Mining Austin for CFF

Please accept my apologies for not blogging more often. I was running from screening to screening (and a few parties), so was not back at my base where the Internet was. I wish I was a better blogger. So sorry!

To catch you up, I did get a chance to see nine feature films and many shorts (only listed the two I liked below) in total out here. All really truly interesting in their own way. Our festival was promoted and many an idea for other films to bring to CFF was sprung with filmmakers. I will certainly write more analysis after digesting them all and reviewing with Doug and Tom what they saw at Sundance to try and complete a well-rounded offering, but Austin was a great place for making relationships that will last for us and finding unique films to show our town.

Cigarette Candy (short)—about soldier returning home from war with a burden to bear.

Kelp (short)—funny relationship comedy.

And Everything is Going Fine—the Spalding Gray story.

Helena from the Wedding—situational comedy ensemble piece.

Some Days Are Better—what is the meaning of life? X-generation funny.

A Different Path (doc)—unique discussion about urbanization and cars.

The Happy Poet—funny about success and morality. Possible?

Dance With the One—best drama for me. Two brothers try and make their way in life after being raised by hippies.

Tiny Furniture—mother/daughter/sister comedic drama also trying to find out who you are.

Lebanon, PA—every decision we make leads us a certain direction…sometimes home.

Barry Munday—comedy about a man who literally has to lose his “manhood” to learn to be a man. Has stars like Cybill Shepherd, Malcolm McDowell, Chloe Sevigny. If we can work it out with distributor, we could have this come to CFF. It was funny. My agent is their agent, but we must wait and see what distributor ends up on board.

Met or knew someone (thanks to great introductions from my Austin friends) so we can access these all pretty easily. Plus, six degrees from others…fingers crossed for good filmmakers to attend again.

Attended the Austin Chronicle Film Party (who sponsored the festival with others).

Attended the premier party for Dance With the One.

Have much follow-up with people met including some wonderful actors, writers, producers and others.
There are also a few films I missed but heard great things about that I will follow up with and get copies sent. I mean really, a couple of great looking films to chase down.

Also, heard that Ed Norton owns land (an island?) in our Easton area. True? His film Leaves of Grass was SXSW Friday night opening movie. Richard Dreyfuss also in it. He is also a fan of our area. Anyway, something for us to check into making a fundraiser event out of or something. He is an environmental activist and we could mix that into the fundraiser or something.

Will be at airport at 4 a.m. for my 5 p.m. departure. Thanks for the opportunity to represent CFF and bring back some gems. Great stuff all around!! And best of all was Amy’s House. (Thanks Amy and Pete!)

Goodnight.
Liza

And now from Austin...

Austin is great! Got in late on Saturday due to weather delays with flights, but got to get my badge, meet up with a few people who filled me in on films and what's "hot" so far. Then back to Amy Rich's home. Amy is an Easton High School buddy to add to the CFF connection!

Plotted my course for Sunday. Started with narrative shorts as they provide surprises and good panels with new talent. Liked one called Kelp.

I then met up with indie agent Deborah MacIntosh from William Morris Endeavor to see what might be possible for us to bring to CFF. They represent two great possibilities. First, Barry Munday and secondly Saturday Night, which has John Malkovich hosting a documentary about what it takes to make the Saturday Night Live show. Also funny and cool behind the scenes. So, she will stay in touch about those as well as send other ideas in case these films get caught up in distribution restrictions.

Then I met up with Suzanne Weinert, an indie writer/producer who used to run Julia Roberts company in NYC. Found out she is an advisory board member of SXSW. She had a film in SXSW last year that is a dark comedy that we could maybe showcase, though it will be in limited release by May. We spoke of others as she called people over to introduce me and hear of their films. It was great, plus, she was introducing the film And Everything Is Going to be Fine, the story of Spalding Gray directed by Steven Soderbergh. This film is not necessarily for CFF, but met good people to open more doors.

I then saw Helena From the Wedding, a narrative comedy but too much suburban whining and not clever enough. We'd seen these yuppies a million times. Finally off to bed and ready for Monday. Suzanne is taking me to the parties tonight, so hold onto your hats….

Liza

GOOD NEWS ALERT!

Chesapeake Film Festival Board member Liza Moore will be blogging from SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin for the annual music and film festival. Liza's no slouch when it comes to films, screenplay and script analysis, story consulting, writing...and the list goes on.

She has connections, insight and energy. While she's in Texas, she'll be screening, scouting and spreading the word about CFF. We're delighted she's there. Stay tuned!

Sun is down, dance is done

The mental film blender of Sundance is now complete. We woke as if with a hangover, story lines and characters and moments all swirling together. Wolfed down the last of our groceries for breakfast, stuffed our things in the rental car, and staggered off to the airport. Fellow Sundance-goers could be seen snaking through the security lines, with a mildly lost look. It's all sort of reminiscent of the stagger through the parking lot after a major concert experience…what was that encore tune again?

Courage at the Close. My final day began with two of the highlight films of the festival for me. Freedom Riders and Restrepo, both of which detail people calling upon unimaginable courage - albeit at different times, for very different reasons.

We saw Freedom Riders, which I blogged about before, first thing in the morning, and followed that by Restrepo, a film about the deployment of a platoon of soldiers in the Korengal Valley, the most remote and dangerous place in Afghanistan. Vanity Fair contributors Sebastian Junger and Tim Heatherington each took five one-month trips there and spent the time living with and photographing these soldiers. The result is probably the most intimate document of either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars and the young soldiers fighting it. Truly remarkable and, thankfully, the film lets the soldiers speak for themselves and focuses only on their experience. Wider political and strategic questions are left for other discussions. The result is an invitation into a band of brothers and it's a truly remarkable experience. More on this film can be found here.

The Sundance Jury agreed as the film later won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary filmmaking. The complete results of the awards can be found here.

Thankfully Tom and I were able to see almost all of the award-winning films. Winter's Bones, which we both liked, won two awards. Well, plane is boarding, must go....

Doug

(The top shot is of Tom in the Salt Lake City airport doing his final compilation of film notes and ideas in preparation for our post-mortem CFF programming meeting on the flight home.)

A window into history

Tom and I saw Freedom Riders first thing this morning. Some incredible newly-found archival footage (courtesy of the FBI no less) marks this compelling film. A great window into the early days of the Kennedy administration as well as the civil rights movement. Includes some great interviews with the Freedom Riders themselves, the then governor of Alabama (John Patterson), and JFK Administration adviser John Seigenthaler.

Impressive as a window into history, but also as a testament to human courage in the face of almost certain violence. A keeper.

Doug

Down to the last dance

I can feel the festival simmering down. I will still have about five films on Saturday, but the energy of the town is bubbling down. Now that all of the films have been played at least twice, a lot of the deals have been done. So the dog and pony show of celebrities is pretty much over. But the one thing remaining is the awards.

Sundance is broken up into categories for international and domestic documentaries and features. There are also awards for shorts. So they leave these blank spots in the schedule that are audience favorites or juried winners. We have bought tickets for Saturday’s Juried Feature Award winner. We have no idea what the film is. We may have already seen it. I think we are both rooting for Winter Bone.

There are some favorites that we hope will win, but we also hope that it is a film we haven’t seen. This is just another example of the festival coming to an end.

I have had the best time this year. I have covered a lot of ground as far as sheer volume of screenings, but as importantly I have more than a dozen new contacts. I met so many interesting people this week. Directors, screenwriters, distributors, actors, and, of course, other film fans have all made this week fascinating. It is like a parallel world where ideas and the arts are king. I love it and feel very uplifted to be here. It is a real honor.

It is going to be great for CFF to have all these contacts. I will begin emailing all the films that I liked and start figuring out how to get in touch with the folks that I did not meet. The name of the game now is to get screener DVDs so I can have our programming committee get to work finding the best films for our community. If I have collected 10 business cards, Doug surely has double that number.

I saw a film that troubled me so deeply that I held my gut as I left the theater. It is called Shock Doctrine. It argues that the ideas of economist Milton Friedman have led to capitalism profiting off of disaster. Disaster comes in many guises--hurricanes, coup d’etats, and wars. The film purports that the leaders who rise out of these crisis moments are people like Donald Rumsfeld, Augusto Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, the Russian oligarchs, and Paul Bremmer during the shock-and-awe period. It is a heady, compelling, and shocking film. If you want to know more, check it out here.

Sundance is just the start of a nine-month process that actually gets filmmakers and their films to come to our community. Even though I have another scintillating day ahead of me, I can feel the magic and mirth of Sundance coming down a notch. The race is coming to an end. We have been on fire. Entranced in the sorcery known as cinema.

Tom

Sundance: not just movies

Sundance also features lots of music--and theater, too. Here's a clip from Grace Potter and the Nocturnals at the Sundance Music Café.

Doug

(You might want to turn your volume down a bit before the clip starts.)