Prologue
The Charles Theater
During this year’s film festival I once again realized how much I love the Charles Theater and the Maryland Film Festival. I always appreciated classic, independent or international movies and documentaries and was eager to see them on the big screen, but when I grew up I didn’t have easy access to them. My hometown in Germany used to have a hand full of screens for the big mainstream releases, and everything used to be dubbed in German, so if I wanted to see something the way it was intended I had to import videos from other countries, and make sure my vhs-player was able to handle the foreign video-formats. In those days it would have taken years to download a video. Occasionally I could tune to arte, a French/German tv-channel that sometimes presented movies with subtitles and original audio tracks. This channel helped me discover a number of interesting and unusual movies, but I also imported many of my favorite movies and directors from the UK, Belgium, Canada, and the US.
When we attended the Maryland Film Festival for the first time in 2002 I knew what a priceless treasure we had found with the Charles Theater — not only during the film festival, but also all year long. Where else would you ever get an opportunity to watch a dozen Ingmar Bergman movies on the big screen? Where else could an event like the film festival take place if not at the Charles?
Last week I thought to myself: “What if the Charles had to close one day?” Would there be a film festival? Would there be any alternatives? Other theaters, like the historical, famous and celebrated Senator had to struggle for many years. I can only hope the Charles will continue to do well. Baltimore would become a film desert without it. Or even worse, it would be the death of the city. It is really important to support this theater. If you are slightly interested in good movies, I recommend to check their schedule on a weekly basis. Some movies are only there for a week, so be sure not to miss them! But enough of my shameless blatant advertising insert.
Preparations
Eight years ago we attended the festival for the first time, six years ago we joined the Friends of the Festival sponsor program, three years ago we decided to attend the festival with All Access passes rather than buying so many single tickets. This year we increased the number of movies we were going to watch on a single day from previously three or four to a lot of five per day! We also broke with some of our old traditions and decided not to watch the classic 3D movie, the silent movie with live music, and the annual selection by John Waters. We also skipped the closing night this year in favor of Mother’s Day and a mother’s pleasure to have dinner with us and the rest of the family.
We kept the Opening Night of course, but on the other days we decided to focus on the amazing selection of new and international films in this year’s line-up. It was quite difficult for us again to come up with a weekend schedule. But I think we are getting used to it, facing the same problem every year. I just added the movies we were not able to see to our Netflix queue. Hopefully they will get released one day so we can catch up with them later.
So this year we were going to see:
- Opening Night Shorts at MICA
- Mundane History
- Beijing Taxi
- Dogtooth
- Funny People Shorts
- Daddy Longlegs
- Mama
- Faces
- And Everything is Going Fine
- Liverpool
- Until the Light Takes Us
- General Orders No. 9, and
- Earthling
I will write a little bit about them in this and my following blog posts.
The Opening Night
Jed Dietz opened the 12th Annual Maryland Film Festival a few weeks ago on Thursday, May 6 at the MICA Brown Center with a series of seven short films all of which I enjoyed. I don’t remember the exact order in which these shorts were presented, but one of the first films was Bikini Lighters by Andrew Blackwell and Andrew Goldman. It was about a few kids who shoplifted a bag full of cigarette lighters to create an explosion in the woods.
We also saw Junko’s Shamisen by Sol Friedman which stood out as one of my favorite shorts that evening. A young girl in old Japan returns to her grandfather and finds him murdered. When she leaves to find another place to live she encounters the evil samurai who killed her grandfather. This film was a hybrid of live-action, cell, stop-motion and computer animation. Stylish, visually attractive, funny and dark… I can imagine watching a full feature created in a similar fashion. Thinking of hybrids…imagine Sol Friedman had added some of his creative magic to A Scanner Darkly a few years ago! I could have loved this film.
Junko’s Shamisen – Trailer from sol friedman on Vimeo.
The Late Mr. Mokun Williams by Kenneth Price was about a letter that sends a farmer on a mission to help a girl in Nigeria. It didn’t take long to figure out where this story was going, but that didn’t matter at all. It was a great idea, and very funny. I can imagine a whole series of shorts to visualize certain mail or email pieces I received over the years.
Patrick Bergeron’s experimental short film LoopLoop can be described as moving photographic sculpture. Short films that withdraw themselves from a standard form risk to be misunderstood like some I have seen in previous years, but I was fascinated and impressed by this one. The film festival guide describes it as a sequence “[...] mimicking the way memories are replayed in the mind,” and if I think about it, it really did succeed with it.
Monroe St. by Durier Ryan is a film about finding the courage to open up — the story about a teen who is passionately capturing his neighborhood in Brooklyn with a borrowed video camera but keeps his creative ambitions a secret from his girlfriend.
Another remarkable short film was Slow Pitch in Relief by Mark Cummins which was set in 1957 and told the story of Bill Herman, a door to door salesman who meets Jolene, a working single mother. To impress her son he told him the story that he once played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. This film’s look and feel reminded me of something that really could have been produced in the 50s. Mark Cummins, who played Bill Herman looked as if he traveled through time and arrived straight from the 50s. I was fascinated and impressed. Mark Cummins is no newcomer. When I looked him up on IMDB I found that he’s been active as actor since the early 80s.
Voice on the Line, by Kelly Sears
My favorite of the opening night was Voice on the Line by Kelly Sears. Voice on the Line was a brilliant collage of vintage archive footage, bit and pieces from many different sources, tied together to a unique fictitious document on the history of telecommunications since the cold war era. Brilliant from beginning to end! I loved how the animated wallpaper background served as a glue throughout. It was very inspiring. I felt invited to begin collecting media artifacts myself. During this film I was wondering if Kelly Sears had the story and narration first and looked for clips to support her story later, or if she started off with the clips and then added the narration & story to it later. During the Q&A she explained that she had all these telephone operators and thought she needed to do something with them, and the story kinda grew around these clips.
Left to right: Andrew Blackwell (Bikini Lighters), Mark Cummins (Slow Pitch in Relief), Durier Ryan (Monroe St.), Kenneth Price (The Late Mr. Mokun Williams), Festival director Jed Dietz, Patrick Bergeron (LoopLoop), Sol Friedman (Junko's Shamisen), Kelly Sears (Voice On the Line), Director of Programming Eric Allen Hatch, Programming Administrator Scott Braid
We concluded the opening night with a fine bottle of imported beer outside the crowded MICA hall and were ready for the 3-day movie marathon. Were we? Stay tuned, my next post follows shortly :)
