The Virginia Film Festival

The almost-complete Virginia Film Festival schedule (short of a few announcements still to come) is now online.  The press release you can read here maps out the design of the program, with its two strands addressing terrestrial and extra-terrestrial immigrants.

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.