I feel honored and privileged to take the helm here at the Virginia Film Festival. I am excited with the great potential and plan to build upon the firm foundation that has already been established to help turn VFF into a top, destination film festival. I hope to program a film festival that engages the faculty, students, and the entire community of Charlottesville while reaching outward to create an ever evolving dialogue on film and the fascinating topics that it can cover. VFF is unique among film festivals because it’s unique partnership with the University of Virginia enables it to offer extraordinary resources that other festivals simply don’t have. I believe that a festival should reflect the community which it serves and I am looking forward to moving to Charlottesville with my family to become a part of that very special community.

Sincerely,

Jody Kielbasa

Firstly, UVa’s School of Arts and Sciences has launched its search for a new Festival Director. You can find out more from jobs@uva on the University of Virginia’s website. Submissions will be reviewed from 1 Feb, but applications will be accepted until the post is filled.

To get ourselves in readiness, we are also considering themes for the 2009 Festival. Your suggestions and input have always been a valued part of the decision-making process and this year is no exception. Previous Festivals have highlighted themes which respond to the climate of the times whilst showcasing a broad range of films old and new. If you fancy your chances of coming up with the next big idea, message us here.

Finally, we are putting the finishing touches to the Spring Season of the Virginia Film Society – details will be posted in the next few weeks, so keep checking in for updates.

We’d like to thank you all for your continuing support in these changing times and hope that you will join us for the next exciting phase in our 22 year history.

To the future!

I’ll start with my own memories. They involved standing in front of my friends on the Festival Advisory Board (including Doro Bachrach, Ron Yerxa, Mark Johnson,  Sissy Spacek, Temple Fennell, and others) and, later, an audience of 500 at the Paramount Theater, after this video tribute was projected:

The video was a surprise orchestrated by Virginia Film Office director Rita McClenny, who has been my  colleague, advisor, and close friend since I arrived here in 1994. She cast many of the other partners and friends who have supported me for the past fourteen years in this video memento, which I’ll probably view and inflict on others repeatedly, well into my dotage.

guillermo arriaga-jack fisk-sissy spacek-richard herskowitz

More memories: For many years, I’ve invited a few festival participants to help me detox from the festival’s frenzy at a retreat

hamid naficy

on our final night in a beautiful setting. This year,  Russ and Lyn Bolen Warren graciously welcomed my guests, on just six hours’ notice, into their beautiful, art-filled, mountain-flanked home.

kevin everson

jeanne liotta

The group (documented in these Polaroids by our ace Production Coordinator James Ford) included international, experimental, and Hollywood filmmakers, film scholars, and student interns.

george kuchar

As always, it was a surprising amalgamation, but what a kick to gather such a diverse group together. I’ve always drawn great pleasure from mixing up the commercial and experimental in my programming, and in my partying.

lauren o'connor

peter riegert

Seriously, I think it’s healthy and necessary for mainstream and avant-garde and academic practitioners to be in dialogue, and I have never had a better venue than the Virginia Film Festival to help me realize

this ambition.

Now, I’m off to Houston for the next chapter in my career, a Cinema and Media Arts Festival that kicks off on November 20 with a four-day mini-festival, previewing the full festival that starts in November 2009. So long, Virginia filmgoers and festival guests, and thanks for the fifteen memorable years you gave me here.

I’m very happy that, at my final program as artistic director, Sissy Spacek will be our opening night special guest, with her new film, Lake City. Sissy has been a friend and supporter of both the Virginia Film Festival and me for many years, and I love her performance in this film. Her performing partner is Troy Garity, who plays her estranged son, forced back into his mother’s home while escaping from a nasty drug dealer (played by one Dave Matthews). Garity, who starred in Soldier’s Girl (which director Frank Pierson presented at the VFF in 2003), will also be at opening night, along with the film’s producers and co-directors. Mark Johnson is one of those producers, and I’m also thrilled that this longtime supporter of the Festival is joining this gathering.

Looking over our guest list, I’m struck by their international diversity– featured directors this year are Maurtanian-French Abderrahmane Sissako, Mexican Guillermo Arriaga, and Mexican-American Gregory Nava. This is quite an evolution from my first year here (1994), when we were still called the Virginia Festival of American Film. 1995 was the last year we called our festival by that name, and the theme that year was U.S. and Them. The precise point of that theme selection was to argue that American films could hardly be distinguished from the international films they influence, reflect, finance and/or poach, and to segue into our re-emergence the next year as the Virginia Film Festival. Thirteen years later, we have a strong anti-immigrant political movement that is trying to wall off America’s borders, and so it seems worth making the point again that immigrants are vital to our economy and culture, and that immigrant filmmakers constantly revitalize American film. Hence, the theme of Aliens!

Our other guest actors in this year’s festival include Ghanaian Prince Adu and Armenian-Lebanese immigrant Karren Karagulian, appearing with Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway. The two are non-professional actors who give knockout performances as immigrant hustlers in contemporary New York City.  Also attending will be Pedro Castaneda, another non-professional who gives a stunning performance as the aging patriarch, an illegal immigrant, growing estranged from his assimilating children in August Evening. Prince of Broadway just won the top prize at the Woodstock Film Festival and August Evening won the Cassavetes Prize at the Independent Spirit awards. If you come to our festival looking for strong filmmaking that the commercial distributors are neglecting, start with these two beauties.

I’m particularly excited about the participation of novelist and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who will present his collaborations with Alejandru Inarritu (Amores Perros, Babel…we’re only leaving out 21 Grams) and Tommy Lee Jones (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada). We will also premiere Arriaga’s impressive first directorial effort, The Burning Plain, starring Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.  Audiences here are in for a treat, not just from Arriaga’s characteristic time and border-jumping narratives, but from his articulate, captivating presence. (Not all these films may be visible on the schedule yet, but they will soon be placed in our remaining TBA slots).

There are quite a few major directors coming….Gregory Nava will be here for a 25th anniversary presentation of El Norte, in a beautiful new print, and he will conduct this year’s Regal Shot by Shot Workshop on the film. And Abderrahmane Sissako, the Mauritanian-French director whose acclaimed film Bamako screened in our Film Society last year, will present  two feature films that beautifully render his deeply felt theme of exile, Life on Earth and Waiting for Happiness.

There are additional “Focus On” directors whose careers will be explored through screenings of past and recent work… Alex Rivera, whose Sleep Dealer mixes the sci-fi and immigration strands of our program and was one of the best-received features at Sundance this year, will also show a program of his shorts. Here’s a Rivera short that he won’t show in that program, but couldn’t be more relevant to our theme: Dia de la Independencia (Alex Rivera) . Sean Baker, best known for creating Greg the Bunny, has come out with two impressive neo-neo-realist films about contemporary immigrant life in New York City, and he will bring along some of his non-professional actors and creative partners to our screenings of Take Out and Prince of Broadway. Look for the underground space alien films culled from forty years of filmmaking and presented by George and Mike Kuchar and three documentaries, including the rolicking My America: Honk if You Love Buddha, by Renee Tajima-Pena.

I‘ll just mention one more guest here, who is coming to our festival as both actor and director. Peter Riegert is accompanying another film that, like El Norte, made a big splash 25 years ago and has lost none of its appeal: Local Hero. In that film, he played the disoriented American alien in Scotland. He’s also going to attend our screening of his latest film role, as a judge in a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantanamo in Sig Libowitz and Adam Rogers’ film The Response. The film is based on actual CSRT transcripts, and will be a springboard for a panel discussion led by Slate’s legal writer Dahlia Lithwick. Riegert is also a film director, and he’ll screen his wonderful short film, By Courier, along with King of the Corner, a delightful showcase for an ensemble cast of great actors, who clearly had a blast working with Riegert on this production.

There is much more to tell….Read through the release for a fuller roadmap and come back over the next few weeks as we post full film blurbs and video trailers for each of our titles.

Remember when our theme was WET, and we held screenings in the Aquatic Center pool? Well, for ALIENS!, we’re opening up a “microcinema” in the McCormick Observatory’s 40-seat lecture room (microcinemas are small “do it yourself” theaters, usually run by artists, featuring experimental and underground works). While films screen in the lecture room, the Dome Room telescope will be open to the public and combing the skies for Martians, seventy years after Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast (we’ll play that broadcast on its 70th anniverary, October 30).

Curators Ed Halter and Craig Baldwin (who run, respectively, the Light Industry and Other Cinema microcinemas on the East and West coasts) will be joined in the McCormick Microcinema by avant-garde filmmakers Jeanne Liotta and George and Mike Kuchar in presenting the spaciest films in our program. Halter has unearthed Chariot of the Gods, and will screen it along with clips from other Sunn International exposes on Bigfoot, UFO’s, and the Bermuda Triangle.  The Kuchars have compiled three programs of their underground alien invasion epics. Liotta has collected classics by Joseph Cornell, James Whitney, Hollis Frampton alongside her own work, and Baldwin is mixing his own political found-footage mash-up Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America with titles by Bjorn Melhus, Bill Brown, and the Ford Motor Company.

Meanwhile, I have to thank all the people who responded to this blog and sent suggestions for our program. Several of you suggested The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, not the Keanu Klaatu version), and we’ll be teaming up with the new Library of Congress film archive in Culpeper to present it in their wonderful new theater.  Close Encounters was also suggested, a much better choice than the overplayed E.T., and we’ll have it on the big screen in Culbreth Theatre. As for immigrant-themed works, somebody suggested Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and I managed to track down a print and it’s in the program. I loved Matt Marshall’s suggestion that we show Cat People, about a Serbian immigrant with a dark secret, made by two immigrants (Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur), and so that’s in, too.

On September 25, on this website, all will be revealed.

A film like The Brother From Another Planet by last year’s VFF guest John Sayles makes the alien/immigrant connection clear and would be a perfect selection (although I’m also open to less explicit sci-fi allegories!).

I’m very interested in the kind of films our visiting Festival Fellow Hamid Naficycalls “accented� in that their filmmakers’ styles and subjects reflect a double consciousness of their native and host societies (among Naficy’s examples are Atom Egoyan, Mira Nair, and Luis Bunuel). And films about immigrants and outsiders will be welcome…including new work on the illegal immigrant debate, such as the work-in-progress by the Virginia-based filmmakers at the YouTube channel 9500 Liberty.

What other titles, guests, and events should I consider? Post your suggestions by sending a reply here, and help me program a great and timely festival.

Highlights for me included the very lively and appreciative audience reaction to John Turturro’s ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES (especially the cheers when Gandolfini first broke out in song); David Edelstein’s great rapport with Tamara Jenkins in their post-film discussion of THE SAVAGES; the amazing musical performance by Brent Green, Howe Gelb, and Brendan Canty accompanying Green’s astonishing animations at the Gravity Lounge; the entire PETER PAN show at the Paramount, with its magnificent score by Donald Sosin and the Kid Pan Alley students; the rapturous response to AUTISM: THE MUSICAL, and the appreciative comments by young Josh Tucker in the post-film discussion. Other pleasures included seeing home movies projected on the Regal Downtown screen (to the great delight of archivist Pam Wintle and film scholar Patty Zimmermann) and hearing people’s excited reactions to films I adore by Alan Berliner, Su Friedrich, Esther Robinson, Charles Burnett, and other guest artists.

Most of all, the heart and soul of this festival was Stewart Stern, who mesmerized children and adults with his memories of PETER PAN and conducted an unforgettable Shot-by-Shot Workshop on REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. Readers of my introductory essay in the Festival catalogue know that these two films, and the surprising synthesis of their visions in the mind of REBEL screenwriter Stern, inspired much of my programming. For a taste of what you missed, I suggest that you skip over to Rick Sincere’s blog, where he’s posted his video of Stern’s PETER PAN introduction.

P.S.

There’s a wonderful appreciation of filmmaker Alan Berliner’s visit to the Virginia Film Festival on Jonathan Chisdes’ film review website here. Also, David Edelstein has written two reports on his festival experience on his blog, The Projectionist, here and here.

In the meantime, my recommendation is that you go to the News Release below or here for a guide to help you navigate through the deluge of films. The release explains the structure of the program, such as the seven “Focus On” filmmakers (including Tamara Jenkins) whose works are woven through it. It also highlights the major premieres and guests, including opening night guests John Sayles and Maggie Renzi with Honeydripper, Nick Broomfield with Ghosts, Charles Burnett with Killer of Sheep, and the world premiere of Hoop Reality (the title lost its plural form yesterday, according to producer Lee Caplin).

You’ll notice that there are still three TBA’s. You’re right to guess that they’re going to be exciting. But we’re holding back some announcements so the rest of this incredible lineup can sink in. As I said at the press conference yesterday, the lineup is strong because this happens to be an unusually strong year of international cinema. That’s been evident at festivals from Sundance to Cannes through Toronto, and now many of the best titles are stopping here, before they come to a theater near you. These include The Savages, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Starting Out in the Evening, and many others I really think you should start clicking on, reading about and ordering now.