Avignon/New York Film Festival November 15-19, 2006 Written by Ed Carey

Opening night of the Avignon/New York Film Festival started off with a bang with a cocktail reception in the Hunter College West lobby where members of the press sipped Chateaneuf-du-Pape with the filmmakers. The feature film of the night was a poignant comedy-drama, Ishai Setton’s The Big Bad Swim. Setton was on hand to introduce his film. The feature was preceded by a French short, Le Diner.

Just before the start of the screenings, Festival director/founder Jerry Rudes showed the audience the statues that would be presented for the best films and shorts at the awards ceremony on Sunday night. The audience is the jury and everyone was given a voting card upon entering the Kaye Playhouse.

Setton’s film won a prize at the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival last week and it’s easy to see why. Setton and some members of his cast participated in a Q&A after the screening. The cast members were full of praise for the film, which film looked great and was beautifully cut and edited. The story follows a group at an adult-education swimming class and focuses in on the relationships of three members played by Paget Brewster, Jeff Branson, and Jess Weixler. Noah (Branson) is a pill-popping swim instructor unhappy with his life. Amy (Brewster), a divorced teacher whose ex-husband is trying to push her out of the school, befriends Jordan (Weixler), a young stripper/card dealer who ends up falling for Noah. Their story is one of friendship and finding love where you least expect - an adult-education swimming class being one great example. Many might pass on this film thinking that a swimming class sounds boring, but they haven’t been to a swimming class with characters like this. The film was shot on location in Connecticut on a very modest budget, somewhere under a million.

The second night of the Avignon Film Festival was a night of drama. No, there were no unfortunate situations with festival-goers becoming inebriated from too much Chateaneuf-du-Pape. As opposed to the first night of comedies, the evening screenings were more serious. Nevertheless, there was definitely something in the air. “This is a raucous crowd,” said festival director/founder Jerry Rudes to a group bubbling with anticipation. “I think we’re going to serve less wine tomorrow,” joked Rudes. Jail City was the night’s dramatic feature, but it was preceded by a short called Rounding Third, the directorial debut of Brandon Kusher. Both were filmed in New York City.

Rounding Third was an interesting vignette about a young doctor who is trying to get over his father’s death. He befriends a former Yankee who played with Mickey Mantle but was sidelined by an injury. In the film Dr. Marcus’ bond with his dead father is strengthened by a box of old baseball cards and in real life, a box of old baseball cards is actually what led filmaker Kusher to the idea behind this film. “I found a box of my father’s old baseball cards and thought I could weave an interesting story around them,” said Kusher in a Q&A after the screening. His love for the game is also what bonds Marcus to his new friend Roberto, who tries to get him to confront his pain. The characters are engaging and the story keeps you interested. But if anything keeps the film from being totally engrossing, it is the length. Just when you get involved with these characters, the story ends. Perhaps Kusher should consider turning it into a feature-length film.

Daniel Eberle directed, co-stars and co-wrote Jail City with Paul James Vasquez, who also co-stars. George (Eberle) is a soldier who just returned home from Iraq to find out his brother was just killed. In a parallel story, Hector (Nick Bixby) is paroled from prison to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. Vasquez plays Hector’s troubled father. We see pretty early on why these two stories intersect; the journey lies in the how. George befriends a homeless teenage girl and then embarks on a bloody and tragic path in the search for vengeance for his brother. Hector struggles with his return home to a troubled family and his guilt over the past. Half the fun, they say, is getting there. The film was shot on location in New York at a breakneck pace of about fourteen days. “We were casting up until the first day of shooting,” said Eberle, who cast his next door neighbor in a role vacated by another actor. Vasquez mentored Eberle to be a screenwriter. “Dan was writing novels and I told him he should be writing screenplays,” said Vasquez. And the rest is history. Avignon/New York marks the NYC premiere of Jail City.

Avignon/New York Film Festival screened two films on November 17, 2006, one short and one feature. Both of these films recalled the bygone era of the 1920s and they both adapted literary works, but they were still very different in tone. Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana was adapted by director Ken Kimmelman from the Eli Siegel poem (1925) of the same name. Kimmelman said he wanted to capture the Aesthetic Realism philosophy of Siegel. According to Siegel, the main principle of Aesthetic Realism is “the world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites". Kimmelman said that his goal was to shows how everything is related, in nature, art and the self. He used over two hundred photos and images from the 1920's to give the film an authentic feel and to show how Siegel saw the world. Siegel even recorded a reading of the poem for the film. Kimmelman said the poem is “a way of seeing history poetically.”

While Siegel’s philosophy was optimistic about human nature and the relationship of all things, the subject of the following feature was a writer who looked into the darkness of the human soul. The film The Call of Cthulhu is adapted from a story by H.P. Lovecraft which was first published in 1928. Director Andrew Leman was heavily influenced by Lovecraft and by the silent films of that era. He made a bold choice to shoot The Call of Cthulhu as a black-and-white silent film in this age of computerized special effects. Such a feat could have easily come across as campy, but Leman blends a more subdued, modern acting style with many of the conventions inspired by the Gothic horror films of the 20s. “We wanted to avoid making a parody of 1920s films,” said Leman in a Q&A following the screening. The film was shot in Hollywood and on location in Providence, R.I. where Lovecraft lived most of his life. In order to give the film an authentic 1920s feel, the production team used an HD Video camera combined with digital filtering and lighting in a technique Leman dubbed Mythoscope. The story follows three interconnected narratives about the quest to shed light on the mystery of Cthulhu, a horrific monster personified in the film by a small stop-action puppet, but rendered creepy by the expert use of lighting and suggestion. Francis Wayland Thurston investigates the unfinished work of his dead uncle and finds that the truth is too much for the human mind to bear. This idea is reflected in Lovecraft’s first line, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Leman is also a designer of fonts and has always been interested in typography and he took painstaking measures to create “actual replicas of 20s newspapers,” as well as “a replica of Lovecraft’s own writing in the final shot.” Leman, together with Sean Branney (his producer and co-creator), created the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society in 1986 while he was studying theater in college. The HPHLS is located in Glendale, California.

Leman was also inspired by German horror films of the era, including Nosferatu and Faust. Some of the techniques used in The Call of Cthulhu are also displayed in these early films. One of the advantages of silent films is that they can be easily distributed internationally since minimal dialogue is used. Leman and Branney have sold DVDs across the globe on their website cthulhulives.org, boosting sales to about 12,000 copies since the release of the film in October 2005. The film has been translated in twenty-four languages. While the film may not appeal to a broad audience, The Call of Cthulhu serves as a nice homage to a bygone era of filmmaking. The team of Leman and Branney will take on Lovecraft’s story The Whisperer in the Darkness for their next adaptation, except this time it will be "talkie.”

The Avignon New York Film Festival came to an end on Sunday night November 19, 2006 with a screening of the John Turturro directed film Romance and Cigarettes. The film was preceded by an awards ceremony for the best films of the festival. Winners were picked by audience members who received voting cards for each film they attended, including the shorts. Awards were presented by James Roman, Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, and Pat Swinney Kaufman, Executive Director of the Governor’s Office of Motion Picture and TV. Audience members also received prizes which included DVDs of Ballet Russes and Prix De Beaute (featured at the festival) and some bottles of Chateauneuf-du-Pape wine.

The film winners were:

Short Film (Europe): Intimita; dir. Matteo Minetto
Short Film (U.S.): Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana; dir. Ken Kimmelman

Feature Film (Europe): For the Love of God (Pour l’ amour de Dieu); dir. Zakia Tahri & Ahmed Bouchaala
Feature Film (U.S.): Jail City; dir. Daniel Eberle

A special award, the Pierre Salinger, was given to the best documentary Blues by the Beach. Directed by Joshua Faudem, it tells the story of filmmaker Jack Baxter, who was shooting a documentary in a blues bar in Tel Avia called Mike’s Place when it was struck by a suicide bombing. Baxter and his wife Fran accepted the award, with Mr. Baxter telling the audience that the bar still stands today, serving drinks and blues music to “people from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds.”

“The sheer range of thought-provoking stories and diversity of perspectives inspires us and makes the process of organizing this international showcase that much more fulfilling for all involved,” said Jerry Rudes, festival director/founder.

After the awards were given out, the night’s films commenced, starting with a short named Comment J’ai Arrete (Smoked Away) by director Charles Senard. This short was an amusing fantasy about a chain smoker who wakes up one morning a different man, quite literally, as he does not recognize his own face in the mirror. He struggles with how to tell the woman he loves, who believes he has abandoned her. This was yet another short that drew me in and left me wanting more. Director Senard joked that there would be a sequel to tie up the ambiguous ending. Can anyone say feature-length film?

Finally, Romance and Cigarettes is an enjoyable musical comedy-drama about a family in Brookyln. The father carries on a torrid affair with an elusive redhead named Tula (Kate Winslet) while the grown-up kids try to comfort their mom. James Gandolfini plays Nick Murder, the father who is overwhelmed by his urges while trying to repair a broken marriage, and Susan Sarandon plays his wife Kitty. The characters try to escape the harsh realities of their lives by playing out fantasies to the tune of 60s rocking love ballads, including Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.” The cast is rounded out by Mary Louise Parker, Aida Turturro and Mandy Moore with yet another memorable performance from Christopher Walken as Cousin Bo, who helps Kitty track down Tula. While most of the film jumps from one musical romp to the next (punctuated by moments of hilarity), there are enough tender moments to make you care about these characters and their travails. Turturro couldn’t be there for the NYC premiere, because he’s currently filming The Bronx is Burning.

For more on the Avignon/NY Film Festival, log onto: www.avignonfilmfest.com