NoA Speaks: Cinequest Confidential
By Elliot V. Kotek
(Feb. 26, 2010)
With grey skies swirling above San Jose’s downtown district, the best place to be is inside a theater for Cinequest’s 20th anniversary.
After a jam-packed VIP soiree (i.e., happy hour) sponsored by Intel at Il Fornaio, I jostled the crowd at the old-school (but gorgeously renovated) California theater on First Street to attend the world premiere of Paul Crowder’s “The Real Revolutionaries,” a documentary from the director of “Riding Giants” that tackles the beginning of the technological revolution from the transistor to the microprocessor manufacturing that has seen Silicon Valley recognized as the world leader in all things wired.
The doc is great, with the right mix of animation and information to keep things interesting. I dashed out of a fantastic Q&A (which featured Julius Blank, one of the original “Traitorous Eight” who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957) to catch the program “Shorts 2: Dark, Deep and Dangerous.”
“Shorts 2” started slowly with “The Proposal,” a mediocre effort based on a strange script co-written by Jon Brown (the film’s star and producer) and Steven Martini, and directed by “Lymelife” helmer Derick Martini. As is often the case with lower-budgeted fare, the sound was inconsistent and three polite claps from a full house seemed to say it all.
“Irreparable,” a short about a couple whose relationship is on the rocks following the loss of their baby and for whom a burglary acts as catalyst for conversation, was worse. Poorly acted with a miscast couple, the film never enters the realm of believability it seeks. Thankfully, these initial films were not indicative of what was to come.
NYU/Tisch project “Adelaide” is the perfect use of the short-film medium. A witty tale with beautiful production values, it is the story of a lonely hypochondriac (the hilarious Anna Margaret Hollyman) who finds her perfect partner at the neighborhood pharmacy in a wannabe EMT (Hank Harris). It is directed by Lilliana Greenfield-Sanders, and it’s no surprise that the daughter of renowned photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders brings to the film an eye for detail that is exciting to discover.
Similarly, Hope Dickson Leach’s “Morning Echo” is a glorious portrait of a British family consumed with living various fictions in order to protect one of their children, for whom pretense assures an escape from day-to-day dealings with illness.
Michael Lavelle’s “Out of the Blue” is the equivalent of a modern classic. Free of dialogue, the story – solitary man finds television washed ashore, and in it a caged mermaid with whom he falls in love – is so beautifully constructed it woos the audience with comedy and cleverness from the first frames. The film is well deserving of the festival accolades it has acquired over the past year.
Jon Goldman’s “Diplomacy” is a stellar short we’ve highlighted before. The film about two interpreters who choose to soften the blows being dealt by the diplomats they’re representing at an international meeting in Iran was the worthy winner of the Paris Film Festival’s Best Short Film Audience Award. Among its other festival appearances are screenings at Santa Barbara and Boulder and a showing next month at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
“The Whirling Dervish,” from director/writer (and former opera singer) Rory Bain, is a sublimely photographed short focused on the difficulties of a young dervish Muslim who seeks the guidance of his sheikh in the midst of a society filled with temptation (in this case a Whole Foods-eating, yoga-stretching blonde in the apartment below). Presenting this spiritual journey is presented amidst the backdrop of New York City, there is an innate contrast held captive by the helmer, who revealed to me his plans to link this to other stories in an Arriaga-esque feature in the near future. (“The Whirling Dervish” is represented for distribution by Moving Pictures Film & Television.)
“Night Mayor,” from well-known cinematic provocateur Guy Maddin, is the perfect example of an artsy project. Flashing black-and-white imagery with voiceovers, Maddin’s world is as dark and mysterious as its title suggests. Slightly titillating, the film fits all this shorts program’s title buzzwords: dark, deep and just a tad dangerous.
Photo: “Night Mayor,” courtesy Cinequest
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