Three years before the Venice Film Festival was founded, newspaper journalist, feminist writer, organizer, lecturer, and early advocate of equal rights for women, Mildred Taylor hosted the very first international film festival in 1929 in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California with the screening of two controversial silent films.​

In 1924, Taylor and her husband, artist James Blanding Sloan, established a second residence south of their Bay Area home in Carmel-by-the-Sea. At that time, Carmel was the largest art colony on the Pacific Coast. Blanding was hired by the University of California Extension Division to teach summer classes in Carmel, including instruction in etching, theatre design, and painting. He also contributed his prints to exhibitions at the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club and staged puppet performances for the local children.

By 1929, their visits to town were regularly detailed in the local newspaper The Carmel Pine Cone, and Sloan’s linoleum-cut prints were reproduced in the local literary journal, The Carmelite. That same year, his wife, Mildred Taylor, established Carmel’s first international film festival and screened The Light of Asia, the story of Buddha’s life which featured an all-Indian cast and created an artistic sensation in the capitals of Europe, and perhaps the most famous American experimental film of the 1920s, Life and Death of 9413—A Hollywood Extra, a “very modern” psychological drama produced by the abstract Yugoslav painter, Slavco Vorkapic.

Mildred Taylor and James Blanding Sloan are depicted here in a drawing by Wah Ming Chang.

Mildred Taylor was also the adoptive mother of Academy Award-winning designer, Wah Ming Chang (who at age seven had become a pupil of her husband, artist James Blanding Sloan). Taylor introduced Wah to puppet-making, a skill which he would employ when he eventually began working in film. Chang’s artistic contributions to the cinematic arts are legendary and include designing the elaborate headdress worn by Elizabeth Taylor in the film Cleopatra as well as the Medical Tricorder and the Communicator he created for the Star Trek television series (which later became the inspiration for the flip phone).