2004 High Falls Film Festival Highlights

Article posted Thu Nov 18 07:28:26 2004

The High Falls Film Festival, held in Rochester, New York, is an annual international film festival that showcases exceptional work by women in film and video. All positions in front of and behind the camera are recognized, including cinematographers, screenwriters, editors, composers, directors, producers, and even stuntwomen! (Last year, Jeannie Epper, a lifelong stuntwoman—and double for Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman—received an achievement award.)This year’s achievement award honorees included actors Sally Kellerman and Joan Allen, as well as filmmaker Mira Nair (director of Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair).

Thirty-eight independent feature-length films premiered this year, both fiction and documentaries. The festival opened on November 10 with a screening of Sideways, the latest film by writer/director Alexander Payne (About Schmidt) and wrapped up the evening of November 15. There are no juried prizes; instead, audiences are polled for their favorites, and the two winners are screened on the last night of the festival. The Audience Choice Award this year for Feature Film was Dear Frankie, Shona Auerbach’s debut feature about a mother who invents an alternative reality to protect her son from the truth about his father. The Best Documentary Film was Born into Brothels, about a photographer who worked to change the lives of children born to prostitutes in Calcutta by teaching them to express themselves through photography.

“A woman with a camera has a lot of power,” said one of eight documentary filmmakers at the November 13 documentary panel. In fact, many of the panelists agreed that women are becoming a larger and larger force within the industry. Part of the reason, they concluded, was that female filmmakers tend to be able to get their subjects to open up more than male ones. “Many times people will respond better to a woman, maybe because we seem more sympathetic,” another observed. At the same time, with the success of docs like Ken Burns’s features and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, the public has awakened to the fact that they have more of a choice in their entertainment beyond fictional stories.

Joan Allen, star of films such as Nixon, The Contender, and Pleasantville, appeared for an informal conversation in the Dryden Theater next to the George Eastman House. Allen was refreshingly personable and approachable, sans entourage and dressed in jeans with her blonde hair tied back. She was interviewed on stage for about half an hour before the audience was invited to ask questions about her career. I asked Allen about the experience of seeing herself in the film’s final product. Since scenes are often shot out of sequence, and a given actor may film parts of the same scene on different days or even different weeks, the actual making of a movie can be a very disjointed process, like reading different parts of a book out of order and at different times. The actors have no control over the movie as a whole, and often don’t see the whole filmed story until months after having participated in it. Allen said that seeing herself onscreen is indeed a curious experience: “It takes me a few times to see the whole thing. Until then, it’s like it’s not me on the screen: ‘Oh, she [the character] did this, or she did that.’” Often when watching her scenes, memories would come back to her from the time it was being filmed—and not necessarily about the scene itself. “I’ll remember what else happened on the set that day, or that my daughter was sick that day, or whatever.”

The seminar that drew the largest crowd was by lesser-known (but not lesser talented) 3-D animator Angela Eliasz. Eliasz was a hometown girl who began at Rochester’s own Animatus Animation Studio. The talk was introduced by Fred Armstrong, head of Animatus. Eliasz showed clips from her work on film such as The Haunted Mansion, Stuart Little 2, and Final Fantasy. She discussed computer animation techniques and new advances in the field, as well as the days or weeks of painstaking effort that goes into mere seconds on the screen. (I also took an introductory animation class at Animatus in 2003; the studio is amazing, brimming with animation and cartoon figurines, cels, equipment, movie posters, and strange gadgets that could just as easily be medieval kitchen utensils as animation tools. Animatus Studios can be reached at www.animatusstudio.com, or phone 585-232-1740.)

With so many films to review, I can only highlight one feature film and one documentary. I was unable to attend any of the short films this year, and I hope to see them elsewhere.

Off the Map, a film by actor Campbell Scott starring Joan Allen and Sam Elliott, is about a family of three who lives out in the desert near Taos, New Mexico. They lead a spartan, hippie-like existence, growing their own food and bartering for their goods and services. Though the father of the family suffers from a prolonged depression, the young daughter remains plucky, imaginative, and resourceful. The mother tries to support her husband but the strain begins to take its toll on her. Their lives are changed when one day an IRS agent appears, asking for back taxes that the family can’t afford. But he falls sick, and soon the family is nursing him back to health as well. When he recovers, he finds himself enchanted with the family’s way of life—and in love with the mother, who becomes his artistic muse. The film is a little unfocused and demanding, but has compelling performances by Allen and Elliott.

In the documentary Still the Children Are Here, director Dinaz Stafford traveled to a remote part of northeast India to live among an isolated tribe. The people are subsistence farmers with an intimate knowledge of their land and the many varieties of rice that grow best on them. Yet, as in many places (including the United States), there is a struggle between the old ways and the new. Young people are leaving for jobs in dangerous mines nearby, or big cities where the pay is meager but consistent. Stafford was available after the screening, and revealed that during the shoot she didn’t always know what she was getting on film. Because of her limited ability to speak the language (and a sketchy translator), she would send the footage out to the nearest big city every week or ten days. Only after the film was developed, translated, and returned would she really know what she had shot, what her subjects had said or why they had acted as they did.

This is my second year attending the High Falls Film Festival, and once again I was impressed with the quality and diversity of the films. The festival provides a chance to see both mainstream and independent films, as well as meet filmmakers and discuss everything from documentary funding to animation techniques. Though the Toronto International Film Festival may get a lot of the attention and the glory, the High Falls festival is smaller, more manageable, and more user-friendly. Each year gets better and better, and a visit to the High Falls Festival is well worth the trip. For more information about the festival, see the Web site at www.highfallsfilmfestival.com.