Palo Alto Gets Into the Act With New Film Fest

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Sunday, 25 September 2011 05:00

Written by L E Shannon

The Inaugural Palo Alto International Film Festival (PAIFF) is taking place September 29 - October 2, 2011 at the Aquarius, Palo Alto Square and the Palo Alto Children's Theatre in Palo Alto, California.

The Palo Alto International Film Festival is a program of the Palo Alto Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit creativity lab, dedicated to the pursuit and promotion of unconventional truths through research, education and entertainment.

This new Festival is intended to build a local and international community that focuses as much on behind-the-scenes professionals as it does on stars of the film world.  

"As movies migrate to digital, the future of cinema will depend on the cutting edge tools that continue to be conceived and developed in the [San Francisco] Bay Area. These tools expand the range of narratives that can be told and empower artists of all kinds to reveal narratives that might otherwise remain unseen."

"Since film is the ultimate convergence of art and technology, PAIFF hopes to connect the imaginations of artists, technology professionals, community members and the film industry to expand areas of innovation in Silicon Valley and beyond."

Films include:

Life in a Day
dir. Kevin Macdonald
People from all over the globe submitted over 80,000 videos (more than 4,500 hours) that captured their lives on July 24, 2010. From all of that footage came a cine-mosaic that "PAIFF is proud to present on its Opening Night, a film that celebrates the magical way that the digital revolution has made storytellers of us all."

YouTube My Facebook by Cedric Vella, winner of the 2011 PAIFF-Talenthouse Short Film Contest, will screen before the feature.

PressPausePlay
dir. Victor Köhler, David Dwarsky
This documentary tackles the effect a democratized culture has on art, film, music and literature.

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
dir. Craig McCall
A look at the life of the renowned cameraman behind such classics as John Huston's The African Queen and King Vidor's War and Peace.

Road to Nowhere
dir. Monte Hellman
The legendary director’s first feature in more than two decades, a romantic noir within noir, has a distinct perspective on digital art and truth.

Resurrect the Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
dir. Jon Foy
"Toynbee Idea In Kubrick’s 2001 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter." "Tiles with this message have been found embedded in the asphalt of cities in the Americas since the 1980s. Curious about the maker and meaning of this meme, underground artist/writer/musician Justin Duerr dug into the enigma."

Industrial Light and Magic: Creating the Impossible
dir. Leslie Iwerks
Narrator Tom Cruise recounts the history of ILM, George Lucas’ visual effects house, which revolutionized film and gave us some of the most iconic images that cinema has ever seen.

A Trip to the Moon
dir. George Méliès
sponsored by Technicolor
Tom Burton and Technicolor present the Northern California Premiere of Méliès’ famous 1902 film with a talk about the restoration process.

Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel
dir. Alex Stapleton
This affectionate tribute is full of interviews with Roger Corman film alumnae as it chronicles the life and times of a director every bit as iconic as Hitchcock, Capra or Coppola.

Something Ventured
dir. Dayna Goldfine, Dan Geller
The first venture capitalists were a small group of men who banded together in Silicon Valley in the 1950s to partner with technology entrepreneurs. Where others saw only risk, why did these investors see the seeds of opportunity?

Here
dir. Braden King
In a job called ground-truthing, Will Shepard land-surveys satellite images around the world to check for accuracy.

The Real Revolutionaries
dir. Paul Crowder
"Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley had handpicked eight brilliant men and brought them to the apricot orchards of the Santa Clara valley to work on a Transistor different from the one that had won the Nobel Prize. When Shockley’s plan failed to come to fruition during the civil rights era, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and the rest of the Traitorous Eight made other plans and forged their own paths."

Cave of Forgotten Dreams
dir. Werner Herzog
"Herzog uses 3D to ‛capture the intentions of the painters who worked 32,000 years ago inside the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave in France. Suggesting the motion of horses, rhinos and bison in the tracings of the contours and slants of the cave wall with painted lines (and torch-light), these painters created what Herzog suggests is a "proto-cinema".‛"  

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
dir. Robert Wise
presented by The Film Foundation  
Cathy Gourley will speak upon the concept of a film as a historical/cultural document.

The short film Duck and Cover will set the tone providing insight into the Cold War and society’s fears of an atomic attack.

Many other short film programs will be screened, including selected films for different age groups.

The Digital Native Student Program offers films, including class screenings and interactive workshops for youth, designed to spark creative experimentation, increase media literacy, and introduce a broad range of films to younger audiences.

The Digital Native Youth program serves 4 different age groups: 6-8 year olds, 9-12 year olds, 13-15 year olds and 16-18 year olds. Each age group has a program that is tailored to match its specific needs and interests.

Panels include:

• Animate This! A Conversation with Patricia Hannaway and Tom Sito
• Encyclopedia Pictura
• Digital Filmmaking & Distribution: Whose Tail is Wagging the Dog?
• Ditching the Divide: Merging Technology to Manufacture Cinema
• Global Cinema Tomorrow
• How Much is Your Idea Worth?
• Making The Startup Kids

Some of the Speaker Series guests are:

Walter Murch: Behind the Scenes of Hemingway & Gellhorn – Murch will talk about the integration of FileMaker database management in the post-production of Phil Kaufman's feature film.

Kim Aubry: How Good Filmmakers Make Bad Filmmaking Decisions – The owner and founder of ZAP, Zoetrope Aubry Productions, discusses how the "desktop digital video revolution" has had positive and negative consequences on film and claims that these wonderful tools can be used and abused.

From Apocalypse Now to Twixt: Sound Design with Richard Beggs – Sound designer and re-recording mixer, Beggs will speak about how to move a story forward by application of sound and music, and "how digital technology both facilitates and is at odds with that process."

From Indiana Jones to Benjamin Button: Transitioning to Digital with Craig Barron – As co-founder and head of the visual effects company Matte World Digital, Barron can talk about his prior work creating realistic worlds in classic films and his evolution to digital work. 

For more information, go to www.paiff.net.

Palo Alto International Film Festival
September 29 - October 2, 2011

Palo Alto Square
3000 El Camino Real
(at Page Mill Road)
Palo Alto, CA

Aquarius Theater
430 Emerson Street
Palo Alto, CA

Talenthouse
542 High Street
Palo Alto, CA

Children's Theater
1305 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, CA

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