The Virginia Film Festival

70th anniversary broadcast of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds kicks off Virginia FIlm Festival’s Special McCormick Observatory Series.

The broadcast will be followed by a Culbreth Theatre screening of George Pal’s classic 1953 film War of the Worlds, Introduced By Pal Biographer Justin Humphreys.

Other Early Festival Highlights Include Introduction of New “Festival Fellow; Internationally Acclaimed Film Scholar Hamid Naficy To Offer a Week-Long Course and Keynote Talk Launching October 30-November 2 Festival

The Virginia Film Festival is kicking off its Aliens! themed event this year on October 30 with a special 70th Anniversary rebroadcast of Orson Welles’ classic radio play The War of the Worlds and a subsequent screening of the 1953 George Pal film of the same name.

“Not only is this the perfect way to open our Festival this year, said Virginia Film Festival Artistic Director Richard Herskowitz, “it is also a great way to honor one of the more bizarre evenings in Charlottesville history. On the night of October 30, 1938, Welles’ ultimate hoax had the whole nation on edge and our city was no exception.  Citizens were so nervous, in fact, that the McCormick Observatory had to open its doors just to prove with its telescopes that the skies were not in fact filled with alien spaceships!  Just to be sure history doesn’t repeat itself, we’ve asked the Observatory to have telescopes at the ready to reassure our spectators that the skies are safe.

The broadcast will be presented at 7PM in the Dome Room of Mccormick Observatory.  Later that evening the Festival is offering Sci-Fi fans another special treat with a 10PM Culbreth Theatre screening of George Pal’s classic War of the Worlds.  The film will be introduced by Pal biographer and Charlottesville resident Justin Humphreys.

The Observatory will remain open to the public for every night of the Festival from 7-10pm,  serving up its trademark spectacular heavenly views and hosting a series of films in the specially-created “McCormick Observatory Microcinema.  The series will feature three programs of experimental and independent films about space curated by luminaries of the avant-garde film world including Craig Baldwin, Jeanne Liotta and Ed Halter.

In addition, legendary underground filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar will present four of their most hyperbolic alien invasion spectacles, Blips, Ascension of the Demonoids, Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults, and Secrets of the Shadow World.

According to Ricky Patterson , Senior Scientist in the Department of Astronomy at UVa, the November 1, 1938 issue of the Daily Progress featured the headline, “Leander McCormick Telescope Shows No Mobilization on Mars.

The story, Patterson reports, read:

Jumping nerves of seventy-five or more students and residents of Charlottesville were at rest today after they peered at Mars last night through the big telescope at the University of Virginia’s Leander McCormick Observatory and saw no evidence of mobilization for an attack upon the earth.

In the end, the paper wrote, “Leander McCormick astronomers assure the public that there is no increased activity on the big planet.  As a matter of fact, they are unable to see a soul on Mars, which hasn’t changed very much in a good many years.

The rebroadcast and McCormick Observatory series will cover just one aspect of the Aliens! theme, which will feature some 80 films and 100 guests exploring the fearful and alluring images of immigrants, outsiders, and extraterrestrials alike.

To address images of human aliens who migrate across national borders , the Festival and the U.Va. Media Studies Department have announced the participation of their first “Festival Fellow, Hamid Naficy.  Naficy, an internationally-acclaimed film scholar and the John Evans Professor of Communication at Northwestern University, is the author of An Accented Cinema, which explores the common themes and styles of filmmakers who live and work away from their country of origin.  He will make his first Festival-related appearance on September 25 with a lecture entitled “Making Films With an Accent at 4PM in the Kaleidoscope Room at U.Va.’s Newcomb Hall  The event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Naficy will also offer a keynote talk entitled “From Accented Cinema Toward Multiplex Cinema on the Festival’s opening day at 4PM, lead a four-day, one-credit course on Accented Cinema on Monday-Thursday of Festival week, and participate in and lead various discussion events throughout the weekend.  University of Virginia students are required to add the course by September 12.  For more information about registering in the mini-course, which will be open to non-students, contact Judy McPeak at jam5wx@virginia.edu .

Finally, the Festival is proud to announce that it will be screening Koryo Saram – The Unreliable People, a film executive produced by recently appointed U.Va. Dean of Arts & Sciences Meredith Jung-En Woo.  The film, recently honored as Best Documentary at the 2007 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival,  tells the harrowing story of Stalin’s massive ethnic cleansing campaign in 1937 that resulted in the forced deportation of Koreans living in the coastal provinces of Far East Russia near North Korea to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia, some 3700 miles away.  Dismissed by Stalin as “unreliable people, and enemies of the state, the deportees were forced to integrate into the Soviet system while working under punishing conditions in Kazakhstan.  Today the Koreans there are part of that rapidly modernizing independent state – a story that resonates with the experiences of many Americans who have been forced to assimilate and form new cultures themselves.

When not scanning the skies for aliens himself, and pondering the publicity bonanza that an actual alien invasion during the Festival might bring, Herskowitz is hard at work finalizing the program and will be ready to share its full details in late September.

The Virginia Film Festival is hosted by the University of Virginia.

Press Contact:
John Kelly
434/296-5577
john@johnkellypr.com