Nantucket Film Festival: 15th Chapter of Literary Love Story

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Published on Saturday, 22 May 2010 13:32

Written by Laura Blum

As the days lengthen, so the Nantucket Film Festival fires up for its 15th annual storytelling blowout, June 17 to 20, 2010. The Festival, which celebrates screenwriters, screenwriting and the art of the raconteur in today's cinema, boasts "The Writers are Coming" as its motto.

Wordsmiths aren't the only ones to wash ashore. Once again, 4,000 screenwriters, producers, agents, development executives and lay cinephiles are due on the Massachusetts island -- along with some 6,000 local denizens -- that Herman Melville associated with all things "fine" and "boisterous."  

A century-and-a-half have passed since Nantucket's biggest booster scrawled those descriptions (in Moby-Dick), but the writerly tradition whales on in such NFF standards as the Screenwriters Tribute and Late Night Storytelling.

This year, the Tribute broadens to salute three scribes instead of one. Barry Levinson (Diner, Tootsie), Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for "Superman," An Inconvenient Truth) and Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3, Little Miss Sunshine) form the Academy Award-winning trinity of Tributees.

The fruits of Arndt's latest scriptwriting effort, Toy Story 3, will screen on Opening Night, one day prior to the Disney•Pixar film's national release. NFF's nod to screenplays conceived for animation is a new development. As Artistic Director Mystelle Brabbée explained, the landmark anniversary packs a special chance to "acknowledge contributions in additional fields of screenwriting and storytelling."

Late Night Storytelling, hosted by veteran thesp Anne Meara and writer Jonathan Ames (HBO's Bored to Death) returns with five surprise guests plus brazen recruits from the audience. The bawdy, irreverent platform for ghost stories is known to draw maximum frissons from its performers' script-free delivery.  

Another prime example of Nantucket's programming is All-Star Comedy Roundtable, moderated by Festival board member Ben Stiller. This year, Sarah Silverman (The Sarah Silverman Program) and Zach Galifianakis (The Hangover) bring their minds and mouths to the famed laugh-in.

In Their Shoes... is yet another Festival staple. Levinson will join this year's talkfest hosted by MSNBC political pundit and film geek Chris Matthews. Expect Baltimore's most prolific portraitist to reflect on three decades of directing, producing and writing what Brabbée tagged "smart and literate films."

For further proof of NFF's thing for writers, the Festival will host Showtime’s annual Tony Cox Award for Screenwriting. The jury choosing this year's winner includes producers Stephanie Davis (HBO’s Bored to Death), Joana Vicente (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and Steven Haft (Dead Poet’s Society).

To name but two other awards, the Adrienne Shelly Excellence in Filmmaking Award – a $5,000 jackpot -- and Best Storytelling in a Documentary Film and will also honor best efforts at the Festival.

Other Festival staples include Morning Coffee With… , a daily carb and coffee klatch with marquee guests revealing what really happened on a given film set, and gets fest-goers up earlier than otherwise conceivable.

A total of 25 feature films will unspool at NFF 2010, spanning studio and independent productions made in the U.S., foreign imports and documentaries from all over. Some 20 to 25 short films will also be shown.

Sharing the Opening Night screen with Toy Story 3 will be Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s comedy of manners,The Extra Man. The much-anticipated John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, from Sam Taylor Wood, will do Closing Night honors.

Also spurring pre-fest buzz is The Romantics, co-starring Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin and Josh Duhamel. The first directing effort of Galt Niederhoffer crashes a wedding where a group of ex-Yalies -- and the long-standing joust between the bride and the maid of honor -- rejoin.

From Stanley Nelson comes Freedom Riders, the Festival Centerpiece. The award-winning filmmaker's (The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords) journalistic rewind of 1961, when 400 black and white civil-rights activists defied Jim Crow laws on the roads of the Deep South, is the first feature-length film about this pivotal chapter in U.S. history.

Longtime civil rights activist and one of the featured freedom riders Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr. is slated to join Nelson in a post-screening discussion. The event will be jointly presented with the non-profit educational group Facing History and Ourselves, reflecting a larger Festival initiative to forge strategic partnerships that can expand its participant base.

Nantucket's loyal following is both a "blessing" and a challenge, noted NFF Executive Director Colin Stanfield. "The intimacy of these events, the separation from the mainland -- it's like going on a fantasy adventure," he said. "Once people have experienced that, it's hard not to come back year after year to this magical place 30 miles out to sea."

"It's a real respite from the fast pace of the business that happens at the usual festival," he continued. Stanfield credits the island's "small, intimate environment" with more than just niceties. "Endless careers have been launched because so and so recognized someone's writing, and there was the space to sit down and talk over lobster rolls and ice cream." 

Nantucket Film Festival
June 17 to 20, 2010

American Legion Hall
21 Washington Street

Nantucket High School
10 Surfside Road

Starlight Theater
1 North Union Street

The 1st Hudson Institute Film Festival

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

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Published on Friday, 21 May 2010 05:00

Written by FFTraveler Staff

Hudson Institute will hold its first annual Film Festival, an all-day event, on Memorial Day, May 31, 2010, at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill (237 West 42nd Street, New York City).

Documentary feature films have emerged as a powerful medium for communicating ideas and highlighting problems to the public. The right-wing Hudson Institute is featuring films which inform the public on subjects of concern to the Institute's mission.

After a review of dozens of films that came out in the past year, a selection committee chose three films to showcase at the first
annual Hudson Institute Film Festival. These films highlight the Iranian nuclear threat, the battle of Fallujah, and anti-Semitism at American universities.  

A conservative think tank founded in 1961, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation, The Hudson Institute moved to Washington, D.C., in 2004. The Institute promotes public policy change in accordance with its stated values of a "commitment to free markets and individual responsibility, confidence in the power of technology to assist progress, respect for the importance of culture and religion in human affairs, and determination to preserve America's national security."

The directors will attend the screenings and engage in a Q & A session after each film.

Schedule:

The Last 600 Meters: The Battles of Najaf and Fallujah
11 am
This 90-minute documentary by Michael Pack looks at the two biggest battles of the Iraq war — Najaf and Fallujah — through the first hand testimony of those who fought them. It offers perspectives on these battles, and lessons for warfare in the future.

Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad's Coming War and Obama's Politics of Defeat
1 pm
Joel Gilbert's 95-minute documentary, accordng to the Hudson Institute's info, "leaves little doubt that Iran is in the final stages of preparing a coming war for Islamic Revival. By seeking to appease Ahmadinejad with 'change' in U.S. Middle East policy, President Obama is ushering in the Politics of Defeat for America."

Crossing the Line: The Intifada Comes to Campus
3 pm
Produced by filmmaker Raphael Shore and directed by Wayne Kopping, Crossing the Line explores the proliferation of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incidents on North American college campuses following the launch of Operation Cast Lead by Israel's military into Gaza in late December 2008 and January 2009. This 32-minute doc looks shows how the war evokes anti-Jewish sentiments amongst college students and professors.

Admission is $15 for the entire day at the premier Manhattan blues club and grill, B.B. King's, which will serve food and drinks for purchase throughout the day.

For more info: http://www.hudson.org/

Hudson Institute Film Festival
May 31, 2010
B.B. King Blues Club & Grill
237 West 42nd St.
New York City

Hudson Institute
1015 Fifteenth Street, NW
Washington D.C., USA

"Youth Producing Change" Opens Denver's Human Rights Watch

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Wednesday, 19 May 2010 01:21

Written by Laura Blum

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival swings into Denver, Colorado, this May 20 to 26, 2010 in its Traveling Film Festival incarnation. Co-presented with the Denver Film Society, the itinerant Festival culls the highlights of HRWIFF's London and New York programs. It features documentaries and shorts from Armenia, Tibet and Burkino Faso, among other countries whose issues are too often honored in compassion fatigue and less in inquisitive viewing.

To help audiences overcome human rights' subtlest foe, the Denver Film Society and Flobots.org have tapped into the creativity of young people through a program of short films called Youth Producing Change. Seven works generated under its aegis will open this year's HRWFF in the Mile High City.

The driving philosophy of Youth Producing Change is that young people are drawn into human rights battles around the globe, yet their voices are seldom communicated.

Youth Producing Change narratives are drawn from the young lives of their teenaged filmmakers. These searching, original POV's will set the tone for the rest of the HRIWFF, to be held at the Denver Film Society's Starz FilmCenter on the Auraria Campus (900 Auraria Parkway). (The Film Society has an educational partnership with the University of Colorado at Denver’s College of Arts and Media.)

Using digital cameras, the young filmmakers spotlight human rights challenges facing them and their communities, and entertain scenarios of change. For example, festival-goers will meet the animated character of Leila, an African girl whose farmer parents sell her into servitude to feed rest of her family. (Fret not; the film, called Leila, has a happy ending.) Another film, Mozambique, centers on a Mozambican boy who is orphaned by HIV/AIDs, and who copes through unusual resourcefulness.

Immigration themes rear up in several entries, including Thoughts In A Hijab and Noè’s Story. The former is about a young Iranian emigree to the U.S. who wears an Islamic head covering despite its association with oppression back home; and the latter tracks a 15-year-old as he grapples with identity and notions of success in his adaptive country of America.

Other selections are What Courage Means to Me, drawn from the story of a Tibetan nun and former political prisoner who escaped Tibet, and Aquafinito, a look at corporations, profit motives and the diminishing supply of community water. A seventh short, It’s Not About Sex, looks into the causes and preventions of rape.

Following the program, a panel of local educators and Denver teens will comment on the films and talk about human rights issues close to their own lives. The teen discussants are involved in Colorado Youth at Risk's mentoring programs at Manual High School. A party and reception will also accompany the Youth Producing Change screening.

To coincide with HRWIFF, Starz FilmCenter will host a trade show of Denver organizations that work with youth.  These are but a few of the year-round events presented in collaboration with the Denver Film Society, whose flagship event is the Starz Denver Film Festival, now marking its 33rd year. 

Festival tickets and information are available at http://bit.ly/hrwiff.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival Denver
May 20 to 26, 2010
Denver Film Society
Starz FilmCenter
900 Auraria Parkway
Tivoli Student Union
Denver, CO 80204
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