In East Wyndam, Massachusetts, the enviable lives of young married couples intersect in the playgrounds, community pools, and streets of their small town in hidden and potentially dangerous ways. Sarah (Winslet) has a PhD in English literature and is still coming to terms with living in the suburbs and raising children. She hangs out with, but does not connect to, the other suburban moms (women who can declare a spa treatment “an intense spiritual experience”) and views her shallow neighbors as sociological specimens instead of peers.

Those moms, in turn, are more interested in Brad (Wilson), a stay-at-home dad and former athlete whom they refer to as “the Prom King”. Brad, married to Kathy (Connelly), a striking PBS documentary filmmaker, is unenthusiastically anticipating taking the bar exam for the third time. Partly out of intrigue, and partly just to shake up her neighborhood, Sarah begins a flirtation with Brad that unexpectedly leads to steamy sexual trysts during their children’s “nap time”.

The genuine peccadilloes happening in their neighborhood remain largely unnoticed by the community members more focused on the imagined deeds of a sexual predator who has been released from prison and now lives nearby with his mother. As the story unravels, so do the lives of these reckless characters, only to slowly intertwine again. Even Brad’s wife finds herself in a book club with Sarah, her husband’s secret lover, who feels compelled to defend the title character of Madame Bovary.

Strong performances from all the actors, crisp cinematography, and sure-handed direction create an involving and eccentric tale. Little Children is an intriguing study of morality, small town paranoia, and the hunger for passion and meaning in uncontrolled lives.

In 1996, with producer Lori McCreary, Freeman formed his own production company, Revelations Entertainment, with the express aim to “develop and produce projects that enlighten, express heart and glorify the human experience”. Not content with just producing Hollywood hits such as Along Came a Spider and Under Suspicion, Freeman recently formed a second production company, ClickStar, in partnership with high tech chip maker Intel, to offer original films for direct download. The first offering from that company, 10 Items or Less, starring Freeman and directed by Brad Silberling, will screen at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.

Angels, his first feature film shot in and around Charlottesville and featuring many local talents, previewed to great acclaim at the 2004 Virginia Film Festival.

The Stone Carvers, his 1984 portrait of the Italian American artisans who carved the gargoyles and statues of the Washington Cathedral, received both Emmy and Oscar awards; in 1998, he earned another Emmy for A Paralyzing Fear: the Story of Polio in America, a documentary he produced about America’s scientific and cultural conquest of polio; and Out of Ireland earned a Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize in 1995.

Since the 1980s, Wagner has directed documentary films for the Smithsonian Institution about old-time medicine shows, museum education, family traditions, fishmongers, Southern pottery, the U.S. Postal Service, the Columbian Quincentenary, and anthropological rituals around the world. He served as executive producer for films on the history of insane asylums and on the French novelist Marcel Proust, both broadcast nationally on PBS. He has co-authored two books, both companion volumes to his documentary films, Out of Ireland and A Paralyzing Fear: the Triumph Over Polio in America.

Paul Wagner has been awarded many grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the D.C. Humanities Council, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and from the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic Media Fellowship Programs. In addition to the Oscar and the Emmy, his films have won many regional Emmy Awards, CINE Golden Eagles, the Irish Silver Harp Award, Blue and Red Ribbons from the American Film Festival and the Grand Prize from the National Educational Film Festival.

The 2006 Virginia Film Festival is honored to welcome back Paul Wagner and to premier The God of a Second Chance, his latest feature documentary about religion, race, poverty, drugs and sensuality in an inner city neighborhood of Washington DC.

The indie wunderkind (with a reputation for playing off-beat characters) graduated to big-time studio releases as one of the kidnappers in Ron Howard’s Ransom (1996) and later that year, essayed the role of accused killer Cotton Weary whose mere look inspired fear in Wes Craven’s blockbuster Scream (a role he reprised twice in Scream 2 and 3). The end of that decade found the actor even more in demand as he took roles in higher profile features alongside such Hollywood heavyweights as Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone in Sphere; Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, and Paul Newman in Twilight; Alan Arkin and Robin Williams in Jakob the Liar, and Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen in A Walk on the Moon.

The succeeding years have found the actor very much in demand both on screen and on stage. In 1998, he was again onstage in Central Park in the dual role of the god Jupiter and the villain Iachimo in Cymbeline, for which he received a 1999 Obie Award. while the following year saw him star as Hamlet at the New York Shakespeare Festival. In 1999, Schreiber’s deft performance in RKO 281 as Orson Welles, the similarly brilliant young actor and filmmaker who gave us Citizen Kane, earned him an Emmy nomination. In 2000, he made a compelling Laertes in Michael Almereyda’s modern-day film version of Hamlet and supported Oscar-winners Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt in Pay It Forward.

Every year since then has seen the actor in a successful Hollywood feature or returning with acclaim to the stage. In 2005, Schreiber secured a Tony for his performance in Glengarry Glen Ross, Joe Mantello’s high-octane revival of David Mamet’s play. Later that year, the actor made his feature screenwriting and directing debut with Everything Is Illuminated (screening at this year’s Virginia Film Festival), adapted from the critically-acclaimed novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a young American Jew’s journey to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II.

With growing demand for his sonorous voice in documentaries, Schreiber continues to offer his talents to successful stage and screen productions. In the summer of 2006, he played the title role in Macbeth opposite Jennifer Ehle at the New York Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. A film version of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, in which Schreiber co-stars with his real-life romantic companion Naomi Watts (King Kong), is currently in production for release later this year.

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Terry Lindvall’s interactive presentation looks at the energy and spectacle of religious fervor in African-American church life as portrayed in film. Less of a lecture and more of a dialogue, Dr. Lindvall (C. S. Lewis Chair of Communication and Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan College) will present film clips while fielding questions from and interacting with the audience. How do these films tease out the particular practices of various Church traditions? How do they capture both the practice of true Christian faith and its hypocritical shadows in the communities of saints who are also sinners? How do these films stereotype religious rituals and embalm them in the understanding of audiences? Where do these films fail to represent vital aspects of various religious believers?

Stylistic moments of excess, passion, justice, and music lead to a rich portrayal of the abundant expression of African-American Christianity throughout film history. From King Vidor’s first all-black melodrama, Hallelujah (1931), through Tyler Perry’s hilarious but devout Medea series (Diary of a Mad Housewife, 2005), Dr. Lindvall leads us on a tour through the charismatic black spirituality of the “invisible Christianity” as portrayed on the silver screen.

Terry Lindvall, a great scholar of silent comedies, animated films, and religious cinema, has long been one of the VFF’s most popular and entertaining speakers. As C.S. Lewis Chair of Communication and Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan College, Dr. Lindvall is uniquely qualified to offer shrewd analysis of the treatment of Christianity in film and the interaction of film and religion generally. He may be best known for his studies of humor in both film and religion, and for his own lively sense of humor in his books and lectures.

Hollywood, Teach Us to Pray examines how Hollywood teaches the Cinematic Arts to fold hands and pray. Dr. Lindvall’s clip lecture provides both an overview of the portrayals of this sacred ritual as well as a romp through some favorite and obscure films that illustrate what Hollywood filmmakers have seen as both pious and hypocritical practices of a segment of their audience that they don’t completely understand. This interactive presentation encompasses a broad visual history of images of prayer in over 40 films, from the silent classics of Chaplin, Keaton, Pickford and Fairbanks to Bride of Frankenstein, Nightmare on Elm Street, Cold Mountain, and Million Dollar Baby. Cinematic representations of prayer, in drama, comedies, westerns, and horror films, have constructed their own ways and words of praying to a culture given to prayer.