To enter Gen Art, your name must be on a clipboard manned by a shining, feverish lady in black. If it is you feel lucky, chosen, special, because then you are permitted to taste what life should be like EVERY DAY: lo, there is free beer, free wine, free cookies and free popcorn. You eat, you drink, you look around. Are you in a singles bar? No – over there is a character actor whom you admire... there is another.... it's a film festival! Now another feverish black-clad lady is ushering you inside, and you obey her, because she must be obeyed.
Gen Art’s Film Festival (April 2-8) is just one part of the larger Gen Art mission to produce events celebrating every artistic enterprise, including art, fashion and music. The goal is to celebrate emerging talent, but sometimes it can feel like the focus is more on the event itself than the art within it. And by “event” I mean “party.” Fourteen teams of filmmakers and the army of energetic staff are probably still sleeping off their hangovers a week later. It's an affectionate, city-defined festival that encourages everyone in attendance to get drunk and kiss a stranger.
“This is an audience-driven festival,” says Vice President of Film Jeffrey Abramson. “And our audience are not, by and large, cinephiles who are heading to the arthouse every single weekend. But they’re social, and curious, and they have good taste.” Logos and shout outs to the program’s corporate sponsors are ubiquitous – witness the gleaming Acura planted in the middle of the opening night
Diminished Capacity party - but it means an unlimited open bar, so no one seems to mind.
Doug Pray’s
Surfwise (pictured above) won the audience award – it’s a crowd-pleaser about the 11-member Paskowitz family, “the first family of surfing,” who grew up living the peripatetic utopian vision of their father, waking up on a new beach every day. “[Subject & producer] John Paskowitz was just going around hugging everybody all night, saying he wanted to spoon people,” said Abramson, as smitten with Paskowitz as he is with every one of the 14 directors.
There is only one screening each night of Gen Art. Each is a New York premiere, though many have been gathering buzz on the festival circuit for months. About half come with distribution already in place, a balance that the programmers have chosen to maintain.
The Take, starring John Leguizamo and Rosie Perez, closed the festival on Wednesday night and a few days later opened in New York and L.A.
Surfwise was produced by the now-shuttered HDNet, and has distribution via its parents company Magnolia Films.
The family in David Pome’s
Cook County runs a meth lab, although the screening and party weren’t any less joyful for it. You can watch theirs and everyone’s antics in the videos by
David Jr., who could be seen circling the melee with his tiny Sony video camera at all times. David Jr. edited his pieces nightly, and Gen Art projected them on the big screen the following evening.
Frost, by Steve Clark, carries on a long narrative tradition of wealthy young men with the world at their feet and an existential crisis at their door.
Frost was the film with a Gen Art home team advantage. New York-bred Clark shot in his own Tribeca apartment building, his parents’ townhouse, and a city court building lobby – not to mention his friends’ nightclubs. Its stylish cast of bright young things are already fixtures on the New York social scene. The ghost of George Plimpton apparently hung over the production, as Clark and co-writer were editors at the Paris Review before moving behind the camera.
Ultimately it was Jennifer Phang’s marvelous
Half-Life, which won the Grand Jury Prize, not much of a surprise after juror Alan Cumming’s glowing preface to the announcement.
“
Half-Life is not an easy film, but [our films] don’t have to be super digestible,” said Abramson. “We want films that will connect with our audience. Some speak directly to our audience like
Frost or they’re something that’s unique and original, like
Nightlife… we really want to showcase talent that we think is going somewhere, that has a future.” This promise of great things to come has been satisfied by alums like Azazel Jacobs, Ilya Chaiken, Brad Anderson, Craig Brewer, and many more.
Reached by phone on his way to the airport, Abramson and Gen Art are already gearing up for an upcoming film festival in Chicago, casting for Project Runway, an art exhibit of cellphone videos with Nokia and, to be sure, more parties.
Labels: Festivals
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4/14/2008 01:42:00 PM
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