Meet your Reel Friends.
They’re all over Atlanta’s cinema spots: hosting themed screenings at the Tara Theatre, on set for new productions or lingering at Videodrome. The cast of friends and filmmakers make up the many partners of the newly formed multi-pronged production company. They’re young, they’re scrappy, and they’re here to make art about Atlanta.
Local filmmaker Rocco Shapiro founded Reel Friends in January as an event, production and distribution company centered around Atlanta film. It’s only been months but its already a fixture in the film scene.
The logo pops up at premieres like hit feature “Withdrawal” at Atlanta Film Festival, or “Reel Talk” short film nights. Short films like “FAFO” and “I Could Dom” are official Reel Friends productions.
“Reel Friends is about connecting filmmakers and film lovers together in a space that makes them comfortable and confident,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro credits the speedy success to his previous experience. As a filmmaker, he knew the ins and outs of the community. He also helped start a production company once before. Reel Friends was like “restarting a game on easy.”
“It was about reconnecting and improving on what I already established the first time,” Shapiro said.
But he wanted Reel Friends to be different. Shapiro opted for a top-to-bottom company that would work to produce and distribute local films. He said there aren’t many other companies in the area that work in both fields.
Shapiro knew he would only get projects if people recognized the brand, though. So he added another component to Reel Friends: local themed events and screenings. His collaborators (or Reel Friends) come together at independent theaters to show cult classics like “Trainspotting” or host “Reel Roulette,” where a spinning wheel decides the film.
The events have helped bring an already tight-knit community even closer. It can get a little bit insular at times, particularly when it comes to unofficial duo Rocco Shapiro and Akshay Bhatia.
Shapiro and Bhatia are longtime collaborators. Bhatia works as the programming director for “Reel Talk,” a series of short film screenings where directors commentate directly over the track. He’s also a writer, director and producer in Atlanta.
When they’re together, the pair start to blend into each other. They share shaggy brown hair and speaking styles, and often get mistaken for each other despite not looking alike. They’re even producing each other’s feature film debuts.
But as artists they couldn’t be further apart. Shapiro takes a “Where’s the Party?” approach to his film. He leans towards coming-of-age comedies and wishes he directed Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.”
Bhatia has a darker tone. He prefers esoteric, grizzly southern gothic tales with multi-layered meanings. He wishes he directed “The Last Picture Show” by Peter Bogdanovich.
“The interesting thing is, I wouldn’t naturally come to (Shapiro’s) projects,” Bhatia said.
But Reel Friends brought their work together, and both films will be part of the company. The pair hopes that their films will help “legitimize” the company and gain them more access into the higher levels of the industry – then they can bring that access back to their other Reel Friends.
“We hope to just show as a model that we can do this,” Bhatia said. “Where it’s not that we’re a factory for other communities’ sort of interests, we’re showing there’s a viability to making films out here in Georgia.”
Through Reel Friends, Shapiro and Bhatia want to nurture Georgia’s film identity. They also want to show you can make a living as a local filmmaker. The state is best known for hosting several Marvel productions, or being re-skinned as New York or Los Angeles in any number of feature films. Bhatia said the productions come into town, shoot and leave.
“It makes it so we’re kind of subservient to the machinations of the larger industry,” Bhatia said.
But the duo is uninterested in the big-scale Hollywood machinations. They care about their local scene with a “small town attitude” and deep relationships. They each have spent years working to make Georgia more than a production stopover. They believe in Atlanta.
“We’re not New York and LA, but that’s why this is a good thing,” Bhatia said. “Atlanta has its own identity, its own artistic scene, it has its own burgeoning sort of creative spirit that’s very, very contained within this city.”
Reel Friends is here to foster the city’s “creative spirit.” But Shapiro and Bhatia admit they can create a sort of “bubble” of frequent collaborators. To expand the company’s reach, Shapiro brings in directors he doesn’t know. At a recent Reel Talk he showed “Hula Hoop” by Katie Ivey. it was his first time meeting the filmmaker.
Through Reel Talk and more, Shapiro and his collaborators want to display Atlanta’s “melting pot” of multicultural stories. The Reel Friends also want to encourage future filmmakers to declare themselves as artists in a “safe space.”
“I definitely want to invite people into the party,” Shapiro said.
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