Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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The Cult Appeal of the Creative Capital Retreat
“Creative Capital is a cult,” said Phillip Andrew Lewis at the end of his presentation at the art funder’s semi-annual retreat this past weekend at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. “But it’s a good cult.” Lewis’s was both a good line and an appropriate capper to his presentation, which shocked right from the outset. The installation artist began his talk by saying he had been held captive as a child for two years within a radical drug treatment program sponsored by the U.S. government. “I consider my work a form of deprogramming,” he told the stunned audience. For the record, […]
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THE 17TH ANNUAL STONY BROOK FILM FESTIVAL
Falling under the umbrella of the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University, and still run by its original founder Alan Inkles (whose praises I’ll sing a bit later), the Stony Brook Film Festival is a breath of fresh Long Island air in a sea of desperate-to-please fests. Now in its 17th year, the event runs like a well-oiled machine – with screenings starting promptly on time and technical glitches nonexistent – yet feels more like a 10-day family retreat, complete with marina lodgings in nearby Port Jefferson. It’s also one of the warmest, most accommodating festivals I’ve […]
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A GLANCE AT NEWFEST 2012
NewFest, New York’s LGBT film festival, returns this year with bicoastal fortification, its programming taken over by the folks at L.A.’s Outfest, whose motive for the merge is to foster a national queer arts entity. But is the alliance holy? With Outfest having just wrapped its 30th anniversary, an 11-day event that boasted nearly 150 titles (including Ira Sachs’s Keep the Lights On, Jonathan Lisecki’s Gayby, and David France’s riveting ACT UP doc, How to Survive a Plague), NewFest has the not-so-faint whiff of an afterthought, its 18-feature lineup looking more like the subpar cache of a scavenger than a […]
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LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL 2012
The Los Angeles Film Festival is something of an oddity, not least because of its relative obscurity: for a 11-day-long cinematic event a stone’s throw away from the heart of the American film industry, it hardly registers on the local radar. As a reasonably cinema-savvy Angeleno, I don’t personally know anyone who gets more excited for it than they do for AFI Fest – my usual screening buddies either skipped LAFF entirely or only showed up for a handful of films this time around – though perhaps the comparison isn’t entirely valid. Where this is a “traditional” fest, with programming […]
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EIFF 2012: ONWARDS & UPWARDS
Scotland looks magnificent in EIFF closing night film Brave — lots of mountains, mystical spaces and torrential waterfalls. Strangely though, it doesn’t rain in the movie. Not once. This decision must have been overseen by the Scottish tourist board, for there are few places as rainy as Scotland. When it rained in Cannes this year, it was all the trades could talk about — but it’s just not news when it happens in Edinburgh. The last two weeks in Edinburgh we have all been dashing from cinema to cinema in raincoats, umbrellas up, wavy hair getting frizzier by the minute. […]
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EIFF 2012: IN DEVELOPMENT
We’re over half way through now and I’m starting to panic. I keep hearing about great films that I’ve missed (The Mirror Never Lies is spoken of only in superlatives, and The Unspeakable Act is another one I’m late to the table for, Tabu, Kid-Thing and more) and rocking events that slipped by while I was elsewhere. Chris Fujiwara told me about an event where he and some of the Filipino filmmakers who are in town did a live musical accompaniment to a film, and I don’t know where I was for Thelma Schoonmaker‘s Q&A after a screening of a […]
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WRAPPING SILVERDOCS 2012
Brutus McCracker, a Chihuahua with a camera mounted on his collar, wandered through the Silver Spring Civic Building capturing low-angle moments of the AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Film Festival. The camera is featured in Seth Keal’s short CatCam, one of 114 films from 44 countries programmed in the 10th edition of Silverdocs that concluded yesterday. The canine mascot provided a cheery reminder of the relaxed nature and intimate setting of the festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, a multicultural suburb abutting Washington, D.C. With its proximity to our nation’s capital, the festival specializes in social issue docs and attracts activists and political […]
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EIFF 2012: NEW BEGINNINGS
Walking around the opening party you couldn’t help but hear the word “rebirth” a lot. As the most heavily pregnant person in the room, this made me jump, but I soon joined in the celebration. The 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival had just opened with William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe, and the evening was a definite success. Not everyone liked the film — there were questions about on-screen violence towards women in particular — but everyone agreed that as an opener, new festival director Chris Fujiwara had hit the right note. Smacked it right on the kisser, you might say. There […]
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LAFF 2012: CREATIVE NONFICTION
In a very real way, Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives presents the other side of the Pincus coin: where that film teeters near death, Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore’s documentary focuses on birth. Gaskin, regarded as the “mother of authentic midwifery,” has been present for over 1,200 births, written four books, and lectured across the U.S. and abroad since founding the Farm Midwifery Center in Tennessee in the early ’70s—no slim resumé. Lamm and Wigmore have compiled a great deal of footage from the period – bearded men wielding guitars, fuzzy camerawork, and hippie gatherings are […]
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LAFF 2012: FAMILY MATTERS
The North American premiere of Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love was the big to-do Thursday night in downtown Los Angeles, and not just because it opened the L.A. Film Festival: Allen doesn’t often visit the city (not even when nominated for an Oscar), making his personal introduction of this latest work something of a coup for the fest. And while it would be wrong to call a new film by the endlessly prolific director a cinematic “event” in the same vein as, say, the arrival a new Terence Davies project, so too would it be wrong to think it […]
