There was an extraordinary amount of excitement and enthusiasm surrounding this year's Film Festival, as attendance catapulted 25% over the 2001 program. 129 films and events and 86 guest speakers drew 11,800 event attendees and a far larger audience who encountered the tremendous amount of publicity and news reportage on this year's program.

Maybe the Festival's success could be attributed to the uncanny appropriateness of the theme to public concerns. Most of Virginia had been experiencing a severe drought since the summer, and newspapers could not resist commenting on the irony, as reflected in the Daily Progress headline: "The Film Festival, At Least, is Wet." What was even more uncanny was the fact that the rains revived in October and throughout the Festival, and many joked that the Festival was responsible. When it was over, I released the following press statement: "It appears that the WET program had a kind of talismanic effect on the area's drought. I apologize to the people of Charlottesville for not holding the event las

The level of excitement this year reached a peak during Saturday night's closing night party at the Fringe Festival. This was the third year in which the U.Va. Art Department organized a massive art exhibition in the downtown Frank Ix Building featuring works related to the Festival theme. For the Festival's closing night party, the large warehouse was filled with lighting and video projections and dance music. Downstairs, the acclaimed artist-provocateur Guillermo Gomez-Peña conducted a performance-tour of the building's "catacombs." Outside the dance space, underground filmmaker George Kuchar presided at a medieval "marriage" ceremony of two art students. Upstairs, 300 people danced to Rob Zombie's brand new recording of "Brick House," while Nicolas Cage, Lisa Marie Presley, and Rob Zombie himself watched from the sidelines. The event was written up in the next week's Village Voice; I doubt that there was a better party anywhere that night.t spring and possibly sparing us all the parched summer."

It was already evident on opening night that this was going to be an extraordinary year. To celebrate our fifteenth anniversary, we chose to celebrate Virginia filmmaking with a focus on one emerging and one established Virginia filmmaker. The emerging filmmaker was Jeff Wadlow, the son of late state senator Emily Couric. One year and a day earlier, I had stepped out onto the Culbreth stage and dedicated the Festival to Emily, who had been a Festival board member for many years and had died a few days earlier. This year, our opening night event helped transform the first anniversary of her death into a joyful celebration of her son's skyrocketing film career. Friends and family of Emily and her husband, U.Va. Medical School professor George Beller, came from all over the U.S. and helped pack the U.Va. Art Museum to the gills. The Museum party, which was bedecked with spectacular lighting by Blue Ridge Light Forms (including four panning klieg lights visible as far away as Crozet), was a glorious community celebration, and many guests approached me to say it was the best opening party ever. The regional emphasis that night was heightened by the participation of several area vineyards featuring Virginia wines, and by the turnout of many people involved with the production of Gods and Generals, including director Ron Maxwell and actors Stephen Lang and Karen Hochstetter. There were many history buffs buzzing with the excitement of seeing the tantalizing 30-minute preview of Maxwell's epic.

Audiences responded extremely positively to the premieres in this year's program, including Far From Heaven, Rabbit Proof Fence, Teknolust, Maelstrom, and Rivers and Tides, which sold out twice. That Andy Goldsworthy documentary stunned viewers and was cited as a Festival favorite by many people. Todd Haynes's last-minute withdrawal from the program was a disappointment, but Focus Features production head Glenn Williamson filled in for him to present Far From Heaven and then stayed to conduct a very well-received Darden Producers Forum the next day. Classics that drew the most enthusiastic responses included L'Atalante, Lawrence of Arabia, and Jean Renoir's The River, which Martin Scorsese's archivist, Mark McElhatten, delivered to our screening. Roger Ebert was, more than ever, a vital force in engaging our audience with the classics, encouraging a group of his workshop students to join him for a Sunday 8am encore screening of The River, and promoting the Friday night screening of Steamboat Bill, Jr. and thereby causing a stampede on our box office. No one was disappointed. Keaton's genius and the live accompaniment by Anne Watts and Boister elicited an ovation. Roger also did an incredible job interviewing Nicolas Cage following the American premiere screening of Cage's directorial debut Sonny and guiding 200-plus students through a detailed examination of Chinatown. He brings so much to this Festival that I cannot thank him enough.

The most satisfying aspect of this year's Festival, for me personally, was the success of the Liquid Light series of experimental films. I had wondered whether devoting eight programs to avant-garde cinema was a risky indulgence of my own passion for this kind of filmmaking, and whether a local audience would materialize. But the shows drew audiences comparable in size to Vinegar Hill's past years and much more appreciative. The beautiful and challenging artistic creations of Leighton Pierce and over sixty other experimental filmmakers, arranged in illuminating groupings by the ten curators who attended that weekend, were well worth the risk (made easier by the financial support of the Virginia Commission for the Arts). Happily, one curator scouted talent at Light House's outdoor Cinemud screening and ended up inviting a local film to the Rotterdam Film Festival. Even more satisfying was the fact that Liquid Light filmmaker George Kuchar, mesmerized by the fall colors, was inspired to make a new video diary featuring the Festival, a wonderful new piece titled The Guzzler of Grizzly Manor, which has already been picked up for distribution by Video Data Bank.

The Wet festival was a wonderful culmination to the year, which had seen a great escalation in film exhibitions thanks to our burgeoning Film Society and Festival Friends group. Having cut ourselves loose from the Southern Circuit, a South Carolina-based network that had provided most of our Film Society programs for the past eight years, we created a Society series that has been, indisputably, more exciting. The first guest was Jonathan Nossiter, who is both an independent filmmaker and leading New York sommelier. Not only did he introduce three extraordinary nights of films at Vinegar Hill Theater, but he selected wines and talked about their relation to independent film at a special dinner for Festival Friends. Nossiter was followed by the triumphant return of Virginia filmmaker Richard Kelly with his cult feature film Donnie Darko. The Society continued with experimental films presented by John Columbus and Caveh Zahedi and then rematerialized in the summer with a special screening of Chelsea Walls presented by actor Ethan Hawke. Hawke charmed a packed house during the post-film Q&A and joined Festival Friends for a memorable reception on the Lawn.

This is going to be a hard year to top, but our staff is up to the challenge. We are strengthened by the recent hiring of Mari Ines Woodsome, who joined us in late July as Operations Manager and so learned her job and stayed remarkably calm under highly stressful conditions. Marisa Vrooman expanded our development efforts this year, and attracted exciting new sponsors, including Virginia National Bank, Chrysler, Delta Airlines and New Dominion Pictures. Late in the year, we learned that we were one of eighteen festivals awarded a sizable grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. While the shaky economy lost us some sponsors, we are more grateful than ever for the loyal companies that support us year after year, especially Sprint, Regal Cinemas, Pepsi, Category 4, as well as the City, County, and Virginia Film Office. Thank you all for helping us to keep our valuable arts and educational programs going strong into 2003.