Kitty Anne

She has spent a lot of her life finding different ways into movies.

Kitty has worked in front of and behind the camera, written for the screen, worked on the visual and production side of filmmaking, programmed films, written about them, sat on festival juries and panels, moderated conversations with filmmakers, and spent a loooootttttt of late nights figuring out how to get people into a room to watch something she really wanted them to see!

Programming became less about simply choosing movies and more about thinking about who gets to see them in the first place. Kitty saw how easily assumptions about an audience can become decisions made for them, what they'll watch, what they'll understand, what belongs on a screen in the South. She saw the same thing happen on the other side of the screen, where money, time, caregiving, geography, industry connections, and access to resources can determine which filmmakers get to keep going and which films ever get finished.

A lot of her work started with genre.

Through Hello Huntsville Horror, Kitty built a local audience around genre screenings and events, often finding that the people who showed up challenged the usual assumptions about what a horror audience looks like. Some of the biggest supporters of her horror programming have been older women. Turns out, you don't get old and stop being curious!

Hauntsville Film Fest grew from another frustration: wanting to see women, femme, and nonbinary filmmakers given real space in genre cinema instead of being treated like an occasional programming theme. The festival centers genre films written, directed, or produced by women, femme-presenting, and nonbinary filmmakers, and that commitment to femme and queer voices continues throughout Kitty's work.

Her programming has since taken her throughout the Southern film community, working with festivals, theaters, filmmakers, and fellow programmers as a guest programmer, presenter, moderator, juror, and panelist. She has introduced films, hosted filmmaker conversations, served on festival juries, and helped emerging filmmakers make a little more sense of submissions and the festival world.

It became hard to ignore the bigger questions.

Why should living in the South mean having fewer films available to you? Why do we assume audiences won't be interested in something they've never had the opportunity to encounter? How many people could make a movie but never imagine themselves as filmmakers? And how many good films get started here but never make it to a screen because somebody was missing money, childcare, an editor, a connection, or simply someone who knew what the next step was?

Reel South Cinema brings together years of programming, festivals, writing, community organizing, and advocacy, but the goal is bigger than putting on more screenings. Kitty wants to help build a South where more people can encounter cinema, more people can imagine themselves making it, and fewer practical barriers decide who gets to participate.

She believes Southern audiences are more curious than they're often given credit for. She believes Southern filmmakers don't have to leave home, go to film school, or make movies for a living before they're allowed to call themselves filmmakers. And she believes the South shouldn't be treated like a theme or a market somebody else gets to define.

Kitty is also a film writer and zine maker, creating independent publications about movies, history, identity, fandom, and the strange personal ways films stay with us.

She lives and works in Five Points, Huntsville, Alabama.