for it. In 2016, after the festival suffered low
turn out, Scariot pushed her vision for change.
Scariot was willing to start her own film festival in Gilroy
if PJIFF wasn’t ready for her vision, but founder, William
“Bill” Leaman, soon came on board to let Scariot run the film
festival her way.
“I said, ‘I’m going to make a lot of changes,’ and he said
‘you’ll be the boss,’” Scariot said.
Growing Season
She immediately added Gilroy as a location for the films to
play in 2019 and in 2020 Hollister and San Juan Bautista will
be added as well.
Then she grounded the film festival in the community
through educational programs that invite members of certain
local groups to make their own films: Last year that included
kids, millennials, and adults 40 and older. This year they’re
adding military veterans and adults 70 and older.
All of the films that these community members make are
shown at the film festival.
“That was a good way of bringing the community in. It
teaches them that you can have a voice in film, but we also
teach it’s a viable career choice,” she said. She pointed out
that film is more than just “going to Hollywood.” And it
encourages these filmmakers “to stop and look around and
see the stories that are around them and within them.”
Making Film Accessible
Scariot has worked tirelessly to help people recognize that
films are for everyone, that theater-going does not have to be
an elite experience, and it doesn’t matter what your personal
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
experiences are or where you come from; there’s something
for everyone.
“You definitely are asking people to step outside their
comfort zone. It’s new and different. But once somebody
sees one movie, they’re addicted,” she said.
She’s also made it part of the film festival’s mission to
show more movies made by women and people from a
wide range of racial and social backgrounds, different gender
orientations, and from other countries.
“There is a deficit in Hollywood with women and
minorities, and I wanted to make sure our films reflected
that. We changed our mission to be an inclusive, diverse,
women-empowered film festival,” she said.
In her first year as director she publicly announced that
she intended for 50 percent of all the films shown to be
directed by women. And she achieved that goal in 2019.
Diversity doesn’t stop with the films, however. “We
[consider] diversity inclusion and women empowerment
in everything we do—so our board is diverse, our jury is
diverse, and anytime we’re connecting with people to come
to educational programs, we do it in a diverse, inclusive way.
I think that’s really important. You can’t create a diverse film
festival without diverse voices behind it,” she said.
Film Bridges Divides
One of the reasons she loves film is that she sees how easy
it is to pick up misinformation and biases about different
cultures through media and politics. “When you see films
made by artists in their country, telling the stories they
want to tell, it gives a different perspective of life in these
countries, which changes the way you see each other.”
Film is a powerful medium to loosen our preconceived
notions of one another, she said. “The message is I’m a
human being.”
“We don’t really have a conversation with people that are
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