The Virginia Film Festival

Originally made for the French television series 2000 Seen By, Abderrahmane Sissako’s docudrama presents a lyrical portrait of life in a small African village on the cusp of the new millennium. Sissako stars as a fictionalized version of himself, on a journey from his home in France to his father’s land.

Two new media productions exploring the current immigration debate will be featured. ICED, or I Can End Deportation, is Breakthrough TV’s online video game recreating the experience of surviving as an immigrant to the U.S. 9500 Liberty is a YouTube, MySpace and upcoming feature documentary on the immigration clashes in Prince William County.

Classic political documentary co-directed by featured festival guest Renee Tajima-Peña. An Asian-American automotive engineer is murdered by Detroit assembly-line worker who blames Japanese auto makers for the loss of his job.

Based on actual transcripts of the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals, this short film dramatizes the trial of an Arab detainee (Aasif Mandvi) and the military judges (played by Peter Riegert and Kate Mulgrew) who must decide his fate. Slate legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick will host a panel following the screening with experts on the Guantanamo Bay tribunals.

For the second year, musician Paul Reisler and Terri Allard will lead a group of Charlottesville schoolkids who have composed songs to accompany today’s Family Day presentation of classic silent fantasy films: Edwin S. Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk (1907), Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland (1915), and Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917).

One camp classic from Mike Kuchar joins forces with two shorts by George Kuchar, for an otherworldly mix of cosmic energy and unbridled lust. Mike’s Sins of the Fleshapoids takes place one million years in the future, in the aftermath of the Great War, humankind has abandoned itself to hedonism and debauchery, leaving all work to a race of robots. But soon the robots decide to indulge in sinful pleasures of their own, and civilization may never be the same. Tower of the Astro-Cyclops features French ufologist Jacques Vallee, the reputed inspiration for a character played by New Wave director François Truffaut in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As always, George Kuchar offers viewers a close encounter of an entirely different kind. George’s Orphans of the Cosmos is a coming-of-age story set on the planet Mars.

The award-winning filmmaking team of director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga return to familiar yet startling territory with their 2000 collaboration, Amores Perros. Octavio thrives in the “illegal economy” of dog-fighting, until his prize canine Cofi is wounded. While rushing to get aid with Susanna, the woman he loves and whom he is trying to rescue from a hurtful relationship with his own brother, he is involved in a horrific car crash. Also involved in the crash are Daniel and Valeria, two lovers who thrive on the other side of Mexico’s cultural divide, living the high life in an expensive apartment, away from undesirables such as Octavio, until the accident brings them together in ways even they do not recognize. Amores Perros was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2001 Academy Awards, and won several Ariel Awards (the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars) that same year.

Klaatu and his eight foot tall robot Gort, visitors from outer space, arrive on Earth with a message, but the natives are not ready to listen to a voice from beyond. To convince the planet that he means business, Klaatu resorts to the event mentioned in the title. Will the Earthlings listen to him now?

Home (Stories) is a film inspired by the performance Home, which was created by Ghazel in collaboration with a group of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. Ghazel is an acclaimed visual and performance artist born in Tehran and currently living and working in Paris.

This spectacular new CGI animated feature features the voices of Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson, and Dennis Quaid. Terra is a lush planet whose inhabitants celebrate peace and tolerance. That tranquility is shattered when an armada appears above the defenseless globe, and the Terrians must find the strength to confront human invaders.

Following an encounter with a maverick Pocahontas enthusiast in Essex, England, artist Anna Lucas traveled around Virginia in the fall of 2007, using the local legendary female figure of Pocahontas as a virtual guide. From that experience came both a gallery show and this film, Little White Feather and the Hunter. Lucas’ filming style, though resembling documentary, often becomes more formal and cinematic, as she plays with reality and fiction simultaneously. Preceding the film will be the regional premiere of the latest work by Derek Sieg (Swedish Auto), Wasteland. In this contemporary thriller, a white man who is about to lose his home to foreclosure sets out to kill the chairman of a local Indian tribe who is blocking a casino project.

The Golden Age of Fish is an experimental feature film that interweaves various fragmentary narratives about the landscape of Cleveland, Ohio, from its prehistoric past to the present. An African American woman geologist is the excavator of Cleveland’s past, and our protagonist. The title references the geologist’s specimens, Devonian age Cleveland shale; it was the Devonian period (417 to 354 million years ago), when Cleveland had a golden age, and many new kinds of fish appeared. The film is a collage of fragments—scripted scenes and historic news footage, black and white and color—interwoven suggestively and poetically. “Everson tells without frills, but you can't call it minimal. The images, occasionally no more than fragments, are too poetic and atmospheric for that. He also has a theme all of his own. To put it simply: the life and survival of the black population of America” (Rotterdam Film Festival). The Golden Age of Fish will be followed by Hyacinth, directed by Lydia Moyer, and Secret, directed by William Wylie.

Hailed by Variety upon its release 25 years ago as “the first American independent epic”, Gregory Nava’s visually stunning feature tells the tale of two young Guatemalans fleeing their homeland and heading north towards the United States in search of a new start.

The 1970s saw the unlikely rise of distributor Sunn International, which released Chariots of the Gods in 1974, followed by titles on Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, along with two more documentaries on “ancient astronauts.” Ed Halter presents an illustrated lecture and clip show on the curious success of Sunn International and its numerous imitators. ART$ Dollars cannot be used for this event.

Rose Lorkowsky (Amy Adams) is struggling single mom making a poor living by cleaning the houses of more successful former classmates. When her cop boyfriend (Steve Zahn), who is married to someone else, happens to mention in passing that a lot of money can be made in the specialized line of crime scene clean-up, Rose sees a new opportunity. Enlisting the aid of her less-responsible but edgier sister Norah (Emily Blunt), she forms Sunshine Cleaning, a business that cleans up violent crime scenes. Directed by New Zealander Christine Jeffs (Sylvia and Rain), and produced by Big Beach, the same company which brought last year’s surprise hit Little Miss Sunshine to the big screen, Sunshine Cleaning was nominated for a Grand Jury prize at Sundance earlier this year.

The past and the present have a curious way of affecting one another. Mariana, a 16-year-old girl trying to put together the shattered lives of her parents in a Mexican border town; Sylvia, a woman in Portland undertaking an emotional odyssey to burnish a sin from her past; Gina and Nick, a couple dealing with an intense and clandestine affair; and Maria, a young girl helping her parents find redemption, forgiveness and love are all brought together in writer and director Guillermo Arriaga’s newest film The Burning Plain. Kim Basinger, Charlize Theron, and Jennifer Lawrence star.

Director Abdellatif Kechiche’s story of a North African immigrant family in the French fishing port of Sete follows unemployed Slimane, the family’s patriarch, who attempts to provide for his two families (including his ex-wife, current girlfriend, and their daughters) by building a couscous restaurant in a derelict boat.

George Kuchar's video diary presents itself as a record of the making of a new UFO feature but ends up a rambling journey through Kuchar’s gleefully eccentric social circle. The film runs over 140 minutes and is stuffed full of Kuchar’s trademark irreverence. ART$ Dollars cannot be used for this event.

Filmmaker Jeff Wadlow and producer Beau Bauman will screen the results of the Adrenaline Film Project. Local filmmakers write, shoot, and edit a film over the three days of the festival, mentored by Wadlow and Bauman. Awards will be announced at the end of the screening.

Alex Rivera’s dazzling feature length debut explores contemporary economic globalization through a classic sci-fi narrative in which Mexican laborers tap into a virtual reality where they work American factories without ever entering the country.

Filmed in Richmond, the debut feature from the co-writer/director team of Perry Moore and Hunter Hill weaves an engaging, classically Southern tale of family drama, propelled by Sissy Spacek’s powerful lead performance. Troy Garity, Rebecca Romijn and Dave Matthews all deliver strong supporting roles.

Steve Balderson’s new film adapts Joseph Suglia’s novel into a sprawling meditation on love and identity. Matt Riddlehoover stars as a wildly narcissistic 20-something destructively enamored with his own body.