Back in May I wrote about our time at the Maryland Film Festival. We had to leave the Narrative Shorts program early and missed the ending of Paul Harrill’s Quick Feet, Soft Hands. In my blog I mentioned that I was very interested in the rest of the story, and shortly after posting it I received an email from Paul mentioning another screening at the Rosebud Film & Video Festival in Arlington, Virginia. Being relatively close to Baltimore I thought this sounded like a great thing to do on a Saturday. So we took a zipcar yesterday and spent some very enjoyable hours in Arlington.
The Rosebud Film and Video Festival was founded in 1990 and celebrated its 18th anniversary this weekend. Rosebud is an annual competition open exclusively to DC, Maryland, and Virginia film and video producers. It seeks to honor the innovative, experimental, unusual, and deeply personal in creative film and video making. Twenty independent films were selected for the Nominee Showcase that took place yesterday. A panel of judges chose five winners including one Best of Show. The five winners will each receive a $1000 cash prize. The Best of Show winner will also receive $500 of video products and services.
The winners are announced today at the awards ceremony and party that begins at 7pm. Unfortunately we won’t be able to attend because we had the car for only one day, but we watched all 20 candidates yesterday, most of which I enjoyed a lot. Before getting to my conclusion I can already say upfront that this was a fantastic little film festival with a really nice and diverse choice of short and medium length films. We both were glad we could come. All of the films were nice for one reason or another, so I will try to make it shorter this time. :) I especially liked the “deeply personal” and the “unusual funny” candidates of the following films we saw yesterday:
Cause
Documentary (57 minutes) by Denise Prichard – Washington DC
Meet four Americans who have dedicated their lives to a cause — putting their ideals on the line, every day, every hour.
Britt, the Minuteman, living his life out at the U.S.-Mexico border, defending his America from invasion; Kayla, the PETA Activist, exposing the plight of animals, while sometimes exposing herself; Dennis, the Pro-Life Minister, crisscrossing his way through the country spreading his truth about abortion; and Concepcion, the Peace Activist, maintaining her twenty-six year long anti-nuke vigil just steps away from the White House.
This film, entitled “CAUSE”, peels back the layers to uncover the personal histories and motivations that make these individuals who they are, and what drives them to behavior some would call extreme. Going beyond the labels and what initially meets the eye, their stories weave together to form a collective thread and reveal that they have more in common than one would think. (from the official website)
Vignette
Experimental narrative (17 minutes) by Dustin Thompson – Forest, VA
Quick Feet, Soft Hands
Drama (25 minutes) by Paul Harrill
Set against the backdrop of our national pastime, Quick Feet, Soft Hands follows a young couple trying to pursue the American Dream.
Greta Gerwig (Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs) stars as Lisa, a young woman whose hopes of moving up are tied to Jim, a minor league baseball player.
As Jim falls deeper into a batting slump, the couple must cope with the day-to-day realities of being young and poor. And they must confront the prospect that they may never make it to the big leagues.” (from the official website)
I was quite amused to find that we actually missed only a minute or even less when we had to leave the screening back at the Maryland Film Festival. It was nice to see this film again, and I still have the same good impression. It’s a sad but very realistic slice of life applicable to many individuals, couples, relationships, hopes, dreams and failures.
Rogue Gnome
Animated music video (5 minutes) by Stephen Guidry – Arlington, VA
Richard Wants a Nickname
Drama (9 minutes) by Julie Haberstick – Arlington, VA
Nunna Mia e la Barca
Documentary (13 minutes) by Jacob Dodd – Richmond, VA
Nunna Mia e la Barca is a short film about an Italian grandmother, Nunna, who endured the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956. Despite living 50 years in the U.S., Nunna continues to preserve her Italian heritage. Through the act of preparing a meal and selflessly giving of her time, Nunna passes on the heritage to her grandchildren.” (from the official website)
Alchemy
Experimental (2 minutes) by Victoria Hanabury and Joshua Rachford – Charlottesville, VA
Birds
Drama (17 minutes) by Mark Betancourt and Marc Ryan – Washington, DC
I really liked this short film and its conclusion. They packed quite a large emotional spectrum into the 17 minutes. It was humorous and thrilling, personal and serious, and also very wise at the same time.
Mexico Painting
Video art (3 minutes) by Vin Grabill – Ellicott City, MD
Lustig
Drama (16 minutes) by John Black – Gainesville, VA
Lustig, set in the years after the end of WWII, tells the story of a man’s solitary journey for redemption. Carrying haunting memories from time spent in a concentration camp, the man seeks out the family of a friend he knew there. He brings a secret to their doorstep that only the strength and courage of the deceased allows him to reveal. In admitting his own cowardice, he creates the heroic legacy of a man. A man a young son will always remember.
The title “Lustig” is not the German word for “funny” here, but the name of the main-character in this film. It actually is a true story about Branko Lustig, a Croatian Jewish survivor of Ausschwitz, who produced a number of movies including Schindler’s List. He was the inspiration for this short film. I liked this film which was very moving, personal and very well made. John Black chose to have all dialog in German, but only the mother (played by Ilka Fischer) spoke German fluently without an American accent. While I could believe that the Croatian visitor wasn’t fluent, I didn’t buy her son’s and the Nazi commander’s accent. I found this a little distracting. That’s a shame because I really liked this film otherwise. I thought it might have been a better decision to keep the dialog in English instead.
Dance Party: The Teenarama Story
Documentary (57 minutes) by Beverly Lindsay-Johnson – Washington, DC
Untitled No. 9
Comedy (5 minutes) by David Butler – Annapolis, MD
This short film shows where you might end up if you let your life be guided the philosophy found in pop lyrics. Some of the philosophers quoted in this film include Paul McCartney and Wings, Janis Ian, Elvis Presley, Paul Simon, Don McLean, Bob Dylan, Three Dog Night, Melanie, Simon & Garfunkel, Don Henley, Carole King, Bread, The Rolling Stones, The Romantics, U2, The Beatles, Petula Clark, The Talking Heads, 10cc, Elton John, ABBA, Tracy Chapman, Bryan Adams, John Cougar Mellencamp, Jimi Hendrix, Harry Nilsson, Bruce Springsteen, The Drifters, Billy Idol, Rappers Delight and Baha Men.
Oh how I loved this film! It was one of my very favorites of the day. What a fantastic idea to tie all these song lyric fragments together to a “lyrical meditation on life”. And what a brilliant camera-work and delivery. I really liked Mark Redfield in this and would love to see more of him. It made me think of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation and Spalding Gray in Steven Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy which I loved. But Untitled No. 9 was still different and very clever. I wonder what Untitled No. 1-8 may be like? David Butler’s site is butlerfilm.com.
My Best Friend Mark
Personal narrative (5 minutes) by Renee Shaw – Washington, DC
Las Historias Mas Sexy del Mundo No. 2
Comedy (15 minutes) by Eric Cheevers – Washington, DC
This was another of my favorites. Brilliant, funny, cool, hot, surreal, mesmerizing, fascinating, sexy…a kind of 70s Swedish soft-core porn meets Quantum Physics meets Matthew Lesko (the infomercial questionmark-suit-man played in this film) meets David Lynch’s red room meets a weird but great music performance by The Raveonettes. I read that the predecessor, Las Historias Mas Sexy del Mundo No. 1, won the Rosebud Film Festival in 2004 and I think No. 2 might win again this year. Unfortunately I didn’t find a clip on the web, but here is an an interview with Eric Cheevers and Scott Mueller, also also a few pictures. I loved it.
Unraveling Michelle
Documentary (85 minutes) by Michelle Ann Farrell – Bel Air, MD
I loved Unraveling Michelle. I haven’t read any reviews or watched any trailers before we watched it at the Rosebud Festival. I didn’t know anything about it at all. So the documentary started with a very funny guy working on indie-horror-comedy type movies. He just announced something like “I want to be a female filmmaker” and it sounded as if he wasn’t really serious about it. It could have been just another example of his wicked humor. The clips that portrayed the old filmmaker Joe O’Ferrell and his history looked too crazy and unbelievable to be true. There you saw the athlete, the addict, the film-maker and businessman, the dude and manly man. At first I wasn’t even sure if I was looking at the same person or just different actors representing him in his different life stages. I thought it was all staged, and that what we were about to see was a funny kind of mockumentary, but not a serious documentary about a sex change.
The first facial surgery approached. It was again very funny, in a similar dry Tom Greenish humorous kind of way, as he leaves the hospital looking painfully awful and his head wrapped in bandages, but still making jokes about it. When they lost their way he moved over to the driver’s seat in the state he was in, with bloodbags hanging off his face… and I still thought, that has got to be a joke… after all he is in the horror-comedy industry.
But as the story continued it became more and more clear that his/her journey was very real, and that the male Joe O’Ferrell was really about to become the female Michelle Ann Farrell. The documentary followed the transition from the beginning to the end and revealed so much in addition about her past and present life, the problems and challenges without losing a healthy sense of humor. I couldn’t believe how many really extreme changes she went through in her life. If I trace back my own life of the last 20 years I can find many drastic visual and physical changes that make it sometimes hard to believe the person from back then was really me. But Joe’s and Michelle’s roller coaster history exceeds everything I could ever imagine. I have to admire the strength and courage she was able to bring up and transform her life through all these stages.
This documentary was about a journey of a sex change, but there really was so much more. It was a very personal portrait of an extraordinary, interesting, humorous and very likable individual. It was also a milestone for both: Joe’s final masterpiece and best work in his filmography, as well as Michelle’s debut, marking the beginning of a great future. Very impressive — I just loved everything about this film… the film itself and its flow…it was really well done…the deeply personal portrait…the very unusual history with all transformations…the humor, and of course, last but not least, Michelle herself. :)
Headache
Experimental (8 minutes) by Robert Parrish – Arlington, VA
This film was entirely made with public domain clips taken from archive.org. I loved how cleverly it recycled old footage to tell a completely new and different story. We once saw a short film at the Maryland Film Festival that made use of public domain footage and thought it was such a great idea. Headache was very well done, but unfortunately I couldn’t find anything on the web.
Signage
Drama (12 minutes) by Rick Hammerly – Washington, DC
A receding hairline, the beginnings of crow’s feet, and a chance meeting with a young shirtless deaf man in a bar, force Lex to confront getting older in a youth-conscious world.
I loved signage — “when life calls the last shot” and the way it touched this internal battle of aging, self-doubts and insecurities that tend to increase proportionally with the gap between oneself and the youthful generation you still might like to be a part of or at least connected with. I loved how main character/writer/director Rick Hammerly made his story turn even more personal and internal, as there really is nothing wrong with him. He looks just fine and not old at all, and yet there are these self-doubts.
Freedom Dance
Animation (28 minutes) by Steven Fischer – Crofton, MD and Craig Herron – Baltimore, MD
A cartoonist keeps a diary in cartoon form during his adventurous escape from the deadly 1956 Hungarian Revolution. (from the official website)
tar guys
Video poetry (5 minutes) by Cathy Cook – Baltimore, MD
Widow’s Meal
Drama (8 minutes) by Arnon Shorr – Baltimore, MD
Conclusion:
When we arrived in Arlington Alice and I both were very surprised to find a very empty and dead-silent building. The garage was empty, all stores inside the building were closed, and at first we seemed to be the only visitors to a private viewing. Eventually a few more people showed up, but the theatre never filled up. I thought it was a real shame. The Rosebud Festival has already been around for almost two decades. The film selection was wonderful, and I couldn’t see why it couldn’t attract more independent film lovers. At only $8 for an all-day pass it was a real bargain and I’m already looking forward to Rosebud 2009. Thanks to everyone who made this festival possible, and thanks to Paul for the recommendation.
I’m curious to find out who won this year, but the winners haven’t been published yet. I will follow up with another blog as soon as I find out.
