JACKSON, Miss. – Charli Holbrook says she got mixed signals when she told people in her home state of Mississippi that she wanted to make movies for a living. Now in her second semester in the Howard University film graduate school, Holbrook recently returned home to show her short, “Perception,” at the Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson.
“I was very excited once I found that my film had been accepted,” said Holbrook, who today lives in Washington, D.C. “And when I got there, I got to meet a lot of professionals, and we networked, and it was just a good experience.”
Holbrook may move back to Mississippi someday, perhaps to start a film program at Jackson State University. She graduated from JSU with a mass communications degree emphasizing broadcast production.
She said she no longer thinks it’s absolutely necessary to leave Mississippi and attend a big school in order to succeed in film, but connections do help, and that’s an area where the state continues to lag.
Film and TV professionals say there is still a significant shortage of trained professionals to staff the projects attracted by Mississippi’s diverse locations and film incentive program, despite a growing number of higher education opportunities across the state.
The incentive program offered filmmakers a 20-percent rebate for local expenditures and non-resident payroll, and 25 percent in the case of a state resident cast and crew. In an expansion of the law pushed by Rep. Diane Peranich, D-Pass Christian, and signed by Gov. Haley Barbour on March 24, the program now increases those rebates by 5 percent each and covers both streaming video and Internet delivery as distribution methods, plus new technology areas such as animation and 3-D applications.
In addition to the incentive program, the networking opportunities at Crossroads and other film festivals are just a few of several bright spots for the industry in Mississippi.
