Five Festival Guests
The festival program will be unveiled here on Friday, and our online box office will open here as well. I promised to reveal some of our featured artists ahead of time, though, and I’ve been remiss.
In an earlier blog entry, I responded to one commenter’s suggestion that we show works by Su Friedrich and Alan Berliner. I said I’d invite Alan, and he’ll be presenting three of his films in our program: The Family Album, Nobody’s Business, and Wide Awake, his latest. Berliner weaves together archival footage, including his own family’s and others’ home movies, with incredible dexterity, humor, and insight. A program of his early short films, which demonstrate his incredible editing skills, will be on display in the UVA Art Museum’s media gallery.
I ended up inviting the other masterful autobiographical filmmaker and editor of home movies, Su Friedrich. She’s been to the festival twice before, but never with the two films I consider her greatest. Sink or Swim and The Ties That Bind respectively examine her relationships with her father and her mother, and with the larger social forces that created them. 
While the other home movie experimenter I mentioned, Peter Forgacs, could not come, he’s sending his latest film, Miss Universe 1929. It will be introduced by Patricia Zimmermann, the pioneering scholar of that disparaged cultural product, the home movie.
One of the first films that came to mind when I came up with the KIN FLICKS theme was Macky Alston’s Family Name. 
In this film, Alston explores ‘black’ and ‘white’ families that share his surname, and the racial and sexual family secrets of the American South. In the last year, Alston produced two new documentaries that knocked me out. One The Killer Within, also deals with a shocking family secret — a father’s revelation to his family that he had gone on a killing spree as a college student. The film resonates with the Virginia Tech tragedy, and Randy Stith, a Virginia Tech administrator and a longterm VFF discussant, will join the post-film dialogue. Macky Alston’s other new film, Hard Road Home, has less to do with our theme, but its artful and dramatic portrayal of ex-cons fighting the pressures to return to a life of crime through their own organization, the Exodus Project, convinced me to show all three of these films, and invite Alston as a featured artist.
Another film came along in the course of the year that explores the shared lineages of ‘black’ and ‘white’ Southerners. It’s called Moving Midway, and it is the first film directed by a great film critic, Godfrey Cheshire. The film is also a rich exploration of cultural representations of the Southern plantation, including Gone With the Wind. After inviting Godfrey, I learned, and was somehow not surprised, given our theme, that he and Macky Alston are cousins.
