Each day, the Festival will offer a free panel discussion addressing issues central to the theme, U.S. and Them. Filmmakers and scholars will present film clips to accompany their lively discussions. The panels are co-sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
1:00pm, McLeod Hall Auditorium
This panel will compare screen images of the late 19th and early 20th Century waves of European immigration with the images of past and recent third world immigrants and refugees. Scenes from Hollywood's two Scarface's ( Italian in 1932 and Cuban in 1983), along with other illustrations, will be featured. Picture Bride director Kayo Hatta will be joined by University of Pennsylvania history professor Eric Perkins and University of Virginia history professors Olivier Zunz and Reginald Butler.
Photographer/filmmaker William Klein and novelist Mary
Lee Settle will present short films they made while living
as American artists in European exile, and discuss the reasons
for their choices to live and work abroad. They will be joined
by Lewis Allen, a close friend of actress Jean Seberg,
an artist-emigre who, like Klein and Settle, remained actively
critical of American politics from her position abroad. Allen
will respond to the representation of Jean Seberg's life and
career in Mark Rappaport's new film From the Journals of Jean
Seberg, which will be screened directly before the panel,
at 10:00am in Vinegar Hill Theater. Settle, who now lives in Charlottesville,
will screen James Broughton's classic experimental film The
Pleasure Garden, in which she appeared while living among
a community of emigre artists in England in the early fifties.
Klein, whose photographs will be on display at the Bayly Museum
beginning October 21, will screen a portion of his segment from
the French omnibus film, Far From Vietnam.
Moderator: Hugh Southern
The influence of foreign film on some of America's most innovative filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, will be discussed by a panel of film exhibitors, critics, and distributors. The panelists will also analyze the changes in foreign film exhibition and reception in the U.S. since the 1960s, and attempt to assess the impact of these changes on future American and international film production. Participants include Milestone Films distributors Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, Fine Line Features' Sarah Eaton, Vinegar Hill Theater owner Ann Porotti, and Festival Program Director Richard Herskowitz.
Screenwriter Paul Jarrico, author of The Song of Russia and Tom, Dick, and Harry and producer of Salt of the Earth, will be joined by Picture Bride screenwriter Mari Hatta and Frank Pierson (Academy Award-winning author of Dog Day Afternoon and the newly appointed directed of the American Film Institute film school) to discuss how screenwriters address and challenge stereotypical conventions while writing ethnic characters and plots, and how some of these conventions have evolved since the 1930s. Tentatively scheduled to join the group is Desmond Nakano (White Man's Burden, American Me, Last Exit to Brooklyn). The discussion will be moderated by Jeanine Basinger, chair of Film Studies, Wesleyan University.