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(Illustration by Will Lytle)
The Woodstock Film Festival (WFF) wound up its 15th annual manifestation on Sunday night, October 19, this year drawing cinephiles from near and far to 11 venues in Woodstock, Rhinebeck, Saugerties, Rosendale and Kingston. Besides the honorees previously announced — director Darren Aronofsky for the Honorary Maverick Award and producer/director/screenwriter/actor Mark Duplass for the brand-new Fiercely Independent Award — the star-studded bash at BSP in Kingston on Saturday night also conferred the Haskell Wexler Award for Best Cinematography on Michael Lavelle for Patrick’s Day. That film’s director, Terry McMahon, took home the Best Narrative Feature laurels as well.
Red Lines, Andrea Kalin and Oliver Lukacs’ profile of two activists in the secular Syrian opposition movement, was named Best Documentary Feature. Debra Solomon’s My Kingdom won for Best Animation. The Diane Seligman Awards for Best Short Narrative, Best Student Short Film and Best Short Documentary went to Iva Gocheva’s Sunday, Kate Tsang’s So You’ve Grown Attached and Tomasz Sliwinski’s Our Course (Nasza Klatwa) respectively. The James Lyons Awards for Best Editing went to Terry McMahon and Emer Reynolds in the Feature Narrative category — again for Patrick’s Day — and to Ali Akbarzadeh and Prichard Smith in the Feature Documentary category for Killswitch. Nathan Silver’s Uncertain Terms copped the Ultra Indie Award, and Caryn Waechter won the Tangerine Entertainment Juice Award for Best Female Feature Director for The Sisterhood of Night.
Two of the most eagerly awaited award announcements don’t come out until after the festival is over and all the ballots counted. The Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature was conferred by happy moviegoers on Sean Mullins’ Amira & Sam, and the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature on Thomas G. Miller’s Limited Partnership. The interactive component of being able to vote on what you’ve just seen is one of many crowdpleasing facets of WFF, along with the opportunity to direct questions at the filmmakers and actors in the live discussion sessions that follow most screenings.
Happy suburbia?
Local audiences in particular are tickled to see scenes obviously shot in Hudson Valley venues, which were much in evidence this year. The closing-night film, for example, A. J. Edwards’ visually lyrical The Better Angels, set Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood amidst scenery familiar to any who like to hike the Mohonk Preserve or have visited the Ashokan Center. Alexis Gambis’ The Fly Room, depicting the odd relationship between decidedly unfatherly genetics pioneer Calvin Bridges and his precocious daughter Betsey, was shot almost entirely on the Bard College campus, using it as a stand-in for the original Fly Room at Columbia University. Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe in Unicorns was filmed in Goshen and Campbell Hall, Adrián García Bogliano’s Late Phases in Rhinebeck, Kingston and Woodstock, Lacey Schwartz’s Little White Lie partially in Woodstock and Gene Fischer and Samuel Centore’s Passing Ellenville in…well, Ellenville.
The City of Kingston and its environs, including the Black Creek Preserve in Esopus with its unmistakable footbridge, delighted local viewers at screenings of the abovementioned The Sisterhood of Night, a modern-day retelling of the story of the Salem Witch Trials in which bullying, adolescent cliques and the abuse of social media replace Satanist-sniffing Puritan zealots as the drivers of false accusations and ultimate tragedy. Howls of skeptical laughter went up when a character in the film described Kingston as an “archetype of happy suburbia,” and anyone familiar with the actual demographics of Kingston High School must have felt somewhat baffled by a cast of young actors in which Asian students outnumbered black ones. Clearly, Kingston was discovered as a promising location and made to fit a screenplay written about someplace very different. But it’s fun to see places you know onscreen all the same, and the economic activity that filmmaking generates in our communities is doubtless welcomed by all.
Great directors of tomorrow
Musical performance was, as ever, interwoven with the screenings, filmmaker panels and actor dialogues at WFF 2015. Paul Green and the Internet Trolls entertained attendees at Saturday’s Maverick Awards ceremony at BSP. Roots-rocker Steve Earle joined Israeli singer/songwriter David Broza to perform live after the world-premiere screening of Erez Miller and Henrique Cymerman’s East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem in a WFF preview at the Woodstock Playhouse on Wednesday night. South African jazz legend Hugh Masekela put in an appearance at the Friday-night screening of Michael Lessac’s documentary A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake, also at the Playhouse. And comic Pauly Shore, the subject of a self-directed documentary titled Pauly Shore Stands Alone, performed live on Saturday night at the Colony Café.
All together, 130 films were screened at WFF 2015. Some will resurface in art houses like Upstate Films and the Rosendale Theatre or on public television over the coming year; a few, like the star-powered The Imitation Game reviewed in this week’s Almanac, will find wider theatrical distribution. But many will remain unseen except by the determined cinephile who makes the effort to seek them out, unless and until the lesser-known filmmakers’ careers take off. So if you want to catch the great directors, producers, cinematographers, editors and screen stars of tomorrow on their way up, get yourself into the habit of checking the WFF website, www.woodstockfilmfestival.com, on a regular basis to find out what teasers are being screened locally throughout the rest of the year. And be sure to order your tickets for WFF 2016 early!