Bisbee Royale, the big blue building on Main Street across the street from Patisserie Jacqui, is set to host their 2nd Annual Royale Film Festival this May. The film festival will run every Friday-Sunday in May, and admission is free for all shows. Of the 85 submissions received to try to make it into this year’s lineup, there will be over sixty films of all types: shorts, features, documentaries, animation, music videos and more. A handful of the movies in the mix originated in Arizona, including some from right here in Bisbee and Cochise County.
Michael Stefaun, owner of Bisbee Royale, is excited to see what how year two will build upon last year’s inaugural film festival. “I came up with the concept because I had a movie theater and wanted to do something with it,” said Stefaun. “My original thought was doing a festival of animation, like Spike and Mike’s, which may still happen someday.” This year, Stefaun asked Bisbee resident Dan Margules to come onboard to help. With experience as a judge at film festivals, Stefaun was happy to welcome Margules onboard. Margules has put in many hours working on the event website and networking to get producers to submit their films. “In my first year doing this, I’m interested to see how it turns out,” said Margules.
One of the producers with ties to Bisbee is local resident and recent Cochise County Teacher of the Year nominee, Brianna Young. She is a busy, multi-talented lady, who is a film and TV production teacher at Bisbee High School by day, and an actress and owner of a film production company during many of the rest of her waking hours. She has written/directed/edited two feature-length movies, “Bloomfield,” which is streaming on Amazon Prime, and “Wrangle Town,” screening at the this year’s Royale Film Festival, now available on her company’s website- www.ruralranchproductions.com- as well as available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Additionally, Young acted in two other feature films last year, “Billy the Kid,” portraying Paulita Maxwell, Billy’s real-life girlfriend, and “The Seamstress,” portraying Petra, the seamstress. She will be attending the Saturday, May 10, 1 p.m. matinee screening of her western/drama, “Wrangle Town,” the second of her feature-length movies. Her film will be preceded by four 3-minute shorts made by her students. Her inspiration to produce the file came from her love of true crime mixed with her love of the expansive storytelling often found in large ensemble Westerns.
Another producer representing Bisbee and Cochise County is Stephen Crout, who is a digital media arts teacher at Cochise College in Douglas. The screening of his short, “The Land,” follows another local resident, Tate Rich, and was filmed on the outskirts of Bisbee. Crout was inspired by his discovery of some expired 16mm film from the 1990s, which led him to experiment with a windup Bolex camera that he used for this project. He flew from Philadelphia to Bisbee to spend some time with his good friend, who was living off the grid in the Sonoran Desert inside a hand-sculpted structure a few miles out of town, and to take footage of the experience. His film will be one of 11 shorts playing on Sunday, May 18, at 7 p.m.
The project took time to come to fruition- at one point it sat dormant for about a year until a former graduate school classmate of Crout’s suggested pairing the visuals with a live, improvisational musical recording. And although that revived the short, it still lacked a cohesive narrative structure. That was until 2019, when he returned to Bisbee and Rich asked him if any of the footage was viewable. Fast forward to now, after previously screening at regional art galleries and small international film festivals, “The Land” will be playing publicly for the first time in Bisbee.
Other documentaries with local ties include the Saturday, May 3, 7 p.m. showing of three short films and one feature- all horror and all filmed in Arizona. It will be the world-premiere of one the shorts, "For Sale by Owner," which was mostly shot in Bisbee, with some additional footage taken in Naco and Goodyear by Paul C. Hemmes of Goodyear.
The first Sunday of the festival, May 4, includes a 4 p.m. matinee that will be showing a feature- length music documentary, “Wall of Dreamers," by Douglas-based producer Bruce Endres. The film focuses on Arizona-based musicians, including Dolan Ellis of The New Christy Minstrels and Al Stewart. One part of the documentary talks about the impact of the 1949 country hit "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky," which was conceived by Douglas native Stan Jones. Not only a producer but also a musician, Endres will perform live before the screenings start. As a bonus for the matinee, there will be four music videos playing, one of which, “Government Cheese” by local musician Steve Moramarco, was filmed in Bisbee.
The opening documentary, “No Other Land,” will be screening on Friday, May 2, at 7 p.m. The movie, which focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the took home the Academy Award for the Best Documentary Feature Film on March 2 nd . The film was produced between 2019 and 2023, and it follows activist Basel Adra as he risks arrest to document the destruction of his hometown, Masafer Yatta, which Israeli soldiers are tearing down to use as a military training zone.
The festival ends on the last day of May, the 31 st , with an evening of encore screenings of the best films shown at this year’s Royale Film Festival. It’s the last opportunity to see some of the fan favorites for either the first time if you missed them or the second time if you loved them. The shows kick off at 7 p.m. “We got the films here to be able to showcase them onscreen, and that’s half the battle,” said Stefaun.
Please check out the event’s website for a full calendar of screening and show times- filmfestival.bisbeeroyale.com