Directors Report
by Richard Herskowitz

In so many ways, the Virginia Film Festival reinvented and rejuvenated itself in 2004. The program generated a great deal of excitement, and attendance rose to 11,100, a 15% increase over last year.

With the board’s encouragement, we loosened the grip of our theme, and featured a program of “Premiere Selections” unrelated to “Speed.” The relaxed programming policy allowed us to not only show Kinsey, Tarnation, and Chrystal, but also respond to the renaissance in filmmaking underway in our region and state. Among the Virginia filmmakers with strong new films in our program were Paul Wagner, Kevin Everson, Ricardo Preve, Doug Bari, and David Williams. Opening night was reserved for Nicole Kassell, a filmmaker whose family and roots are in Charlottesville, and whose brave first feature, The Woodsman, is garnering international acclaim.

The Festival maintained, in large part, its thematic focus, and “Speed” generated a rich selection of classics and guest artists. Since it happened to be the tenth anniversary of the film Speed, and she is a proud native, Sandra Bullock came to receive the Virginia Film Award. In addition to previewing a clip from Miss Congeniality 2, she conducted a fascinating forum on film acting for students in the U.Va. Department of Drama. Steve McQueen’s stunt double Loren Janes enchanted our audience, and John Warner IV and his father, Senator John Warner, wowed the audience with their gripping NASCAR film. A visit by “Speed” Levitch with his film The Cruise was inevitable, but his incredible walking tours of the Lawn and Rotunda were unforgettable. The Festival’s reputation for creating quirky, extra-filmic events was enhanced by the “Slow Food” luncheon we hosted at Mas Restaurant following our screening of Mondovino, led by the legendary wine importer Neal Rosenthal.

Richard Herskowitz and Nicole Kassell

While the Fringe Festival shrank this year to a much smaller student art exhibition, the Festival sustained its inter-arts variety by staging a variety of concerts and exhibitions related to “Speed.” Jim White, whose Chevy convertible is the automotive star of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, materialized after the Regal screening with assorted odd instruments to perform onstage at the Gravity Lounge. The escalated pace of music video editing was demonstrated in both a screening and live VJ dance party conducted by David Last of the Synaesthesiologists. Finally, visual artists Sharon Lockhart and Martin Arnold presented screenings of their film and installation works while the U.Va. Art Museum mounted an exhibition of video installations by Bill Viola, framed within a series of slow art pieces we called "Extreme Time.”

The “Speed” theme bequeathed to the Festival a program that should become a lasting component of future events: the Adrenaline Film Project. This intensive filmmaking blitz was a contest in which twelve teams of three filmmakers from U.Va., the Light House high school media center, and the community, competed. The teams had three days to write, produce, and edit a short video featuring a particular prop (a hula hoop) and line of dialogue (“You’re going way too fast”). What set this apart from other rapid filmmaking contests, a recent phenomenon at many other festivals, was that, in keeping with this festival’s educational mission, ours was a workshop led by two mentors. Jeff Wadlow and Beau Bauman advised and challenged the filmmakers to produce works of astonishing quality, to the great pleasure of the packed house at the Culbreth premiere on closing day. Intern Kevin Wu of the Filmmakers Studio deserves praise for the project’s terrific organization.

Part of the ongoing reinvention of the Festival involves a renewed effort to integrate the Festival with the University’s curricular offerings. In the spring of 2004, the Film Festival joined with the Museum, the Art Department, and American Studies to mount an ambitious series of classes, exhibits, and events on the theme of “Collage.” Our Film Society’s contribution was an impressive series of collage media artists and speakers, including Christian Marclay, Rick Prelinger, People Like Us, and Kevin and Jennifer McCoy. These guests all gave public screenings and met with my independent film class, which was entirely devoted to the theme of collage media. In the fall, the Virginia Film Society expanded its offerings to include a mini-series of classics called “The Cinema of Contemplation.” The film series was hosted by Professor Robert Kolker, who also taught a course in Media Studies on the theme of slow, meditative cinema. The central guest of both Kolker’s and Walter Korte’s film classes this fall was Paul Schrader, who was brought to the U.Va. Grounds as a featured artist in this year’s Festival. Schrader and filmmaker David Gordon Green conducted this year’s shot-by-shot workshops on classics of contemplative cinema, Pickpocket and Days of Heaven (memorably, Green was joined by the disembodied voice of editor Billy Weber, piped in from Los Angeles, where he was grounded on jury duty).

The Festival’s new programming energy was matched by our impressively revamped publicity materials, which gave the Festival a fresh new look. Both the Preview Guide and Festival News were given clearer, more compact formats. The designs of these and other Festival brochures were striking, and they were matched by two original Festival trailers produced by Virginia filmmakers Todd Free and Martin Jones. Overall, Festival publicity was more energetic and successful than it has ever been, thanks to the matchless creative efforts of the Payne Ross team led by Rebecca Gibson, Anne Hooff, and Tony Ross.

Organizationally, the Festival made tremendous strides this year. Operations Manager Jenny Mays and Production Coordinator Lili Grabbi ran the smoothest event in memory. Development Director Mieke Zylstra created a very powerful Development Committee, before she moved up the ladder to work full time for Arts and Sciences Development; luckily, she left us with a remarkable committee chairperson, Janet Matthews, who will now be taking over Festival Development. The tireless publicity efforts of student interns Jeff Anderson and Kate Malay drummed up unprecendented enthusiasm for the Festival among U.Va. students. Stelios Christodoulou wrote our Festival News copy this year and last; now that he is graduating and moving back to Greece, the quality of his writing will be hard to match.

Final thanks go to our primary sponsors: the University of Virginia, the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, the Virginia Film Office, Sprint, Pepsi, and Regal Cinemas, and all the other donors and sponsors whose contributions allow us to keep renewing and strengthening our festival’s year-round programs.