Silverdocs, the annual documentary festival hosted at AFI Silver Theatre each summer, announced today that it has a new name (AFI Docs), a new sponsor (Audi), and a new esteemed panel of advisers (Ken Burns, Spike Lee, Barbara Copple, and Davis Guggenheim, among others).
The largest documentary festival in the US, Silverdocs has long been a highlight of the summer for filmgoers and Silver Spring residents alike. This year’s festival, scheduled for June 19 through 23, will still be based at the AFI Silver Theatre but will also include screenings in downtown Washington in venues on the Mall and in Penn Quarter. AFI Docs, the name of which refers to the American Film Institute, will also include a new program called the AFI Catalyst Sessions, which brings together filmmakers, policy-makers, and audiences to discuss issues affecting Americans today.
“AFI Docs will bring film artists to the forefront of a dialogue with our nation’s leaders,” said AFI President and CEO Bob Gazzale in a statement. “History has proven that great change in civil societies is often, if not always, catalyzed by art. It is this that inspires us to be in Washington, DC, with storytellers whose voices serve as catalysts for action.”
More information about this year’s slate of films and other scheduled programing will be posted at the AFI Docs website in coming weeks, and we’ll update as we learn more about the 2013 festival.
Among the offerings at FilmFest DC is Norway’s Kon-Tiki, nominated for an Oscar this year. Photograph courtesy of Filmfest DC.
Filmfest DC returns for its 27th year— April 11 through 21—and after almost three decades of reviewing more than 300 submissions annually, founder Tony Gittens has a definite idea of what makes a good film: “Ultimately, it comes down to the story. The stories seem to be pretty much about the same thing—people understanding their place in the world, trying to have connections with other people, and finding themselves with obstacles to overcome.”
This year’s roster encompasses 81 features, documentaries, and shorts from around the world. Films are grouped thematically, including an espionage-and-thriller category called Trust No One. Among the festival’s highlights are the US premiere of Underground: The Julian Assange Story, an Australian movie starring Alex Williams as the WikiLeaks founder and Rachel Griffiths as his mother. Also on the roster: Stories We Tell, an autobiographical documentary by Canadian actress turned director Sarah Polley (Away From Her, Take This Waltz); Kon-Tiki, the Oscar-nominated Norwegian drama about Thor Heyerdahl’s groundbreaking voyage across the Pacific Ocean; and The Attack, a Lebanese film about a middle-class man who learns his wife is a suicide bomber. “A number of things have changed in 27 years,” Gittens says. “We’re seeing a lot more variety and more diverse voices. But we have a loyal audience and they’re very knowledgeable. To know we’re making a contribution to the city’s cultural scene is a good feeling.”
Filmfest DC. April 11 through 21. For schedule, venues, tickets, and other details at the festival’s website.
This article appears in the April 2013 issue of The Washingtonian.
It’s always sad when a festival calls it quits, but in the case of National Geographic’s All Roads Film Festival, the cancellation of the annual event is a real loss for minority and indigenous filmmakers.
All Roads, which has been screening films at National Geographic locations across the country since 2004, also provided seed grants ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 annually to filmmakers who came from or documented underrepresented cultures. Finished works were subsequently presented as a part of the September festival and occasionally screened on the National Geographic channel.
“Unfortunately, [All Roads] did not generate the audience needed to sustain it as a separate strand of programming,” says National Geographic spokesperson Meaghan Calnan, who added that the organization will integrate films focusing on indigenous cultures into National Geographic Live, its public events series.
The first All Roads Film Festival debuted in 2004 in Los Angeles and Washington, presenting more than 36 films culled from 500 entries. Spike Lee, a member of the project’s advisory council, praised the festival’s mission to give underrepresented cultures and filmmakers a platform. “The All Roads Film Project will help bring to light a whole new group of talented individuals with extraordinary stories to tell,” Lee said. One of the first films screened was Arna’s Children by Juliano Mer-Khamis, an Israeli/Palestinian actor and filmmaker who was assassinated in 2011.
In 2009, All Roads participant Thornton Warwick’s film Samson and Delilah was one of nine movies shortlisted for a Foreign Language Film Oscar that year and ended up winning the Caméra d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival.
The former All Roads homepage now states that both the “All Roads Film Project and its Seed Film Grant program has ceased operation and will not resume.” National Geographic continues to offer other grants to conservationists and explorers, but its contributions to filmmaking will be sadly missed.
See who picks up their Oscar trophy at one of these parties. Photograph courtesy of Joe Seer / Shutterstock.
You’ve recovered from the shock of Hangover star Bradley Cooper being nominated for Best Actor, and heard all about how Jessica Chastain is upset over Zero Dark Thirty’s Kathryn Bigelow being passed over for Best Director. You have your own opinions on the Oscar contenders, so we’ve rounded up a few places where you can enjoy disagreeing with the Academy’s choices over cocktails.
Suraj Sharma in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, opening Wednesday. Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, Life of Pi, featured the magical realism-influenced story of a young man drifting in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean for the better part of a year following a shipwreck. His only companion in the boat as he spends his time trying to survive and reminiscing about his past: a Bengal tiger. Ang Lee’s adaptation of the film is being hailed as a visual marvel, the sort of thing that can sell even those annoyed by 3D and CGI on the technological capabilities of those tools. Critics have been a little more lukewarm on the handling of the inspirational and theological underpinnings of the story, but the general consensus is that the film is so dazzling to look at, the deficiencies wind up being fairly minor in Lee’s very grand scheme.
View the trailer. Opens today at theaters across the area.
Hot on the heels of HBO’s look at Alfred Hitchcock’s attachment to The Birds star Tippi Hedren, with Toby Jones in the lead role of that film, comes a peek at the making of arguably Hitchcock’s most famous work, 1960’s Psycho. Anthony Hopkins dons the makeup and fat suit for this one, which is based on Stephen Rebello’s book and directed by Sacha Gervasi. This is Gervasi’s second outing as a director, and his first narrative film, his first effort being the excellent rock documentary, Anvil: The Story of Anvil. The story pays particular attention to the influene of Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, a former screenwriter and assistant director herself, played here by Helen Mirren.
View the trailer. Opens Friday at Georgetown, E Street, and Bethesda Row.
Chris Dodd, Peter Glatzer, and Adrian Grenier at the MPAA. Photograph by Joy Asico/Impact Arts + Film Fund.
While Adrian Grenier was starring in Entourage, he told a Washington audience last night, he made valiant efforts to “green” the HBO show’s set. “It lasted about a week,” Grenier said. “Don’t ever try and mess with the crew’s doughnuts.”
SHFT (pronounced “shift”), which actor and filmmaker Grenier founded with producer Peter Glatzer in 2009, is another attempt to promote environmental awareness and sustainable ways of living without “the doom and gloom,” as Grenier puts it. The website combines a number of different platforms—filmmaking, art, shopping, news—and gives the pair a home for their various advocacy efforts, which include Mobile Kitchen Classroom, a nonprofit that engages New York City high school students with preparing and cooking healthy, sustainable meals.
Grenier and Glatzer joined Motion Picture Association of America chairman Chris Dodd at an event hosted with Impact Arts + Film Fund at the MPAA last night to screen five short films the pair have made, and to talk about SHFT’s continuing progress. The timing of the event, given the disastrous impact of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey, seemed auspicious. “Certainly, anyone who’s a denier of climate change has to change their tune at this point,” says Glatzer. “A lot of the issues with the planet are impossible to ignore, and we’re hopeful that this is going to be a wake-up call.”
Angelika Mosaic in Fairfax. Photograph by Andrew Propp.
If you’ve spent any time in New York City (or Dallas, or Plano), chances are you’re familiar with the Angelika Film Center. The NYC Angelika, an East Village landmark on the corner of Houston and Mercer, has been an indie film institution since it opened in 1989, and this weekend sees the opening of Washington’s own Angelika—but on a much larger scale.
Angelika Mosaic, which opens this Friday, is a brand new eight-screen luxury theater and the cultural linchpin of Fairfax’s Mosaic development, which is projected to feature restaurants such as Matchbox and Taylor Gourmet, as well as stores including Anthropologie, Timothy Paul, and Lou Lou. We got a preview of the cinema complex, which aims to offer intelligent programming such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master alongside indie movies (Josh Radnor’s Liberal Arts) and foreign films (Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion).
Emanuele (left) and Waitt in front of Le Lincoln Cinema in Paris, France. Photograph courtesy of Nicole Emanuele.
The local film scene is abuzz this week with the kickoff of the ninth annual DC Shorts film festival. But this Sunday also marks the local premiere of the indie flick Not Waving but Drowning, screening at the AFI Silver Theatre. The music-driven movie tells the story of two teenage girls in a small town in Florida, best friends who begin to head down different paths when one departs for New York City and the other stays behind. It’s preceded by The Most Girl Part of You, a dark yet touching short film based on the story of the same name by Amy Hempel. This is the first feature from director Devyn Waitt, 26, who is from Oldsmar, Florida, and is produced by Nicole Emanuele, also 26, a Rockville native. The two met and became friends while attending film school at Florida State University (where, full disclosure, this writer knew both of them), and will attend Sunday’s screening. We chatted with Waitt and Emanuele about the challenges of a first movie, screening to French audiences at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival, and using Kickstarter to get a horse on a train.
Tell me how the movie and your partnership first came about.
DW: The idea started my freshman year of college, when I was 19—kind of from that overwhelming feeling of being trapped and being anxious. I started writing the script after I moved to New York [after graduation]. I went through this long period of restlessness, and a lot of the characters came out of that. It was a year of writing and working on it, and it was definitely a lot of getting to know the characters. It’s kind of a collage; there were lots of little things I knew I wanted to include, so it’s more like a novel in that you spend some time with these people and in the end maybe you learn something, rather than setting things up in the first act. At times it felt urgent that I be working on it, and at times it became distant. Like the characters—they kind of wax and wane.
NE: We started working on this in 2008 or 2009, and I quit my job in April 2010 to work on it full-time. Devyn and I were both delusional and thought it would take us one year to make the movie—it’s been two years, so only twice as bad as we thought.
When did you decide to include the short, The Most Girl Part of You, at the beginning?
DW: That was something that came about while we were in beginnings of preproduction. I wasn’t super-happy with how Not Waving but Drowning began, and I’ve been a huge fan of Amy Hempel since I was in college. I was thinking about how Girl would make such a great short film, and as I was walking home listening to music and imagining it, I got excited about making it. I feel like not a lot of people see short films . . . I liked the idea of putting a short with a feature so people could see both, like it being a throwback to when you used to see a short film before a movie.
Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, and Terry Crews in The Expendables 2. Image courtesy of Lionsgate Films.
When the first Expendables came out, I was completely on board, in theory. Aging supergroup of action heroes acknowledging that their viability as action heroes is starting to run out? That’s a concept with serious potential. In practice, The Expendables was bloated, too self-serious, and downright boring. But reviews for the sequel have been significantly more promising, suggesting that the film may have exactly the fun, self-aware tone that was so sorely lacking in the first installment, and which is entirely necessary to make this kind of movie work. Which may still not make it good, but should at least make it the sort of watchable throwaway fun that’s often all that’s needed for a good summer action flick.
Sylvester Stallone still has a hand in writing this one, but cedes the director’s chair to action veteran Simon West (Con Air, The Mechanic). Stallone plays the leader of a mercenary group that includes Chuck Norris, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and the not-yet-too-old Jason Statham, going up against a rival group led by Jean-Claude Van Damme. Bruce Willis returns as the CIA agent doling out assignments, and Arnold Schwarzenegger takes his cameo from the first film and expands it into a full supporting role. If ever a film warranted a trip up to Baltimore to catch it on the big drive-in screen at Bengies, this is probably it—though it’s not on their schedule yet, one has to guess that it will be, as drive-in-ready as this feature looks.
View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at theaters across the area.
Miguel Angel 'Junior' Rosario plays in a bullpen carved out of the space behind a dugout. Photograph by Casey Beck.
When it comes to making a film about baseball, Trevor Martin has the credentials in both categories. Martin, co-director of the damning new documentary Ballplayer: Pelotero—playing at West End Cinema through July 26—is a DC native who played varsity baseball at Woodrow Wilson High School, worked for many years in the Northwest DC Home Run Baseball Camp, and also organized the city’s first-ever student film festival at the Avalon in 2004.
Ballplayer examines Major League Baseball’s recruitment practices in the Dominican Republic, a system that provides professional baseball with nearly 20 percent of its players. It’s also a paradigm that’s deeply flawed, as the film demonstrates by focusing on two young prospects in particular. Martin talked to The Washingtonian about how the film was made, how MLB has responded to it, and what happens to the kids who don’t make it over to the United States.
