Film festivals offer an embarrassment of riches
The region’s crowded cinematic schedule hits a particularly busy stretch this month, starting with this weekend’s kickoff of the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival
Aquestion that couldn’t be more obvious: If it’s not yet entirely clear that Buffalo can support one major general-interest film festival, why the devil do we have two? One—the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival—begins today with a festive tribute to “American Graffiti,” complete with Louis Gossett, Cindy Williams and vintage cars at the Riviera Theatre and ends with its awards dinner May 10 in the Mansion on Delaware.
The other is the Buffalo International Film Festival, which was started in 2003, incorporated in 2005 and, as its founder and president Ed Summer puts it, “has slowly partnered with a great many cultural organizations locally, nationally and abroad” and is in the process of trying to raise $500,000 toward a “large event” in October. (BIFF offered the wonderful daylong celebration of Mickey Mouse’s 80th birthday that took place three weeks ago in Shea’s Performing Arts Center.)
Let’s just call it by that old standby “creative differences,” even though there is clearly a major ambition differential involved here: The Buffalo Niagara Film Festival is a clear-cut, blue-collar affair with an affection for both respectability and grind-house, and the Buffalo International Film Festival is far more upmarket.
Says Bill Cowell, founder of the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival, which even as we speak is upon us for 10 days in many different venues: “I have a firm commitment to building our festival into one of the greatest and most enjoyable festivals in the world. …I have the deepest respect for Ed Summer and what he is doing and offered many times to merge these two companies, but it seems Mr. Summer has a different agenda.”
Summer, on the other hand, points out that “Buffalo has more than a score of groups that call themselves film festivals: Women’s International Film Festival, Buffalo International Jewish Film Festival, Disabilities Film Festival, although most of them are really film SERIES and not true festivals. …As a matter of not-for- profit mission, BIFF is here to support all such activities and promote them non-exclusively.”
“Our notion is to go slowly and do things of the best quality we can manage.”
Of Cowell, Summer says: “I gave a screenwriting talk as a guest speaker (for no charge) at his first event and have offered yearly to work with him. However, he seems to have his own ideas and—beyond that initial year— has not invited us to work with him despite the advice of his publicist.”
So is this an embarrassment of riches?
Or just an embarrassment. You be the judge.
Last year’s Buffalo Niagara Film Festival began rather cleverly with a 25th anniversary tribute to “The Natural,” that wonderful moment from the summer of 1983 when Buffalo inexplicably came to be a two-month home to Robert Redford, Kim Basinger, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close and Company.
This year’s event begins at 3 p. m. today with “American Graffiti Super Fest” in the Riviera Theatre (67 Webster St., North Tonawanda), with “dozens of Graffiti Era cars” and both “American Graffiti” and “More American Graffiti” shown, plus promised appearances by Gossett, “Graffiti” cast member (and “Laverne and Shirley” co-star) Williams “and other guests.”
Among the 90 films—features, shorts, documentaries—to be shown for the next 10 days, viewers can find everything from a feature film from Iran to Channel 4 news documentaries by Rich Newberg to, yes, a 70-minute documentary by Robert Dunlap on the once-fabled “Happy Hooker” Xaviera Hollander called “The Happy Hooker: Portrait of a Sexual Revolutionary.”
Receiving its premiere will be no less than “What Goes Up,” Jonathan Glatzer’s film about Christa McAuliffe and the space shuttle Challenger starring Hilary Duff, Steve Coogan, Olivia Thirlby and Molly Shannon (7:15 p. m. next Friday in the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center, 639 Main St.).
Gossett will introduce a special showing of his film “Enemy Mine” Saturday at 2:45 p. m. at the Riviera Theatre.
There’s even something called a “musical docu-tragicomedy” about Condoleezza Rice called “Courting Condi,” which is said to be a spin on “Rapunzel.”
Among the films entered into the fiction feature competition are:
• Rafael Monserrate’s “Poundcake”: Starring Jay O. Saunders and Kathleen Quinlan. It’s a dark comedy about a Thanksgiving dinner gone horribly wrong. It was filmed, in part, in Buffalo because its co-writer Kevin Logie is from the Town of Tonawanda.
• Michael Coonce’s “Lonely Joe”: Starring Erica Leerhsen as an investigator looking into a lot of disappearances in small upstate towns.
• Duane Crichton’s “Saving God”: Starring Ving Rhames, Dean McDermott and Genelle Williams in a tale of a reformed man going back to clean up his old neighborhood.
• Jeffrey Chernov’s “A Line in the Sand”: Starring Bruce McGill, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Charles Malik Whitfield in a comedy drama about a man thrown into the clink for urinating on the mayor’s limo.
• Mohammad Nourizad’s “Flags of Kaveh’s Castle”: Film from Iran follows a Quran through three different eras of Iranian history.
• John Putch’s “Route 30”: Starring Curtis Armstrong and Dana Delany in three interconnecting stories about slices of life in central Pennsylvania.
• Gordon Synn’s “A Deal Is a Deal”: Starring Colm Meaney and Imelda Staunton, a tangy-sounding British comedy about a train engineer trying to engineer a cushy early retirement by getting one more victim to fall “accidentally” off his train.
• Tamer Dishek’s “Staggered”: Hungarian film about a paranoid man directed by a director said to have Western New York origins.
• Jong Wook Lee’s “Roses Have Thorns”: A drama about failed cross-cultural relationships.
Among the local subjects for documentary films in the festival are photographer Milton Rogovin (“The Rich Have Their Own Photographers”), Buffalo-raised sculptor artist Sylvia Hyman (“Sylvia Hyman: Eternal Wonder”) and conductor Marylouise Nanna (“La Maestra in the House”).
Other festival events include an all-day tribute to the Old West called “Go Ahead Make My Day” May 9 in the Freedom Run Winery (5138 Lower Mountain Road in Lockport) and a “veteran’s day” celebration full of war films and documentaries beginning at 11 a. m. Sunday in the Riviera Theatre.
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