The Satelli D'Or Film Festival, or prior to 1990, The Ernest Satelli Celebration of Film Movie Festival, is a film festival based in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and is notorious for hosting the films of young and promising young filmmakers while at the same time allowing industry professionals scout for young talent.
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Ernest Satelli was a projectionist working at the Carnivale Matinee movie theater in Hershey, Pennsylvania, who decided to start a film festival in order draw more people to the theater. The Festival, started in 1984, was originally called the Ernest Satelli Celebration of Film Movie Festival. The second year running, a young filmmaker named Alexander Payne won a top prize for his short called Carmen. This film started to attract attention from other filmmakers and professionals. In 1989, Ernest Satelli died at 74, but the festival was continued in his honor. It was renamed the Satelli D'Or Film Festival in 1990, meaning Satellite of Gold, for its ability to attract young, talented filmmakers and industry professionals began to regularly orbit the festival in hopes of finding new industry recruits. The Festival continued to grow through 2005 and has helped jumpstart the careers of some notable filmmakers such as M. Night Shyamalan with Praying With Anger and Richard Kelly with his film, The Goodbye Place.
The Satelli D’Or Film Festival has housed the early short films of some of the most acclaimed directors working in the industry today. Some of these filmmakers include:
In recent years, the Satelli D’Or Film Festival has encouraged its potential entries to “think outside the box” and to experiment. This announcement by the heads of the film festival was made directly after the 2003 festival, which held the lowest attendance rate and lowest poll rating scores in the history of the festival. The following year, a new wave of fresh and young talent submitted their work, which took the festival by storm. The films experimented with controversial and transgressive themes, which include the compulsion of human violence, sexual aggressiveness and repression, etc. The heads of film festival realized when they viewed this work that it would be controversial to say the least, but decided to put it on the bill to hopefully improve the festival. While the attendance rate for the film festival continues to decline, the poll scores have improved drastically and several local film critics praise the New Wave of filmmakers as “some of the strongest young voices in the country”. Several of these New Wave filmmaker have publicly expressed their concern regarding the rumored end of the film festival. One filmmaker who asked to remain anonymous spoke to a reporter at the Press & Journal, a local newspaper in the small town of Middletown, Pennsylvania, “It’s the damn attendance is what’s killing the festival. And the low attendance rate has halted the funding that festival used to get from local sponsors and the now defunct film office. We’re very concerned. The Satelli D’Or Film Festival is one of the very few festivals in the entire country where young filmmakers like me can express our talent and ideas and not worry about being patronized and shunned for them.”
As was stated in the previous section of the article, some of the more recent entries in the festival have been labeled as “controversial” and some of the festival’s harshest critics have labeled them as “pornographic at best, and snuff material at worst”. One of the more shocking festival entries was entitled Mud, a film that followed the misadventures of a seventeen year-old boy whose sexual festishes include one that involves rubbing mud inside and around the orifices of virgins that he encounters and seduces. The film was widely hated by the audience with the exception of several influential filmmakers and critics who claimed it to be a “degrading masterpiece” and caused the film’s auteur Richard Preszer to be arrested and imprisoned for four month for “soliciting pornography”. Another intensely controversial picture was entitled Cuts which followed an inspired filmmaker named Paul who forces his actor to cut himself daily in order to get into the character he is playing. While the film was praised by locals for its gorgeous cinematography and powerful surrealistic images, many were turned off by the scenes of the actors cutting themselves, especially a scene involving a fourteen year-old girl. Rumors have been spreading across the board that one of the film entries for this year’s festival is in fact a snuff film that was made by four young filmmakers. Together, these four young filmmakers have created a piece entitled “Our Sacrifice” and while we await to see the film at it’s premiere as the Closing Night Selection at the Satelli D’Or Film Festival, it will be more interesting to see the hinted riots that could take place after the premiere. “That night”, says a local filmmaker, “will most likely be only comparable to the night that Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece Last Tango In Paris premiered at the New York Film Festival back in October 1972.”
Many community groups have attempted to halt the Satelli D’Or Film Festival as they find it to be “sleazy and disrespectful. Ernest Satelli, who was very open about his Marxist views, believed that the younger or more liberal generation deserved a “safe haven where they can let their imagination run wild and have as much creative control as they please” and “be able to create the films that they’ve always wanted to make”. Ernest Satelli fought long and hard to keep his festival going. There were several local businesses and art collectives who would annually donate money because they believed in Satelli, his “students”, and their cause. When Ernest Satelli died of cancer at the age of 74 in 1989, local art collectives strived to keep the festival going in his honor, even despite many conservative and Christian groups damning the festival. One of the most famous cases involved young filmmaker Richard Preszer, whose film Mud caused a scandalous sensation. After the 19 year-old was released from prison after being sentenced for “soliciting pornography”, a extremist conservative group trashed his house and burned many copies of the film Mud as they felt that “justice hadn’t been served”. One anonymous member claimed that the celluloid of Preszer’s film contained a demon and that the film was “deflowering their children by visual means”. After this incident, the local film office who had been greatly generous to the festival pulled the plug on their funding for the festival. Many of the charitable businesses and art collectives soon followed after receiving threats from other conservative and Christian groups and the mayor of Hershey. Today, the Satelli D’Or Film Festival keeps its liberal views and continues to allow “experimental” entries, but is running on their own funds. The heads of the festival believe that the end is soon.