Posted by editor@vimooz.com on February 3, 2009 under Art Film Festival (PWU Independent Film), Midwest Independent Film Festival, Social Issues Documentary Film Contest (SI DocFest), Virginia Film Festival | 
“The Poker House” at Midwest Independent Film Festival, Tuesday, February 3rd
The Midwest Independent Film Festival takes place Tuesday, February 3rd at 6 p.m. at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema with the screening of award winning film, The Poker House, directed by Lori Petty. Read more …
University of Virginia Announces Search for New Director for the Virginia Film Festival
The University of Virginia’s College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has announced that a formal search has begun for a new Director for the Virginia Film Festival. Read more …
Art Film Festival awards hosted by the PWU Independent Film group
Three art films bagged this year’s Art Film Festival awards hosted by the PWU Independent Film group in Mania, Philippines.
Named Best Short Feature was “Singaw” by Robert Milan Jr. of the Colegio de San Juan de Letran. “Kamatis” by Brian Javier also of Colegio de San Juan de Letran and “Aparador” by Jomel Alviar of Asia Pacific College were awarded for Best Screenplay and Best Director, respectively. Read more …
SI DocFest 2009 Awards to be Held in Downtown San Jose
The Second Annual Bay Area Social Issues Documentary Film Contest (SI DocFest) will hold its screenings and award ceremony at the Camera 12 Cinemas in downtown San Jose on Sunday, February 8, 2009 from 2-6 pm.
The SI DocFest is not a traditional film festival, but rather a contest narrowly focused on high school students, the documentary genre, social issues, and the greater Bay Area community. Participants are asked to create a short documentary (8-12 minutes) profiling individuals or organizations that are making or have made a difference in the community through their work and dedication to social issues. At last year’s event, close to $25,000 was granted to participants. Read more of this article »
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on October 17, 2008 under Virginia Film Festival |
Charlottesville is preparing for an alien invasion of epic proportions as the Virginia Film Festival scans both earth and sky for tales of strange visitors from other worlds and cultures.
Aliens!, set for October 30-November 2, will feature some 80 films and more than 100 guests covering the entire spectrum of the alien experience, from immigrants to outsiders to extra-terrestrials. The guest list for this 21st Annual event will feature an international array of some of the most highly respected artists in the industry today, including Mauritanian-French director Abderrahmane Sissako (screening Waiting for Happiness and Life on Earth) and Mexican-American director Gregory Nava, here for the 25th anniversary presentation of El Norte. Also celebrating its 25th anniversary is Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, presented by actor Peter Riegert, who plays the American alien in Scotland. Riegert will also accompany The Response, a powerful new film dramatizing the legal proceedings against a Guantanamo detainee.
For the second year, the Festival will explore the work of several emerging and established filmmakers in depth, with multiple screenings of films by a group of “Focus On” directors, headlined by Mexico’s Guillermo Arriaga. Arriaga will be on hand to screen several of his filmed screenplays, including Amores Perros, Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Babel, culminating with the Virginia premiere of his first feature as director, The Burning Plain, starring Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.
Other “Focus On” directors include::
- Director Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway, Take Out)
- Screenwriter and director Megan Holley (Sunshine Cleaning, The Snowflake Crusade)
- Underground film pioneers George and Mike Kuchar (Secrets of the Shadow World, Blips, Ascension of the Demonoids, Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults, Sins of the Fleshapoids)
- Feature director and media artist Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer, The Sixth Section, Why Cybraceros?, The Borders Trilogy)
• Documentarian Renee Tajima-Pena (Calavera Highway, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, My America: Honk If You Love Buddha)
The Festival program is jam-packed with regional premieres of films that have been making waves on the international festival scene, including Waltz with Bashir, August Evening, The Betrayal, The Secret of the Grain, The Exiles, and A Jihad for Love. A complete list of new titles can be found at the end of this release.
Virginia Filmmaking: Natives, Emigres, and Immigrants
While the focus will be on the theme of outsiders, Aliens! will also feature a uniquely Virginian flavor. In the course of looking at the concept of migration, Herskowitz discovered a wealth of riches in the work of Virginia emigres. “We have a long history of featuring on opening night the work of filmmakers whose roots are in Virginia, and who have left but returned to make or show their films here,” he said, citing Nicole Kassell’s The Woodsman, Derek Sieg’s Swedish Auto and Jeff Wadlow’s Tower of Babble as precedents. “We are proud to continue this tradition with Lake City, a wonderful film with a history rooted not only in Virginia but in the Festival itself.”
The film’s New York-based co-director, Perry Moore, first met its producer Mark Johnson (whose credits include some of the best films of the last twenty years including Diner, Rain Man, The Chronicles of NarniaWeiman Seid,Lake City’s executive producers. Together, they decided to film the Southern gothic tale, about a buried family tragedy and its resonances in the relationship between a mother and her troubled son, in Richmond, Virginia. The film’s local roots run even deeper thanks to the starring roles played by Charlottesvillians Sissy Spacek and Dave Matthews. Moore, Johnson, and Seid will attend the screening, with additional special guests to be announced. and many more) at the VFF in the early nineties. The two U.Va. alumni were joined by a third, who became one of
There is more work by artists with ties to Virginia:
- The festival will present the regional premiere of the Sundance hit Sunshine Cleaning, which producer Glenn Williamson, another U.Va. alumnus, discovered when its author, Richmond-based Megan Holley, won the Governor’s Screenwriting Award at the Virginia Film Festival in 2003.
• The Festival slate will also feature the American Premiere of Little White Feather and The Hunter, a film on Pocahantas and the English constructed from a collection of verbal accounts gathered by British artist Anna Lucas from people in Harwich and Essex in the U.K, and Jamestown, Virginia. Little White Feather will be accompanied by the latest film by Derek Sieg , Wasteland, a contemporary tale of whites and Native Americans in commercial conflict.
• Charlottesville audiences will finally get a chance to see on screen the controversial animated film about the U.Va. mascot, The Great Seal of Virginia, by alumni Irwin Berman, Michael Wartella and Sam Retzer.
• And the spotlight will shine on Moviemaking in Virginia in the Virginia Film Office’s special presentation of Robert Griffith’s new documentary on the film scene in the Commonwealth, accompanied by winning shorts from the Virginia Independent Film Festival,
Aliens: The Immigration Axis
“As I started thinking about the Aliens! theme I was struck by the different meanings of this word,” said Virginia Film Festival Artistic Director Richard Herskowitz. “What ended up evolving was a two-pronged approach, with one axis covering the extraterrestrial visitor, and another looking at issues related to the ‘illegal immigrant.’” The latter kind of alien is certainly playing an outsized role in the current political season, and it seemed worth finding films that will allow audiences to question and debate the use of the term in defining immigrant populations.”
The Festival’s “Immigration Axis” will be highlighted by:
- Gregory Nava presenting a 25th Anniversary screening of his groundbreaking work El Norte, which he will also explore in depth in the annual Regal Shot by Shot workshop. Nava’s work will be complemented by a series of new films about Mexican undocumented workers, including My Life Inside, Lucia Gaja’s scathing look at the railroading of a Latino immigrant woman by the Texas judicial system, and August Evening, Chris Eska’s Cassavetes Award-winning indie feature on generational ties and tensions within an immigrant family. Also, “Focus On” director Alex Rivera will screen his futuristic sci-fi films about Mexican immigrant labor, Sundance hit Sleep Dealer and his short video pieces, The Sixth Section, Why Cybraceros?, and The Border Trilogy.
Abderrahmane Sissako, the Mauritanian director living in Paris, whose work reflects the insights and challenges of a life lived in exile. Sissako will present his films Life on Earth and Waiting for Happiness
Peter Riegert, celebrating a 25th Anniversary of his own with Local Hero, in which Riegert played the American business representative adrift in Scotland. Riegert will also accompany writer Sig Libowitz with The Response, a new film in which he co-stars with Kate Mulgrew. The film follows the hearings against an Arab detainee using actual transcripts from the Guantanamo proceedings, and will be followed by a panel discussion on the Guantanamo tribunals led by Slate legal writer Dahlia Lithwick. Riegert will also present two films that he directed, King of the Corner and By Courier.
Ghazel, a noted Iranian-French video and performance artist will appear at the Festival via Skype hookup. Ghazel became even more relevant to the theme when she encountered what she deemed to be humiliating and unreasonable visa roadblocks from U.S. immigration personnel due to her Iranian heritage and canceled her Festival visit.
Two “Focus On” directors explore contemporary immigrant life and struggles in the U.S: Renee Tajima-Pena examines Asian-American identity in Who Killed Vincent Chin? and My America: Honk if You Love Buddha and the cross-border family tensions of her Mexican husband in Calavera Highway. Sean Baker creates semi-documentary fictions about New York immigrant life with non-professional actors in Prince of Broadway and Take Out.
Classic films about outsiders by immigrant directors include two films made by Spanish director Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Los Olvidados and Nazarin, and Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s horror classic about a Serbian immigrant with a secret, Cat People. Other immigrant-themed classics include Fassbinder’s Ali:Fear Eats the Soul , West Side Story, and Bad Day at Black Rock (presented by director John Sturges’ son, Charlottesville resident Michael Sturges).
Also key to this sub-theme will be the keynote talk being offered on the Festival’s opening day by the first Virginia Film Festival Fellow Hamid Naficy, an internationally-acclaimed film scholar and the John Evans Professor of Communications at Northwestern University. Naficy will also teach a week-long mini-course for students and non-students on the Festival theme for the U.Va. Media Studies Department beginning October 27 (for more information about registering, contact Judy McPeak at jam5wx@virginia.edu). Dr. Naficy is the author of An Accented Cinema, which explores the common subjects and styles of filmmakers who live and work away from their country of origin. “We are thrilled to have one of the world’s foremost experts on exilic, diasporic, and ethnic filmmaking joining us this year to illuminate the Festival theme for students and our broader audience,” Herskowitz said.
Aliens: The Extra-Terrestrial Axis
As previously announced, the Festival will allow visitors to comb the skies for alien invaders at its McCormick Observatory Cinema, which will play the Orson Welles/H.G. Wells radio play War of the WorldsGeorge and Mike Kuchar and Jeanne Liottta and programs curated by Ed Halter of Light Industry/New York and Craig Baldwin of Other Cinema in San Francisco. on its 70th Anniversary, the Festival’s opening night. The ‘50s George Pal film of the same name will be shown later that night in Culbreth Theatre, introduced by Pal biographer Justin Humphreys. The McComick Observatory Cinema series will continue with sci-fi and space films by
No look at Aliens! would be complete without Aliens, and the acclaimed film heads the list of classic sci-fi favorites to be offered throughout the weekend. Aliens will be joined by the superb Star Trek sendup Galaxy Quest, as the Festival’s two-part tribute to the late Stan Winston, the special effects master and VFF board member who passed away earlier this year. Also on the sci-fi classics list will be Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Day the Earth Stood Still, screening in the new Library of Congress theater in Culpeper,
Bring the Family!
After a wildly successful debut in 2007, the Virginia Film Festival is bringing back Family Day on Saturday, November 1. Presented in conjunction with the Virginia Discovery Museum, the event will feature a pair of programs at The Paramount Theater for the family and budget-friendly rate of $1 per ticket for kids under the age of 12! The Discovery Museum will also offer free admission for children (ages 1-12) on Family Day from 2:30-5:00 and a 10:30am free screening of the animated Zula Patrol at Cityspace.
Once again Festival favorites Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton will be joined by Paul Reisler, Terri Allard and the students of Kid Pan Alley to accompany silent films with live music, including songs by Charlottesville schoolkids. This year’s program, entitled Strangers in Strange Lands, will feature fantasy films by Georges Melies, Edwin S. Porter and Charlie Chaplin.
Director Meni Tsirbas will introduce the 4PM regional premiere of Terra, the spectacular new CGI animated feature about a lush, peace-loving planet whose world is shattered by an invading armada of humans. The film includes the voices of Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson and Dennis Quaid.
The Festival continues another favorite tradition of silent films at Scottsville’s Victory Theatre with The Mark of Zorro, accompanied by Matt Marshall. Read more of this article »
