Film
Move over Cannes. Sundance, save your films for a rainy day. The second annual Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival was in town this weekend and the roster combined the best of festival award winners, local documentaries and Academy Award nominees.
“It was excellent,” co-director Navette Previd said. “The attendance was fantastic, the audiences were excited about the film selections and the parties were a smash success.”
Four hundred thousand dead civilians and 2.5 million displaced refugees. Hundreds of undefended villages razed by government-funded marauders on horseback. People living in camps with poisoned wells. Starving two-year-olds who look like they’re 102. Mothers who send their daughters out to collect firewood, knowing they will be raped. The violence in Darfur makes the early 21st century look as dark as the 20th.
Lucinda Childs, a pioneer of post-modern dance and a Vineyard resident, is the subject of a documentary screening free at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11 at the Capawock Theatre on Main street in Vineyard Haven.
The 53-minute documentary was made in 2006 by Patrick Bensard of the Cinematheque de la Danse in Paris. It includes rehearsals, performances and interviews in London, New York and Paris with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Philip Glass, Anna Kisselgoff, Yvonne Rainer, Susan Sontag and Robert Wilson.
Thursday, Sept. 13
Opening Night Party on the rooftop at the Mansion House Inn from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. with music from Phil DaRosa, dors d’oeuvres and Champagne and wines.
Opening Night Film at the Capawock Theatre on Main street in Vineyard Haven.
8 p.m. The Owl and the Sparrow, a love story set in Saigon (97 minutes) with post-screening discussion with director Stephane Gauger.
Friday, Sept. 14 At the Capawock:
The ominous, quickening strains that can mean only one thing - the shark is near and getting nearer - are slated to fill Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs at an August 5 open-air screening of Jaws.
Netflix, a company that operates a DVD mail rental service, has applied to the Oak Bluffs Park Commission to show the movie at the park off Seaview avenue. Admission would be free. The commission was scheduled to vote on the application last night.
Amid the stacks of DVDs and under the piles of papers, press photos and programs, the sixth annual Martha's Vineyard Independent Film Festival is coming together.
Slowly.
"This is the crunch time, for sure," festival founder and director Thomas Bena says one afternoon last week from the festival headquarters in North Tisbury. "We still have a lot to do."