2023 in Review
For the team at Dr. Clean Productions, 2023 was the place to be. We started the year with post-production on Fantasy A Gets a Mattress still not completely finished. We ended the year with more awards and trophies than any of us had ever won in our lives.
There could not have been a better premiere than the Seattle Black Film Festival where we won Best Narrative Feature and got to meet other filmmakers working to explore local locations and talent. It was great to bump into some of the same people later when we won at Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings Film Festival and the Tacoma Film Festival.
When The Beacon Cinema, Northwest film’s top tastemaker, invited us to do a one night screening we already felt like we’d made it. At the time we never thought that that one night would overflow into TWENTY sold out shows.
From The Beacon we flowed into sold-out shows at Central Cinema and sold-out shows with lines wrapping around the block at The Grand Illusion. Radio (KUOW) and print (The Seattle Times, The Stranger, South Seattle Emerald, Real Change, Scarecrow Video, and High Country News) started calling Fantasy A Gets a Mattress a phenomena and Fantasy A firmly solidified himself as a counterculture icon with his own Wikipedia page. All over America, mattresses started popping up with the film’s title spray painted on them.
As the year wound down we started getting our biggest news of all. Sir Mix-a-Lot requested a private screening and the Seattle Times wanted to cover it for the Pacific NW Magazine cover story.
Just days after returning from our big screening in Baltimore at the TASH conference, we had an even bigger 400 person screening at the Egyptian back home.
It is hard to say which experience felt more surreal: watching Sir Mix-a-Lot shout out Fantasy A when accepting his Hometown Hero Award at MoPop, or seeing Fantasy A in the Egyptian lobby reading a glossy magazine with his face on the cover and a huge movie poster with his face on it behind him.
There is no good way to end our good news roundup because the good news isn’t nearly done. We have a lot of exciting stuff in the works which we can’t wait to announce. 2023 was the place to be, but expect more in 2024.
Cheers,
