Wednesday, September 19, 2007
The Jane Austen Book Club
With Susan Fraiman and Alison Booth (U.Va. English Dept.) conducting live phone Q&A with director Robin Swicord
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
(2007) As five women and one enigmatic man meet to discuss the works of Jane Austen, they find their love lives playing out in a 21st-century version of her novels. Director Robin Swicord has adapted her screenplay from the novel by Karen Joy Fowler. Virginia Film Festival board member Julie Lynn produced the film and has pulled together a striking cast, including Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Hugh Dancy, Amy Brenneman, Kathy Baker and Jimmy Smits.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
The Manhattan Short Film Festival
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
The Manhattan Short Film Festival is hailed as the festival showing the most creative short films in the world, judged by the cinema-going public around the world. Audience members, here 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 the quality of the films is certain to be exceptionally strong.
Films of the Brothers Maysles with Guest Filmmaker Albert Maysles
Albert Maysles and his brother David are pioneers of “Direct Cinema”. Their earliest feature films (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) show the drama of life without scripts, sets, interviews or narration. In 1999 Eastman Kodak saluted him as one of the 100 world’s finest cinematographers.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
From the Archives of the Brothers Maysles
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
In this special showcase originally curated for the Sundance Institute at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Albert Maysles presents work spanning the 195Os to a sneak peek at his current projects. The program features rarely and never screened footage from classic films including Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens to short films, to remarkable footage from the 196Os and beyond.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Lalee’s Kin
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
(2000) For generations of African-Americans, the legacy of the cotton industry for in the Mississippi Delta has been poverty and virtual illiteracy. LaLee Wallace, a former cotton picker retired on disability, is a great-grandmother struggling to support and encourage her family, while Reggie Barnes, a crusading superintendent, strives to save the West Tallahatchie school system from state takeover.
“The balance between feeling and distance is… the dynamic that makes this film an especially humanistic entry in the Maysles canon.”
- Robert Koehler, Daily Variety, 2007.
Friday, November 1, 2007
Killer of Sheep
Regal Downtown, 10:15pm
(1977) Charles Burnett’s first feature was first seen at film festivals in 1977 but was not commercially released until this year. Using semidocumentary techniques and a cast of nonprofessional actors, Burnett created an impressionistic yet finely detailed account of family and community ties within the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles, then set it to an unforgettable soundtrack of blues, jazz, pop, and classical music. The film focuses on a working-class father who works at a local slaughterhouse and suffers from insomnia and alienation from his wife and family.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The Fall
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
(1968) “Whitehead was the greatest avant-garde British filmmaker of the Sixties. His films stand together as an unrivalled record of that decade’s counter-culture” (Dave Calhoun, Time Out). Considered by Whitehead to be his most important film, The Fall is an extremely personal statement on violence, revolution and the turbulence within late sixties America. Filmed entirely in and around New York between October 1967 and June 1968, it features Robert Kennedy, The Bread and Puppet Theater, Tom Hayden, Stokely Carmichael, Arthur Miller, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Wednesday, December 7, 2007
Smiles of a Summer Night
Vinegar Hill Theatre, 7pm
(1956) In turn-of-the-century Sweden, four women and four men attempt to juggle the laws of attraction amidst their daily bourgeois life. When a weekend in the country brings them all face to face, the women ally to force the men’s hands, exposing their pretentions and insecurities along the way. Chock full of flirtatious propositions and sharp-witted wisdom, Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night is one of film history’s great tragicomedies, a bittersweet view of the transience of human carnality. Cosponsored with Live Arts. which is presenting Stephen Sondheim’s musical adaptation, A Little Night Music.
