Kyle Remmenga thought about putting together a community theater production in Macomb, but said that’s done everywhere. He wanted something different.
“What if the town made a movie instead of putting on a play?” said Remmenga, who made the film “Killinois” and calls himself Chief Executive Monster of Cube of Justice Productions.
The result of his brainstorming is the Forgottonia Film Lab, a screenwriting contest open to residents from throughout western Illinois.
The winning script will be produced as a short film.
The rules
Remmenga said he reached an agreement with artist Ryan Taylor to shoot the film in his Red Dragon Gallery in the former St. George’s Episcopal Church next to Macomb city hall. So, one of the rules of the screenwriting competition is that the story must be set in that location.
Other rules: the script must be for a 10-to-15-minute short film, it can have up to three actors, and Remmenga said writers should keep it fairly clean.
“It’s not officially a city project, but since it is a community project, they should aim to keep it PG or down, unlike my own films which are definitely a hard R rating,” Remmenga said with a laugh.
He said the story can be in any genre the writer chooses. He said keeping the film under 15 minutes will allow for the possibility of entering it in short film festivals.
He said there is no cost to submit a script. The submission rules and more information about the Forgottonia Film Lab project can be found on the Cube of Justice website.
Remmenga will accept scripts through July 31. He plans to announce the winner on Sept. 1.
“(That’s) assuming we have enough submissions and they’re not all just like, we can’t make these. That’s always a possibility that we get a lot of wildly inappropriate stuff. But hopefully that doesn’t happen,” Remmenga said.
“There seem to be a lot of creative people in Macomb. I’m very confident that we can get something really cool that we can get behind.”
He said a panel of judges will select the winning script.
The community can then choose the director, cinematographer, and fill other positions. He said the community can also hold auditions for the actors, and he said those who participate will learn how to make a film from the ground up.
‘An encouraging voice’
When asked if the winner would receive a prize, Remmenga said at the very least they’d have something to add to their portfolio.
“They’ll officially be able to say, ‘I’m an award-winning screenwriter,’ which goes a long way to get people to listen to you when you’re trying to push your ideas through,” he said.
“I want to be an encouraging voice for people who want to be creative, and here’s an outlet for that.”
He said the Forgottonia Film Lab is his way of testing a town-run project to learn whether he can make it work. He said they’ll be figuring it out as they go along.
“We could become the quirky town in Illinois that makes a movie twice a year, and that markets itself,” Remmenga said.
He is looking for sponsors, which will help when it comes time to make the short film. He said part of the exercise will be learning how to make a film on a micro budget, which he believes can lead to creativity and ingenuity.
“One of the big things, like, the reason Jaws is so good is because the shark broke and they couldn’t afford to fix it. So Spielberg had to come up with a new way to portray the shark. Those kind of limitations, I think, push creativity,” Remmenga said.
Remmenga said he made Killinois for between $5,000 and $10,000.
A return to the Midwest
Remmenga grew up in O’Fallon, Mo.
“I couldn’t get out of there fast enough when I graduated high school, and moved to Los Angeles, started film school, started doing video editing, started jumping into the industry head-first,” Remmenga said.
While out west, he met his wife Iku, who’s from Japan, and they moved to Japan for a while before returning to LA to work in the film industry.
He said everything was shut down when the pandemic hit in 2020, so they talked about moving to Missouri and working from home while making horror films on the side.
However, he said the company he worked for had no tax presence in Missouri, but they did have an office in Illinois, so the family started looking at towns in Illinois. They preferred a small college town where people might be interested in participating in his film projects.
“We also wanted a place that was close enough that I could visit my family in St. Louis if I wanted to, but far enough that they wouldn’t come over every day. We were like, okay, at least two hours out,” Remmenga said.
He said Macomb checked all the boxes, and the family moved to the western Illinois community a few years ago.
After coming to Macomb, Kyle and Iku, who are partners in Cube of Justice, made the film “Killinois,” for which he won the award for Best First Time Feature Filmmaker at the Hot Springs International Horror, Thriller, and Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2024.
“It was a very low budget thing, and it ended up coming out pretty great just because of the participation of the community and everyone involved in that,” he said.
He said it showcased what can be accomplished when people are attached to an art project.
Remmenga said it took about two years to make that film. He said it’s a big endeavor to produce a feature, which is why they’re looking to make a short film through the Forgottonia Film Lab.
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