Press Release

Eva Marie Saint Presents Classic Film and Controversial Documentary at Virginia Film Festival

September 24, 1996: Eva Marie Saint, Oscar-award winning star of On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, will open and close the 9th annual Virginia Film Festival with two presentations reflecting different stages of her productive career. Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest will be presented on Thursday, October 31, followed by a discussion with Ms. Saint and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, moderated by Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University. On Sunday, November 2, Saint will return to present Children in America's Schools, a new documentary co-produced with her husband, Jeffrey Hayden. The film's recent presentation on PBS has provoked a firestorm of debate around the nation, and a town meeting with Virginia educators and government officials will follow the screening on Sunday, November 2.

Ms. Saint will attend a reception at the Bayly Art Museum in her honor before introducing a special screening of North by Northwest at 7:00pm in the Culbreth Theatre. This classic Hitchcock film, which co-stars Cary Grant, was selected by the Festival to represent this year's theme, Wild Spaces, Endangered Places, exploring the movies' changing attitudes towards the American landscape.

Children in America's Schools will air at 1:00pm on Sunday, November 3 in the Omni Hotel. A panel of educators and government officials, organized by the University of Virginia's School of Education, will follow the screening. According to Festival Director Richard Herskowitz, the screening of Children in America's Schools reflects the Festival's theme and its interest, as the nation's most prominent university-based film festival, to expose new academic ideas to the public: "Recent work in landscape and geography studies has emphasized the built landscape around us, and Saint and Hayden's documentary brilliantly calls attention to the starkly different architectural and environmental worlds that public policy is creating for children of different social classes."

After its PBS screening in mid-September, Children in America's Schools set off a firestorm of debate around the country. The program has resulted in town meetings in Ohio, where the documentary was set, and a flood of calls to host Bill Moyers, Saint Hayden Productions, and to the various PBS stations on which it aired. Saint and Hayden are hoping to further stimulate the debate on school funding in Virginia by participating in a town meeting at the end of this year's Virginia Film Festival.