Big names in film—from Amy Poehler to Liev Schreiber —were in Idaho this past week for the Sun Valley Film Festival. But as a smaller festival, it also gives an important stage to lesser-known creatives.
When Christian Lybrook entered a short film, a ghost story, into the first Sun Valley Film Festival, he was just making it up as he went. He didn’t feel like he belonged, but in the filmmaker lounge, someone asked what he was doing at the festival.
“I said, all sheepish, ‘I’ve got a film here,’ and they said, ‘Oh, you’re a filmmaker?’ and I went, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I’m a filmmaker,” Lybrook said.
That was a big moment of validation for the screenwriter and director from Boise.
“When you’re doing this thing where you are taking your innards and putting them out to the world, you need people to tell you, ‘This is valuable, this is good, this is worthwhile.’”
He said that’s what the festival provided for him. In 2015, he won the award for the best short screenplay.
This year at the 11th annual festival, he had a script that was a finalist in the High Scribe screenwriting competition and was read by Jared Stern who wrote “The LEGO Batman Movie.”
Getting facetime with high-profile writers and directors like Stern, and actors, is the best part of the festival for Lybrook.
“Movies, you can see on your TV screen at home—don’t get me wrong, movies are great—but the opportunity to listen to these people tell their stories and be human, in a way that we don’t see on the screen—it’s gold.”
Find reporter Rachel Cohen on Twitter @racheld_cohen
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