In the 1930s and early ’40s, a group of New Deal-sponsored photographers traversed the country chronicling the lives of Americans — rich and poor, urban and rural, black and white — to create one of the most astonishing documentary portraits of America ever compiled.

These legendary still photographers, including Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano, brought to life the New Deal programs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information under the direction of Roy Stryker who headed the organization during the Depression.

Now, a film, “Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI Photographers,” brings their story to life. It will be screened Dec. 2 at Vinegar Hill Theatre at 7 p.m. The screening is the last in the fall schedule of the Virginia Film Society.

Documentary filmmaker Jeanine Butler, who has more than 15 years experience writing and producing documentary and educational films for PBS, The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, National Science Foundation and The National Geographic Channel, directed the film and will lead a discussion after the screening.

Narrated by U.Va. history professor and civil rights leader Julian Bond, this documentary tells the remarkable stories behind the personal vision and the struggles experienced by the photographers who created some of the most iconic images in history.

I’ll start with my own memories. They involved standing in front of my friends on the Festival Advisory Board (including Doro Bachrach, Ron Yerxa, Mark Johnson,  Sissy Spacek, Temple Fennell, and others) and, later, an audience of 500 at the Paramount Theater, after this video tribute was projected:

The video was a surprise orchestrated by Virginia Film Office director Rita McClenny, who has been my  colleague, advisor, and close friend since I arrived here in 1994. She cast many of the other partners and friends who have supported me for the past fourteen years in this video memento, which I’ll probably view and inflict on others repeatedly, well into my dotage.

guillermo arriaga-jack fisk-sissy spacek-richard herskowitz

More memories: For many years, I’ve invited a few festival participants to help me detox from the festival’s frenzy at a retreat

hamid naficy

on our final night in a beautiful setting. This year,  Russ and Lyn Bolen Warren graciously welcomed my guests, on just six hours’ notice, into their beautiful, art-filled, mountain-flanked home.

kevin everson

jeanne liotta

The group (documented in these Polaroids by our ace Production Coordinator James Ford) included international, experimental, and Hollywood filmmakers, film scholars, and student interns.

george kuchar

As always, it was a surprising amalgamation, but what a kick to gather such a diverse group together. I’ve always drawn great pleasure from mixing up the commercial and experimental in my programming, and in my partying.

lauren o'connor

peter riegert

Seriously, I think it’s healthy and necessary for mainstream and avant-garde and academic practitioners to be in dialogue, and I have never had a better venue than the Virginia Film Festival to help me realize

this ambition.

Now, I’m off to Houston for the next chapter in my career, a Cinema and Media Arts Festival that kicks off on November 20 with a four-day mini-festival, previewing the full festival that starts in November 2009. So long, Virginia filmgoers and festival guests, and thanks for the fifteen memorable years you gave me here.

Mandelbaum tells his story through archival footage and contemporary interviews with parents, siblings, friends and children of Argentina’s “disappeared” — those kidnapped, tortured and killed by the ruling right-wing military junta during the 1976-83 dictatorship.

The genesis for the film occurred about four years ago. Mandelbaum, who lives in the U.S. but grew up in Buenos Aires, the son of German immigrants who fled Germany to escape World War II, happened to think about an old girlfriend in Argentina. He wondered what she was doing and decided to look her up. His Google search led to a disturbing discovery: Her name was among the thousands on a list of Argentina’s “disappeared.”

Mandelbaum, 57, decided to find out what had happened to her and others who’d been a part of his life there. He envisioned his quest as a film, a “personal search for the souls of friends who disappeared in Argentina,” as he wrote in an early film treatment. He traveled to Argentina six times over the next three years to conduct interviews and document his search, a task that grew more disturbing as he uncovered details of the disappearances of his former girlfriend and 11 other close friends.

His resulting film, which was screened last month at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and is going to air on PBS next year on “Independent Lens,” unearths the buried past and revisits the tension and energy of that dark chapter in Argentina’s history.

About the Virginia Film Society

Virginia Film Society events are co-sponsored by the Virginia Film Festival and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Most screenings feature guest speakers. Admission to individual screenings is $9 and free to society members. Individual admission tickets may be purchased 30 minutes before the screening when seats are available.

A full-year membership in the Virginia Film Society is $60 ($50 for students and seniors). Membership benefits include admission to the screenings throughout the year, one free pass to Regal Cinemas, $2 off Mondays at Sneak Reviews and $6.50 Tuesday movies at Vinegar Hill Theatre.

For information on membership in the Virginia Film Society, to download an application or to view the full fall season schedule, visit www.vafilm.com

Morse is well known to film, television and theatre audiences alike thanks to a long and distinguished resume that began with his starring role as Dr. Jack Morrison in the hit medical drama St. Elsewhere beginning in 1982.  His many high profile film roles include a number of “bad guy” roles such as a prison guard opposite Tom Hanks in The Green Mile and  the questionable neighbor in the 2007 film Disturbia.  Morse’s other films include Desperate Hours, The Crossing Guard, The Indian Runner and Hearts in Atlantis, among others.  He earned a pair of Emmy nominations for his role as George Washington in the recent HBO miniseries John Adams and for a recurring role on the Fox series House, where he played a detective with a vendetta against Dr. Gregory House. The critic Jon Podhoretz has said that he “enlivens and deepens every movie fortunate enough to have him in the cast.”

“We are thrilled that David Morse will be joining us this year and greatly look forward to his appearance and to his film, Passengers, which also stars Anne Hathaway. Our preview screening will also include a remote hookup interview with its director, Rodrigo Garcia,” said Virginia Film Festival Artistic Director Richard Herskowitz.  “David Morse is one of those actors who, no matter what role he is in, seems to jump off the screen and create indelible characters.  ”

David Morse joins Sissy Spacek, actor Troy Garity, actor/director Peter Riegert and acclaimed director and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, as just some of the featured guests of the Aliens! themed program, which runs from October 30-November 2 at venues throughout Charlottesville.  Aliens! will explore two distinct sides of its theme title, from extraterrestrial visitors to global immigrants.

In addition, the Festival has announced the addition of a pair of noted Washington attorneys who have represented individuals who have been indefinitely detained without charge by the United States at Guantanamo Bay.  The attorneys, Agnieszka M. Fryszman of Cohen Milstein, Hausfeld and Toll; and David G. Dickman of Venable LLP, will join writer Sig Libowitz and actor Peter Riegert for a discussion following the 1PM screening of the new film The Response on Saturday, November 1 at Regal Downtown #4.  The panel discussion will be moderated by Dahlia Lithwick, contributing editor at Newsweek and senior editor at Slate.

The idea for The Response, a half-hour film taken directly from the transcripts of the Guantanamo Bay tribunals was hatched by Libowitz, a character actor who decided he had played so many lawyers he might as well learn to be one.  While in a class at the University of Maryland Law School, Libowitz was fascinated when one of his professors read from the transcripts and suggested after class that it would make for a compelling movie.  The school then became a financial supporter of the film.

For more information on the upcoming 2008 Virginia Film Festival, visit www.vafilm.com or call 1-800-UVA-Fest.  Tickets may be ordered online at this site until 6PM on Sunday, October 27 and after that date in person at the Regal Downtown Box Office.  Box office hours are from 10AM until 4PM through Wednesday, October 29 and 10AM until 10:15PM during the Festival weekend.

I’m very happy that, at my final program as artistic director, Sissy Spacek will be our opening night special guest, with her new film, Lake City. Sissy has been a friend and supporter of both the Virginia Film Festival and me for many years, and I love her performance in this film. Her performing partner is Troy Garity, who plays her estranged son, forced back into his mother’s home while escaping from a nasty drug dealer (played by one Dave Matthews). Garity, who starred in Soldier’s Girl (which director Frank Pierson presented at the VFF in 2003), will also be at opening night, along with the film’s producers and co-directors. Mark Johnson is one of those producers, and I’m also thrilled that this longtime supporter of the Festival is joining this gathering.

Looking over our guest list, I’m struck by their international diversity– featured directors this year are Maurtanian-French Abderrahmane Sissako, Mexican Guillermo Arriaga, and Mexican-American Gregory Nava. This is quite an evolution from my first year here (1994), when we were still called the Virginia Festival of American Film. 1995 was the last year we called our festival by that name, and the theme that year was U.S. and Them. The precise point of that theme selection was to argue that American films could hardly be distinguished from the international films they influence, reflect, finance and/or poach, and to segue into our re-emergence the next year as the Virginia Film Festival. Thirteen years later, we have a strong anti-immigrant political movement that is trying to wall off America’s borders, and so it seems worth making the point again that immigrants are vital to our economy and culture, and that immigrant filmmakers constantly revitalize American film. Hence, the theme of Aliens!

Our other guest actors in this year’s festival include Ghanaian Prince Adu and Armenian-Lebanese immigrant Karren Karagulian, appearing with Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway. The two are non-professional actors who give knockout performances as immigrant hustlers in contemporary New York City.  Also attending will be Pedro Castaneda, another non-professional who gives a stunning performance as the aging patriarch, an illegal immigrant, growing estranged from his assimilating children in August Evening. Prince of Broadway just won the top prize at the Woodstock Film Festival and August Evening won the Cassavetes Prize at the Independent Spirit awards. If you come to our festival looking for strong filmmaking that the commercial distributors are neglecting, start with these two beauties.

Spacek and Garity will be joining the film’s producers Mark Johnson and Weiman Seid and co-directors Perry Moore and Hunter Hill to present Lake City on Opening Night. Johnson, Seid, and Moore are alumni of the University of Virginia, the Festival’s presenting sponsor, and Johnson and Moore first met at the Virginia Film Festival when Moore was a student. Lake City has even deeper roots in the Commonwealth since it was filmed mostly in Richmond and features Virginians Sissy Spacek and Dave Matthews in its cast.

Sissy Spacek returns to the Festival for the first time since 2006, when she joined an all-star panel at The Paramount Theater to discuss the Rodrigo Garcia film Nine Lives. Spacek has been nominated for six Academy Awards as best actress, including Carrie, Missing, The River, Crimes of the Heart, and In the Bedroom, and claimed her Oscar for Coal Miner’s Daughter in 1981. She will also be starring in the upcoming Four Christmases, opening on November 26th.  Garity, a Golden-Globe nominated actor and the son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, is known by millions of moviegoers for his role as Isaac Rosenberg in the smash-hit Barbershop series.  Garity’s Golden Globe nomination came for his role as Barry Winchell in the 2003 Showtime film Soldier’s Girl.  He had a leading role in Danny Boyle’s 2007 sci-fi film Sunshine and will star in the upcoming release Winged Creatures.

The Festival also announced today that a pair of the hottest films from the fall film festival circuit, both early frontrunners for 2009 Oscar consideration, will screen on Friday, October 31 at Culbreth Theatre.

The first of these, scheduled for 7PM, is The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke.  The film, hailed at the Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals in September as a remarkable comeback vehicle for the actor, tells the story of a down-on-his-luck former wrestling star seeking one more shot at the big time.  Rourke’s portrayal of the character, who is some 20 years past his prime and battling formidable personal demons, has been wildly acclaimed by leading critics.  Variety recently said of the performance, “Rourke creates a galvanizing, humorous, deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances.”

Following on Friday at 10PM will be Slumdog Millionaire, the latest film from director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), and the winner of the coveted audience award at this year’s Toronto Film Festival.  The film tells the story of an Indian teenager whose life of extreme poverty makes him an unlikely winner on the nation’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” – and inspires great suspicion among the show’s organizers and police. Boyle intersperses harsh interrogation with flashbacks of the life experiences that are the source of the young man’s knowledge.  The Wall Street Journal called the film “groundbreaking in substance and damn near earthshaking in style.”

Another major regional debut added to the program is Phoebe in Wonderland (Thursday, 10PM at Newcomb Theatre). The film stars Felicity Huffman, Patricia Clarkson and Elle Fanning It is an artfully layered tale about a nine-year-old girl struggling to fit in and live within the rules that bind her. The film, by first-time director Daniel Barnz, has been likened to a look through a kaleidoscope, with perspectives changing based on each character we see. The film was widely praised at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, with special accolades going to Elle Fanning, whom reviewers said was as talented as her sister, Dakota: “How these little girls are able to summon such powerful reserves of fear and anguish and terror, I have no idea,” wrote Mike D’Angelo of ScreenGrab.

Finally, Herskowitz has also announced two new programs of films by Charlottesville-based filmmakers. On Saturday, November 1 at 4:15pm, the Festival will present three films by film, video, and photography faculty in the U.Va. Art Department. Kevin Everson’s The Golden Age of Fish interweaves various fragmentary narratives about the landscape of Cleveland, Ohio, from the perspective of an African-American geologist-explorer. Everson’s film will be supplemented by William Wylie’s Secret, which explores the movement of light through the Enola Gay hanger in Nevada and Lydia Moyer’s Hyacinth, a poetic, nonfiction video incorporating archival footage and images recently filmed at the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana.  Additionally, a free program of films by Charlottesville filmmakers Doug Bari, Elizabeth Howard and Light House students will screen at the Gravity Lounge at 3:30pm on Sunday, November 2, under the heading Moviemaking in Charlottesville.

I’m particularly excited about the participation of novelist and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who will present his collaborations with Alejandru Inarritu (Amores Perros, Babel…we’re only leaving out 21 Grams) and Tommy Lee Jones (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada). We will also premiere Arriaga’s impressive first directorial effort, The Burning Plain, starring Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.  Audiences here are in for a treat, not just from Arriaga’s characteristic time and border-jumping narratives, but from his articulate, captivating presence. (Not all these films may be visible on the schedule yet, but they will soon be placed in our remaining TBA slots).

There are quite a few major directors coming….Gregory Nava will be here for a 25th anniversary presentation of El Norte, in a beautiful new print, and he will conduct this year’s Regal Shot by Shot Workshop on the film. And Abderrahmane Sissako, the Mauritanian-French director whose acclaimed film Bamako screened in our Film Society last year, will present  two feature films that beautifully render his deeply felt theme of exile, Life on Earth and Waiting for Happiness.

There are additional “Focus On” directors whose careers will be explored through screenings of past and recent work… Alex Rivera, whose Sleep Dealer mixes the sci-fi and immigration strands of our program and was one of the best-received features at Sundance this year, will also show a program of his shorts. Here’s a Rivera short that he won’t show in that program, but couldn’t be more relevant to our theme: Dia de la Independencia (Alex Rivera) . Sean Baker, best known for creating Greg the Bunny, has come out with two impressive neo-neo-realist films about contemporary immigrant life in New York City, and he will bring along some of his non-professional actors and creative partners to our screenings of Take Out and Prince of Broadway. Look for the underground space alien films culled from forty years of filmmaking and presented by George and Mike Kuchar and three documentaries, including the rolicking My America: Honk if You Love Buddha, by Renee Tajima-Pena.

I‘ll just mention one more guest here, who is coming to our festival as both actor and director. Peter Riegert is accompanying another film that, like El Norte, made a big splash 25 years ago and has lost none of its appeal: Local Hero. In that film, he played the disoriented American alien in Scotland. He’s also going to attend our screening of his latest film role, as a judge in a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantanamo in Sig Libowitz and Adam Rogers’ film The Response. The film is based on actual CSRT transcripts, and will be a springboard for a panel discussion led by Slate’s legal writer Dahlia Lithwick. Riegert is also a film director, and he’ll screen his wonderful short film, By Courier, along with King of the Corner, a delightful showcase for an ensemble cast of great actors, who clearly had a blast working with Riegert on this production.

There is much more to tell….Read through the release for a fuller roadmap and come back over the next few weeks as we post full film blurbs and video trailers for each of our titles.

October 30-November 2, 2008

Charlottesville, VA – September 25, 2008 – Charlottesville is preparing for an alien invasion of epic proportions as the Virginia Film Festival scans both earth and sky for tales of strange visitors from other worlds and cultures.

Aliens!, set for October 30-November 2, will feature some 80 films and more than 100 guests covering the entire spectrum of the alien experience, from immigrants to outsiders to extra-terrestrials.  The guest list for this 21st Annual event will feature an international array of some of the most highly respected artists in the industry today, including Mauritanian-French director Abderrahmane Sissako (screening Waiting for Happiness and Life on Earth) and Mexican-American director Gregory Nava, here for the 25th anniversary presentation of El  Norte. Also celebrating its 25th anniversary is Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, presented by actor Peter Riegert, who plays the American alien in Scotland. Riegert will also accompany The Response,  a powerful new film dramatizing the legal proceedings against a Guantanamo detainee.

For the second year, the Festival will explore the work of several emerging and established filmmakers in depth, with multiple screenings of films by a group of  “Focus On” directors, headlined by Mexico’s Guillermo Arriaga. Arriaga will be on hand to screen several of his filmed screenplays,  including Amores Perros, Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Babel, culminating with the Virginia premiere of his first feature as director, The Burning Plain, starring Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.

Other “Focus On” directors include::
•    Director Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway, Take Out)
•    Screenwriter and director Megan Holley (Sunshine Cleaning, The Snowflake Crusade)
•    Underground film pioneers George and Mike Kuchar (Secrets of the Shadow World, Blips, Ascension of the Demonoids, Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults, Sins of the Fleshapoids)
•    Feature director and media artist Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer, The Sixth Section, Why Cybraceros?, The Borders Trilogy)
•    Documentarian Renee Tajima-Pena (Calavera Highway, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, My America: Honk If You Love Buddha)

The Festival program is jam-packed with regional premieres of films that have been making waves on the international festival scene, including Waltz with Bashir, August Evening, The Betrayal, The Secret of the Grain, The Exiles, and A Jihad for Love. A complete list of new titles can be found at the end of this release.

Virginia Filmmaking: Natives, Emigres, and Immigrants

While the focus will be on the theme of outsiders, Aliens! will also feature a uniquely Virginian flavor.  In the course of  looking at the concept of migration, Herskowitz discovered a wealth of riches in the work of Virginia emigres.  “We have a long history of featuring on opening night the work of filmmakers whose roots are in Virginia, and who have left but returned to make or show their films here,” he said, citing Nicole Kassell’s The Woodsman, Derek Sieg’s Swedish Auto and Jeff Wadlow’s  Tower of Babble as precedents.  “We  are proud to continue this tradition with Lake City, a wonderful film with a history rooted not only in Virginia but in the Festival itself.”

The film’s New York-based co-director, Perry Moore, first met its producer Mark Johnson (whose credits include some of the best films of the last twenty years including Diner, Rain Man, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more) at the VFF in the early nineties.  The two U.Va. alumni were joined by a third, Weiman Seid, who became one of Lake City’s executive producers. Together, they decided to film the Southern gothic tale, about a buried family tragedy and its resonances  in the relationship between a mother and her troubled son, in Richmond, Virginia.  The film’s local roots run even deeper thanks to the starring roles played by Charlottesvillians Sissy Spacek and Dave Matthews. Moore, Johnson, and Seid will attend the screening, with additional special guests to be announced.

There is more work by artists with ties to Virginia:

•    The festival will present the regional premiere of the Sundance hit Sunshine Cleaning, which producer Glenn Williamson, another U.Va. alumnus, discovered when its author, Richmond-based Megan Holley, won the Governor’s Screenwriting Award at the Virginia Film Festival in 2003.
•    The Festival slate will also feature the American Premiere of Little White Feather and The Hunter, a film on Pocahantas and the English constructed from a collection of verbal accounts gathered by British artist Anna Lucas from people in Harwich and Essex in the U.K, and  Jamestown, Virginia. Little White Feather will be accompanied by the latest film by Derek Sieg , Wasteland, a contemporary tale of whites and Native Americans in commercial conflict.
•    Charlottesville audiences will finally get a chance to see on screen the controversial animated film about the U.Va. mascot, The Great Seal of Virginia, by alumni Irwin Berman, Michael Wartella and Sam Retzer.
•    And the spotlight will shine on  Moviemaking in Virginia in the Virginia Film Office’s special presentation of Robert  Griffith’s new  documentary on the film scene in the Commonwealth, accompanied by winning shorts from the Virginia Independent Film Festival,

Aliens: The Immigration Axis

“As I started thinking about the Aliens! theme I was struck by the different meanings of this word,” said Virginia Film Festival Artistic Director Richard Herskowitz.  “What ended up evolving was a two-pronged approach, with one axis covering the extraterrestrial visitor, and another looking at issues related to the ‘illegal immigrant.’” The latter kind of alien is certainly playing an outsized role in the current political season, and it seemed worth finding films that will allow audiences to question and debate the use of the term in defining immigrant populations.”

The Festival’s “Immigration Axis” will be highlighted by:

•    Gregory Nava presenting a 25th Anniversary screening of his groundbreaking work El Norte, which he will also explore in depth in the annual Regal Shot by Shot workshop.  Nava’s work will be complemented by a series of new films about Mexican undocumented workers, including My Life Inside, Lucia Gaja’s scathing look at the railroading of a Latino immigrant woman by the Texas judicial system, and August Evening, Chris Eska’s Cassavetes Award-winning indie feature on generational ties and tensions within an immigrant family. Also, “Focus On” director Alex Rivera will screen his futuristic  sci-fi films about  Mexican immigrant labor, Sundance hit Sleep Dealer and his short video pieces, The Sixth Section, Why Cybraceros?, and The Border Trilogy.
•    Abderrahmane Sissako, the Mauritanian director living in Paris, whose work reflects the insights and challenges of a life lived in exile. Sissako will present his films Life on Earth and Waiting for Happiness
•    Peter Riegert, celebrating a 25th Anniversary of his own with Local Hero, in which Riegert played the American business representative adrift in Scotland. Riegert will also accompany writer Sig Libowitz with The Response, a new film in which he co-stars with Kate Mulgrew.  The film follows the hearings against an Arab detainee using actual transcripts from the Guantanamo proceedings, and will be followed by a panel discussion on the Guantanamo tribunals led by Slate legal writer Dahlia Lithwick. Riegert will also present two films that he directed, King of the Corner and By Courier.
•    Ghazel, a noted Iranian-French video and performance artist will appear at the Festival via Skype hookup. Ghazel became even more relevant to the theme when she encountered what she deemed to be humiliating and unreasonable visa roadblocks from U.S. immigration personnel due to her Iranian heritage and canceled her Festival visit.
•    Two “Focus On” directors explore contemporary immigrant life and struggles in the U.S: Renee Tajima-Pena examines Asian-American identity in Who Killed Vincent Chin? and My America: Honk if You Love Buddha and the cross-border family tensions of her Mexican husband in Calavera Highway. Sean Baker creates semi-documentary fictions about New York immigrant life with non-professional actors in Prince of Broadway and Take Out.
•    Classic films about outsiders by immigrant directors include two films made by Spanish director Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Los Olvidados and Nazarin, and Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s horror classic about a Serbian immigrant with a secret, Cat People. Other immigrant-themed classics include Fassbinder’s Ali:Fear Eats the Soul , West Side Story, and Bad Day at Black Rock (presented by director John Sturges’ son, Charlottesville resident Michael Sturges).

Also key to this sub-theme will be the keynote talk being offered on the Festival’s opening day by the first Virginia Film Festival Fellow Hamid Naficy, an internationally-acclaimed film scholar and the John Evans Professor of Communications at Northwestern University.  Naficy will also teach a week-long mini-course for students and non-students on the Festival theme for the U.Va. Media Studies Department beginning October 27 (for more information about registering, contact Judy McPeak at jam5wx@virginia.edu). Dr. Naficy is the author of An Accented Cinema, which explores the common subjects and styles of filmmakers who live and work away from their country of origin.  “We are thrilled to have one of the world’s foremost experts on exilic, diasporic, and ethnic filmmaking joining us this year to illuminate the Festival theme for students and our broader audience,” Herskowitz said.

Aliens: The Extra-Terrestrial Axis

As previously announced, the Festival will allow visitors to comb the skies for alien invaders at its McCormick Observatory Cinema, which will play the Orson Welles/H.G. Wells radio play War of the Worlds on its 70th Anniversary, the Festival’s opening night.  The ‘50s George Pal film of the same name will be shown later that night in Culbreth Theatre, introduced by Pal biographer Justin Humphreys.  The McComick Observatory Cinema series will continue with sci-fi and space films by George and Mike Kuchar and Jeanne Liottta and programs curated by Ed Halter of Light Industry/New York and Craig Baldwin of Other Cinema in San Francisco.

No look at Aliens! would be complete without Aliens, and the acclaimed film heads the list of classic sci-fi favorites to be offered throughout the weekend.  Aliens will be joined by the superb Star Trek sendup Galaxy Quest, as the Festival’s two-part tribute to the late Stan Winston, the  special effects master and VFF  board member who passed away earlier this year.  Also on the sci-fi classics list will be Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Day the Earth Stood Still, screening in the new Library of Congress theater in Culpeper,

Bring the Family!

After a wildly successful debut in 2007, the Virginia Film Festival is bringing back Family Day on Saturday, November 1.  Presented in conjunction with the Virginia Discovery Museum, the event will feature a pair of programs at The Paramount Theater for the family and budget-friendly rate of $1 per ticket for kids under the age of 12! The Discovery Museum will also offer free admission for children (ages 1-12) on Family Day from 2:30-5:00 and a 10:30am free screening of the animated Zula Patrol at Cityspace.

Once again Festival favorites Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton will be joined by Paul Reisler, Terri Allard and the students of Kid Pan Alley to accompany silent films with live music, including songs by Charlottesville schoolkids.  This year’s program, entitled Strangers in Strange Lands, will feature fantasy films by Georges Melies, Edwin S. Porter and Charlie Chaplin.

Director Meni Tsirbas will introduce the  4PM regional premiere of Terra, the spectacular new CGI animated feature about a lush, peace-loving planet whose world is shattered by an invading armada of humans.  The film includes the voices of Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson and Dennis Quaid.

The Festival continues another favorite tradition of silent films at Scottsville’s Victory Theatre with The Mark of Zorro, accompanied by Matt Marshall.

Panels and Classes

•    Accented Cinema: A one-week course with Festival Fellow Hamid Naficy, October 27 – November 2.
•    Adrenaline Film Project: The high-energy, 72-hour film school goes “after dark” for the first time this year as Jeff Wadlow and Beau Bauman present the fruits of three days of non-stop writing, shooting, and editing by twelve  talented and thoroughly exhausted filmmaking teams (Saturday, November 1 at 10PM at Culbreth Theatre).
•    Festival Symposium with Harry Chotiner: For the third year, the NYU film teacher and former vice-president of Twentieth Century Fox leads this popular four-day class that introduces college and adult learners to leading screenwriters, directors, producers and actors. Contact pjw8n@virginia.edu for registration information.
•    Darden Producers Forum: This annual Festival highlight will feature Temple Fennell, co-president of ATO Pictures, who will discuss independent film financing and take questions from the audience (Thursday, October 30 at 1:20PM at the Darden Graduate School of Business).
•    “Gender, Race and Film”: Hamid Naficy and Film Festival Executive Director and U.Va. Chair of Media Studies Andrea Press chair a discussion with guest speakers from the Festival program (Friday, October 31 at 3PM at Campbell Hall, Rm. 160).
•    Regal Shot by Shot Workshop conducted by director Gregory Nava on his film, El Norte (Sunday, November 2 at 10AM in Regal Downtown 4).
•    New Media and New Immigrants: A demonstration and panel on two new media productions exploring the current immigration debate.  ICED is Breakthrough TV’s online video game recreating the experience of surviving as an immigrant to the U.S.; and 9500 Liberty is a YouTube, MySpace and upcoming feature documentary on the immigration clashes in Prince William County, Virginia (Saturday, November 1 at 10AM at Vinegar Hill Theatre, FREE.).

Regional Premieres

•    August Evening (winner John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards)
•    The Betrayal (cosponsored with International Rescue Committee)
•    The Burning Plain with director/writer Guillermo Arriaga
•    The Exiles (restored print of 1961 film, presented with OFFScreen)
•    A Jihad for Love with director Parvez Sharma (cosponsored with Serpentine Society)
•    Koryo Saram with producer and new U.Va. Arts and Sciences Dean Meredith Woo
•    Little White Feather and the Hunter/Wasteland with director Derek Sieg
•    Mock Up on Mu (directed by Craig Baldwin)
•    My Best Friends are Strangers (work-in-progress) with director Alexandra Woodward
•    My Life Inside (Mexico, cosponsored with Legal Aid Justice Center)
•    Passengers with director Rodrigo Garcia (via Skype) and actors
•    Prince of Broadway with director Sean Baker, co-writer/producer Darren Dean,  and actors Prince Adu and Karren Karagulian)
•    The Response with actor Peter Riegert, writer Sig Libowitz and panel discussion moderated by Dahlia Lithwick on Guantanamo
•    River of No Return with director Darlene Johnson and Aboriginal actress Frances Djulibing, cosponsored with Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection
•    The Secret of the Grain (France, Abdel Kechiche)
•    Sleep Dealer with director Alex Rivera
•    Sunshine Cleaning (starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin) with screenwriter Megan Holley and producer Glenn Williamson
•    Take  Out with co-directors Sean Baker and Shih-Ching
•    Terra with director Meni Tsirbas
•    To See If I’m Smiling/Hamdi and Maria (cosponsored with Hadassah, on Israel women soldiers and Palestinians in Israel)
•    Waltz with Bashir (Israeli animated feature and Cannes sensation)
•    Watch Out (directed by Steve Balderson)

Additional premieres and special guests will be announced in the weeks between now and the Festival.

Remember when our theme was WET, and we held screenings in the Aquatic Center pool? Well, for ALIENS!, we’re opening up a “microcinema” in the McCormick Observatory’s 40-seat lecture room (microcinemas are small “do it yourself” theaters, usually run by artists, featuring experimental and underground works). While films screen in the lecture room, the Dome Room telescope will be open to the public and combing the skies for Martians, seventy years after Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast (we’ll play that broadcast on its 70th anniverary, October 30).

Curators Ed Halter and Craig Baldwin (who run, respectively, the Light Industry and Other Cinema microcinemas on the East and West coasts) will be joined in the McCormick Microcinema by avant-garde filmmakers Jeanne Liotta and George and Mike Kuchar in presenting the spaciest films in our program. Halter has unearthed Chariot of the Gods, and will screen it along with clips from other Sunn International exposes on Bigfoot, UFO’s, and the Bermuda Triangle.  The Kuchars have compiled three programs of their underground alien invasion epics. Liotta has collected classics by Joseph Cornell, James Whitney, Hollis Frampton alongside her own work, and Baldwin is mixing his own political found-footage mash-up Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America with titles by Bjorn Melhus, Bill Brown, and the Ford Motor Company.

Meanwhile, I have to thank all the people who responded to this blog and sent suggestions for our program. Several of you suggested The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, not the Keanu Klaatu version), and we’ll be teaming up with the new Library of Congress film archive in Culpeper to present it in their wonderful new theater.  Close Encounters was also suggested, a much better choice than the overplayed E.T., and we’ll have it on the big screen in Culbreth Theatre. As for immigrant-themed works, somebody suggested Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and I managed to track down a print and it’s in the program. I loved Matt Marshall’s suggestion that we show Cat People, about a Serbian immigrant with a dark secret, made by two immigrants (Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur), and so that’s in, too.

On September 25, on this website, all will be revealed.

The broadcast will be followed by a Culbreth Theatre screening of George Pal’s classic 1953 film War of the Worlds, Introduced By Pal Biographer Justin Humphreys.

Other Early Festival Highlights Include Introduction of New “Festival Fellow; Internationally Acclaimed Film Scholar Hamid Naficy To Offer a Week-Long Course and Keynote Talk Launching October 30-November 2 Festival

The Virginia Film Festival is kicking off its Aliens! themed event this year on October 30 with a special 70th Anniversary rebroadcast of Orson Welles’ classic radio play The War of the Worlds and a subsequent screening of the 1953 George Pal film of the same name.

“Not only is this the perfect way to open our Festival this year, said Virginia Film Festival Artistic Director Richard Herskowitz, “it is also a great way to honor one of the more bizarre evenings in Charlottesville history. On the night of October 30, 1938, Welles’ ultimate hoax had the whole nation on edge and our city was no exception.  Citizens were so nervous, in fact, that the McCormick Observatory had to open its doors just to prove with its telescopes that the skies were not in fact filled with alien spaceships!  Just to be sure history doesn’t repeat itself, we’ve asked the Observatory to have telescopes at the ready to reassure our spectators that the skies are safe.

The broadcast will be presented at 7PM in the Dome Room of Mccormick Observatory.  Later that evening the Festival is offering Sci-Fi fans another special treat with a 10PM Culbreth Theatre screening of George Pal’s classic War of the Worlds.  The film will be introduced by Pal biographer and Charlottesville resident Justin Humphreys.

The Observatory will remain open to the public for every night of the Festival from 7-10pm,  serving up its trademark spectacular heavenly views and hosting a series of films in the specially-created “McCormick Observatory Microcinema.  The series will feature three programs of experimental and independent films about space curated by luminaries of the avant-garde film world including Craig Baldwin, Jeanne Liotta and Ed Halter.

In addition, legendary underground filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar will present four of their most hyperbolic alien invasion spectacles, Blips, Ascension of the Demonoids, Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults, and Secrets of the Shadow World.

According to Ricky Patterson , Senior Scientist in the Department of Astronomy at UVa, the November 1, 1938 issue of the Daily Progress featured the headline, “Leander McCormick Telescope Shows No Mobilization on Mars.

The story, Patterson reports, read:

Jumping nerves of seventy-five or more students and residents of Charlottesville were at rest today after they peered at Mars last night through the big telescope at the University of Virginia’s Leander McCormick Observatory and saw no evidence of mobilization for an attack upon the earth.

In the end, the paper wrote, “Leander McCormick astronomers assure the public that there is no increased activity on the big planet.  As a matter of fact, they are unable to see a soul on Mars, which hasn’t changed very much in a good many years.

The rebroadcast and McCormick Observatory series will cover just one aspect of the Aliens! theme, which will feature some 80 films and 100 guests exploring the fearful and alluring images of immigrants, outsiders, and extraterrestrials alike.

To address images of human aliens who migrate across national borders , the Festival and the U.Va. Media Studies Department have announced the participation of their first “Festival Fellow, Hamid Naficy.  Naficy, an internationally-acclaimed film scholar and the John Evans Professor of Communication at Northwestern University, is the author of An Accented Cinema, which explores the common themes and styles of filmmakers who live and work away from their country of origin.  He will make his first Festival-related appearance on September 25 with a lecture entitled “Making Films With an Accent at 4PM in the Kaleidoscope Room at U.Va.’s Newcomb Hall  The event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Naficy will also offer a keynote talk entitled “From Accented Cinema Toward Multiplex Cinema on the Festival’s opening day at 4PM, lead a four-day, one-credit course on Accented Cinema on Monday-Thursday of Festival week, and participate in and lead various discussion events throughout the weekend.  University of Virginia students are required to add the course by September 12.  For more information about registering in the mini-course, which will be open to non-students, contact Judy McPeak at jam5wx@virginia.edu .

Finally, the Festival is proud to announce that it will be screening Koryo Saram – The Unreliable People, a film executive produced by recently appointed U.Va. Dean of Arts & Sciences Meredith Jung-En Woo.  The film, recently honored as Best Documentary at the 2007 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival,  tells the harrowing story of Stalin’s massive ethnic cleansing campaign in 1937 that resulted in the forced deportation of Koreans living in the coastal provinces of Far East Russia near North Korea to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia, some 3700 miles away.  Dismissed by Stalin as “unreliable people, and enemies of the state, the deportees were forced to integrate into the Soviet system while working under punishing conditions in Kazakhstan.  Today the Koreans there are part of that rapidly modernizing independent state – a story that resonates with the experiences of many Americans who have been forced to assimilate and form new cultures themselves.

When not scanning the skies for aliens himself, and pondering the publicity bonanza that an actual alien invasion during the Festival might bring, Herskowitz is hard at work finalizing the program and will be ready to share its full details in late September.

The Virginia Film Festival is hosted by the University of Virginia.

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John Kelly
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