Today we’d like to introduce you to Ty Brueilly.
Hi Ty, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I’ll keep focus strong on the film festival that I founded and how that particular aspect of my career started and how I got there today.
As a student at Appalachian State University in the early 2000’s one of my business professors described the definition of entrepreneur as a business minded person that finds a demand or a need that is yet to be filled, and fill that.
In 2023 I had flown all around the U.S.A. representing my filmmaking work at various film festivals, and during that process, I realized that my hometown of Asheboro, NC, was in dire need of it’s own film festival, something up until then that it didn’t have.
Asheboro has some pretty immense potential, and it always has. Some people try and fail, some people try and succeed and some people just leave all together. I’ve been on all sides of that, but here I am, my wife and I moved back to Asheboro in 2015, and got married and I have been faithful to her and my city since then.
Maneuvering through the changing atmosphere of the city that I was not used to from my youth, I started a path down experimental filmmaking to help cope with my Grandmother’s and Aunt’s death. We shot my debut film, ‘Shucks’ and within a month it was wrapped. I got hooked on the feelings and the emotional release that filming provided. I started a process to get it distributed through Amazon Prime, which at the time in 2016 was a much more difficult process, but we did it, thanks to my experience in music distribution.
Once that was on that platform, I started getting invitations to film festivals all around the world. I began learning the landscapes of that type of event and decided to get familiar with it while I started teaching again. So in 2017, I began what would be my last year of a seven year teaching career, and that was high school aged students. The elective class I taught was mass media, so I was able to really learn more filming techniques, and also have some of my students teach me some of the newer ways of filming from their phones, etc.
My wife was pregnant with our first son then too, and my father had a stroke, so with that brought life changing circumstances, along with the school I was teaching at being corrupt, and it was eventually rung through all kinds of legal battles proving that corruption, it was enough to resign from teaching before it could ruin my life.
But I used all that emotional turmoil once again to film my follow up, ‘Meng Hua Lu’ and that really solidified my position of filmmaker and director. During that time, I worked with Relay for Life a few years, then met another entrepreneur from Asheboro, Marlo, who owned a frozen yogurt shop, di’lishi who introduced me to a director of the youth theatre company in town, Carey Clark Way, little did I know then, but that was the big bang for the world I would end up creating.
I was filming all the plays, for a few years, getting used to multiple camera angles, editing, sound on the fly, lenses, everything. I built alot of my technical foundation back then, I just didn’t actually know I was doing that until years later. And I as doing it solo, which pushed me to really learn as much as I could. Not only was I learning all that I was building a relationship with the venue, the Sunset Theatre and the management therein. They began to really trust me and see what I was doing, I ended up getting a ton of freedom just because I had proven to be safe around the kids with a teaching background. But what really got me into the next level of creativity is when Carey introduced me to Bobby Bodford during one of their Christmas productions.
Among a myriad of other talents and experiences, Bobby was Angela Lansbury’s costume and wardrobe head for Murder She Wrote and has directed and written all of the plays that he has done with the Asheboro area youth as Adventures in Theatre, a company he and his wife Nicole founded. I feel like he was put into my life not just as a footnote, he is a major inspiration, a friend and through the last 8 years has really become a mentor to me whether he knows it or not. His direction is powerful, his compassion for young actors is stellar and his writing is superb. Bobby was really the final component I needed to encourage me to take on the ambitious task of Asheboro’s first ever film festival.
And that’s just what ended up happening, about midway of 2023 I was in Harlem NYC representing two of my music videos during the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop, at the Hip Hop Film Festival, I spent time in the Bronx, right on Sedgwick Avenue and reflected on what I needed to do next, what kind of real legacy should I provide, and I knew it was time to step into program directing for my own film festival. So when I got back home I started that conversation with the Sunset Theatre, and two option arose, where I could independently do the event, or I could team up with the City Of Asheboro and the Sunset Theatre to provide our city with the best we could offer. Now fast forward, we just wrapped up year three, with a dream team of producers and I took them up on the offer to work together because I love my city and I feel like they love me back and trust me enough to do what I just did. I know I skipped over a lot, but hopefully we can trickle back to that, I already said a ton. I’m always too wordy, instead of an interpreter, I need a editor, ha!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. I’ve learned with incredible highs, come incredible lows, we can’t have it all, all the time. But even with knowing that, it’s still hard when those downs come.
When I founded Mightier Than The Sword Awards at Sunset Film Festival, I knew there were going to be way more hardships than were on the surface, so I started to assemble a team, mostly from my Los Angeles/Hollywood circle. There’s not very many people in Asheboro, NC that share that mentality and drive that is in abundance out there. That’s not a knock or jab to my city either, it’s just fact, we talk, walk and move way different here and instead of teaching people here something that they can’t readily see or have access to, I would rather just bring that to them an learn by shadowing.
It’s tough, I have such a passion for my city, but oftentimes they just won’t accept or even consider something that they can’t relate to. It’s a super slow process to advance that thinking, it’s unique to the south and a huge reason there are still so many social uproars here, because acceptance comes reallllll sloooooow here.
Speaking of that, the most obvious struggle is just that. My city doesn’t really support what I do, they never really have, from my hip hop music back in the early 2000s, to my experimental films and fashion design, they just won’t latch on to it at the same rate I latch on to them.
It’s heartbreaking. Don’t get me wrong, I do have a great amount of support from my area, it’s just not from the names of people and organizations that can really help make the difference in getting the word out there at a maximum level. And I fight even harder for this festival, because it isn’t my art, this time it’s just me providing an event and a platform for hundreds of other artists, mainly in NC to have a place to be seen and heard, so when I can’t get Downtown Asheboro Inc. to help me spread the word, or the powerful voice of Reynolds Lisk, it’s discouraging, because like I’ve begged so many people and shown them the benefits of what this can bring our quality of life in Asheboro, and although we are only three years in, the event is strong and bringing close to a thousand each year, a vast majority from outside the city, state and even country.
When I went out into the lobby or scanned the auditorium last weekend, I was humbled by the amount of people, but on the same note, nearly all of them were from other areas, sitting there, enjoying downtown Asheboro, while most of our citizens won’t come because our influential leaders in the community haven’t said it was something they should attend. So that hurdle is a high bar to jump over, but I know I will do it one day, my festival and the formula it has is too great not to reach the peak I know it will.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
We are a film festival in the heart of North Carolina, Asheboro. We were established in 2023, but our first festival was in 2024. We are three years into a five year agreement with the City Of Asheboro and the Sunset Theatre.
We have five core components of our event each year.
#1. An international film festival
#2. A comedy hour (Mighty Comedy Night)
#3. An opening night concert
#4. A cult classic double feature
#5. An Asheboro area arts, culture and entertainment award ceremony
Our first year we had 80% of our films come from outside of North Carolina, and our goal was to move toward a majority NC film based festival within five years, but this year, only in year three we had 85% of our films come from NC.
What sets us apart from others, are those components I mentioned above. We make this an actual festival, not just something you sit in a dark auditorium and watch films all day. That’s also awesome, but not for the filmmakers that actually put their hard work and effort into something, and they can’t really get any post-screening feedback or give any additional commentary to their work. So that is also a big separation from other festivals, we give the cast/crew six minutes on stage after the screening to talk about their work to the crowd and then get them on our red carpet to be interviewed even more.
I most proud of this being the first ever for my city. I take so much pride in being a visionary and a frontrunner for bringing my city first of it’s kind. That stems back to me being the first ever hip hop artist in Asheboro to put on for my city. There were some dabbling in it, but I took it to the maximum and became the founding father of rap here. No one can take that away from me. I’ve brought the Sunset Theatre it’s very first hip hop show among so many other things, the list is extensive and I will always be vocal about that, because I want the next generation to bring new things here too and for them to see that it can be done, just do it.
I want the readers to be aware of the festival and make plans to attend in August of 2027. It’s catching speed and gaining incredible momentum. It’s already a top festival in the state in just three years and I am confident we can make it one of the best in the nation within ten years. Come be apart of that growth yall, please.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I see it adapting to many things. Festivals are already starting to add vertical content blocks to their events and also becoming more filmmaker friendly instead of audience friendly. The filmmaking industry is evolving in such vast ways, but there are always some level of purity in there, like Nolan filming in 70mm, and Screen X formats gaining more notriety.
I feel we as a festival got in at the right moment to start the growing pains while the shift was taking place, 2023 was the perfect year to start this, because it was right around the same times as the strikes in Hollywood and the year alot of films that were produced before or during the pandemic started to be released.
There is a shift and I am all here for it.
Pricing:
- Day passes $15-$20
- Full event passes $60
- VIP passes $100
- Film submissions $15-$45
- Merch $10-$100
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.filmandfashionbybrueilly.com/mttsawards
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mightier_than_the_sword_awards/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mttsawards
- Twitter: https://x.com/MTTSwordAwards
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MightierThanTheSwordAwards
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/livebyacode/
