Film Society
September 16, 2008
Flash of Genius
With live teleconference interview with director Marc Abraham
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
Based on the true story of college professor and part-time inventor Robert Kearns' (Greg Kinnear) long battle with the U.S. automobile industry, the film tells the tale of one man whose fight to receive recognition for his ingenuity would come at a heavy price. The film also stars Lauren Graham, Dermot Mulroney and Alan Alda.
September 23, 2008
The Manhattan Short Film Festival
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
The most creative short films in the world, judged by the cinema-going public around the world. Audience members, in Charlottesville and in 50 other cities within a 10-day period, will be handed a voting card upon entry and asked to vote for the one film they feel should win the festival. Last year's program delighted the audience and according to Herskowitz, the quality of this year's selection of films is certain to be exceptionally strong.
October 7, 2008
Operation FilmMaker
With director Nina Davenport
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
Nina Davenport chronicles two years in the troublesome life of aspiring
Iraqi filmmaker Muthana Mohmed. Offered a position on the set of "Everything
Is Illuminated" after director Liev Schreiber saw an MTV report
on the young filmmaker’s plight in Iraq, Mohmed proves generally
incompetent and squanders opportunity after opportunity. Far from
the feel-good story one would expect given Schreiber's noble intentions,
Davenport's film is a painfully aware examination of another failed
American mission in Iraq.
October 30 - November 2, 2008
Waltz with Bashir
Time and venue to be announced
Ari Folman's animated documentary feature recounts the 1982 invasion of Lebanon through both his own eyes and those of his comrades in a delirious mix of facts, half-remembrances and dreams. The result is startling personal and brutally honest. As inventive as it is intelligent, this Israeli film proved to be one of the major revelations at Cannes this year and is due to be released later this year by Sony Pictures Classics.
November 11, 2008
Our Disappeared (Nuestros Desaparecidos)
With director Juan Mandelbaum
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
After learning that Patricia, a long-lost girlfriend from Argentina, is among the thousands who were kidnapped, tortured and then "disappeared" by the military during the 1976-83 dictatorship, director Juan Mandelbaum embarks on a journey to find out what happened to her and others he knew who mysteriously vanished. Mandelbaum combines extraordinary archival footage and contemporary interviews with parents, siblings, friends and children of the disappeared to unearth the buried past.
December 2, 2008
Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI Photographers
With director Jeanine Butler
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
Narrated by UVA's Julian Bond, this documentary brings to life the remarkable stories behind the legendary group of New Deal-sponsored photographers who traversed the country in the 1930s and early '40s, 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. The film features the personal vision and the struggles experienced by photographers Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano, who created some of the most iconic images in documentary history.
