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MAGNOLIA FILMS Boulder International Film Festival ‘ONCE WERE BROTHERS: ROBBIE ROBERTSON AND THE BAND’
SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE Highlighting the 16th Boulder International Film Festival by Michael J. Casey
ON THE BILL: 16TH BOULDER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL. Boulder, March 5-8; Longmont, March 6-8; Fort Collins, March 27-28. Details at biff.com
The Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) keeps getting bigger. Helmed once again by Beeck sisters Robin and Kathy, BIFF 16 (March 5-8) offers moviegoers 88 features and shorts to choose from. And, as has become the tradition in recent years, BIFF is no longer bound exclusively to Boulder. Longmont Museum’s Stewart Auditorium gets in on the action with six features and a shorts package, March 6-8. And on March 27 and 28, BIFF heads to Fort Collins’ Lincoln Center with seven features and a collection of shorts.
If that wasn’t enough, BIFF 16 features another first: A film festival within the film festival. Taking place March 7 and 8 at eTown Hall, BIFF’s Adventure Pavilion comprises an extensive collection of adventurethemed short films. It’s a diverse selection — international in production, global in scope — and the lengths of each short range from a couple of minutes to nearly an hour. Most are documentaries, but a few narratives are sprinkled in for good measure. And since no festival is complete without a centerpiece Q&A, BIFF’s Adventure Pavilion will host a discussion with author, filmmaker and podcaster Cheryl Strayed of Wild: From Lost To Found on the Pacific Crest Trail fame. Patagonia climbing ambassador and advocate Timmy O’Neill will moderate. Tickets to Strayed’s
see BIFF Page 22
GREENWICH ENTERTAINMENT
22 I TOP: ‘CORPUS CHRISTI’ tells the story of a young man who takes advantage of a case of mistaken identity to restart his life.
BOTTOM: ‘BILLIE’ attempts to construct the most complete portrait of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday to date.
BIFF from Page 21
talk are required ($25 plus service fee), but eTown’s downstairs Sponsor Lounge and BIFF Filmmaker Lounge at The Post Brewing Co. (2027 13th St.) will livestream the Q&A for free (space will be limited).
Strayed won’t be the only celebrity at the festival; musician extraordinaire Robbie Robertson will be joining moderator Ron Bostwick on Boulder Theater’s stage for a chat in conjunction with the documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band (March 6). Though the festival begins in earnest on Thursday, March 5, Friday night’s Boulder premiere of Once Were Brothers will act as BIFF’s official opening night film. It’s fitting considering the festival likes to kick things off with a raucous musical documentary to get the energy up and bleed over into the opening night after-party, which will feature music from the Wendy Woo Band. Individual tickets are currently sold out, but a festival pass will net you a seat at the opening night soiree. Once Were Brothers isn’t the only musical doc on the bill this year, and, coincidentally, not
the only one from a Canadian songwriter. Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (5 p.m. March 7) provides a fitting companion to Once Were Brothers; while Billie (3 p.m. March 6), an archeological documentary of sorts, explores a wildly different side of a performer’s story.
Billie attempts to construct a complete portrait of the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday from those who knew her best. The evidence here: Archival interviews unearthed from neverbefore-heard cassette tapes. Those interviews were recorded in the 1970s, 20 years after Holiday died at the age of 44, and were the background research journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl compiled for her planned biography of the singer. But when Kuehl died, so did the project; at least until filmmaker James Erskin came along and brought the story to the screen.
The above three are all Boulder or Colorado premieres, as is Resistance (7 p.m. March 7), a bio-pic about the world-famous mime Marcel Marceau, starring Jessie Eisenberg as the young Jewish actor turned French Resistance member when the Nazis invade. Eisenberg will be in person at the screening.
And while celebrity Q&As, opening and closing night parties and regional premieres will always be a draw, the true pleasures of a film festival lie in the far-flung corners of international cinema. Make time for Corpus Christi (3 p.m. March 8) — a Polish film about Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia), a 20-something criminal who inadvertently becomes a rural town’s priest.
Masterfully told by director Jan Komasa, Corpus Christi takes Daniel from juvenile detention — where he sees salvation and escape in the church — to a small town governed by juvenile pettiness. A chance moment of mistaken identity allows Daniel to pose as a visiting priest coming to replace the alcoholic parson. Daniel
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falls fast into the role, using his own pain to help cast out the hypocrisy of the community. But, as Faulkner keenly pointed out: The past is never past, and Daniel must confront his. Corpus Christi was relatively unknown in the country until it was one of the five nominated for Best International Feature at this year’s Oscars. But even that nomination proved futile as South Korea’s Parasite steamrolled the competition. A pity, as Corpus Christi is an excellent movie, one you won’t want to miss. Same for The Truth (12:15 p.m. March 8), the first film from Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda produced outside his home country. Set in France, The Truth is a powerhouse of actors: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke — each channeling the best aspects of their personas — in this story of family dynamics, role-playing and gratification. Deneuve is elegant and proper, Binoche is ruffled and frustrated, Hawke is roguish and charming.
Deneuve plays Fabienne, an aging actress who is still capable of giving a phenomenal performance but is finding it harder and harder to find phenomenal roles. The publishing of her memoir brings her stateside daughter Lumir (Binoche) back to France, dragging husband (Hawke) and daughter (Manon Clavel) in tow. Fabienne and Lumir have scores to settle, scores both refuse to yield.
Like previous Kore-eda films, The Truth is captivating while remaining quiet and contained. And though the ending is
atrocious, everything that comes before those final two minutes is dynamite — particularly the ridiculous sci-fi/timetravel movie Fabienne performs in an attempt to make herself relevant to modern-day audiences.
Others to seek: Deerskin (7:30 p.m. March 6), a dark French comedy starring Jean Dujardin as a filmmaker who becomes infatuated with his vintage deerskin jacket; Hope Gap (3 p.m. March 7), an English family drama starring Annette Benning and Bill Nighy as a married couple of 29 years who will not see year 30 together; The Personal History of David Copperfield (3:45 p.m. March 7), a comedic reimagining of Dicken’s classic with Dev Patel leading a cosmopolitan cast; and from BIFF’s patented “call to action” section, The Story of Plastic (2:45 p.m. March 7) and Toxic Beauty (10 a.m. March 6), two documentaries to leave you positively furious and ready to make some changes. And don’t miss out on a chance to see Mr. Jones (7:15 p.m. March 7), the latest film from Polish phenom Agnieszka Holland. There’s a power to her work, particularly the ones revolving around the Holocaust, which happens to be the setting of Mr. Jones, a true story of propaganda, the same one that inspired George Orwell to pen Animal Farm. There’s a little something for everyone at BIFF. ‘THE TRUTH’ is the first film from Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda produced outside his home country.
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Together we can put an end to Childhood Cancer
Honing the narrative craft Jorma Kaukonen on writing his memoir and playing with Hot Tuna for the last 50 years By Dave Gil de Rubio
ON THE BILL: Electric Hot Tuna: Celebrating 50 Years. 7 p.m. Feb. 28-29, Boulder Theater, 2032 14th St., Boulder. Tickets are $45-$55.
Morning Glory blooms at night, too!
In light of the spate of music biopics and memoirs that have come out recently, anyone expecting lots of hot dishing when they crack open Been So Long: My Life and Music, Jorma Kaukonen’s 2018 autobiography, is advised to look elsewhere.
Despite the fact that the Jefferson Airplane founding member experienced his first dalliance with fame during the group’s halcyon late-’60s Haight-Ashbury days, it’s more of an intriguing and straightforward account of Kaukonen’s life path. It’s part of the reason why he decided to pass on doing a project like this when he was first approached about doing it a decade or so ago.
“In the mid to early 2000s, I had an offer to do a book with somebody else as a co-writer,” Kaukonen recalls. “But it became apparent that the publishing company that we had been discussing things with wanted all that salacious stuff we talked about that I don’t have in my book. As soon as I realized that they wanted me to dish dirt on people that were more famous than myself, I thought I didn’t want to do that. So I just shelved the whole idea. The same thing happened when I didn’t make the cut for the “Janis: Little Girl Blue” PBS special because Janis and I never had sex or did drugs together. We just played music.”
Born in Washington, D.C., Kaukonen boasts Finnish lineage through his paternal grandparents and Russian Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side. Given that his father was a State Department employee, quite a bit of traveling framed the future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s life. In experiencing far-flung locales like Pakistan and the Philippines, Kaukonen took to keeping a diary, a habit that carried into adulthood and was an enormous boon in detailing the finite detail that flows through Been So Long. It also helped when it came to sitting down to write the book
“For the book, I let the process be my inspiration,” he says. “I’d sit down and maybe the first few minutes, it would be labored. But once I got into the flow, I found that I could do it.”
The book’s narrative thread is wrapped in a straightforward honesty about Kaukonen’s journey, with selfexamination that touches on his addiction and self recovery, his troubled first marriage and still-thriving current one, his musical journey, the creation of the Fur Peace Ranch Guitar Camp and the joy of fatherhood. Lyrics are sprinkled throughout, providing handy narrative bridges. Of course, the memoir deals with Kaukonen’s bands, most notably Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. The Airplane was already a well-established project with several iconic hit songs to its credit (“White Rabbit,” “Somebody To Love,” “Volunteers”) when Kaukonen and Airplane bandmate, bassist Jack Casady, formed Hot Tuna as a side project in 1969.
The seeds for Hot Tuna were planted during a Jefferson Airplane gig at the Fillmore East when Paul Kanter asked Kaukonen and Casady to “...go play an acoustic tune.” In Been So Long: My Life and Music, Kaukonen reflects on the musical freedom he and Casady found with Hot Tuna, which came to include a revolving cast of other musicians and played both in acoustic and electric settings.
“The financial success of the Airplane allowed Jack and me the wiggle room to nurse our young band through its infancy ERIK KABIK PHOTOGRAPHY/MEDIAPUNCH
without financial constraints,” Kaukonen writes. “It was fun and a real relief to be able to just get together with friends and play music without it being a ‘career move,’”
Hot Tuna stayed quite active during the 1970s, releasing eight albums that decade before taking a hiatus that lasted until 1986. Kaukonen and Casady have kept the group together since then, adding a pair of studio albums and several live releases to the Hot Tuna catalog.
These days with Hot Tuna, Kaukonen plays the part of bard. As someone who started learning finger-picking while at Antioch College and subsequently worshipped at the altar of the storied blues/ gospel singer Reverend Gary Davis, Hot Tuna’s shows are rife not only with songs from the Hot Tuna catalog, but material from greats associated with the Americana canon.
Fans can expect to hear a set list populated with gems from the likes of Jelly Roll Morton (“Winin’ Boy Blues”), Blind Willie Johnson (“Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning”), Jimmy Cox (“Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) and Davis (“Candy Man”). And there may even be nuggets plucked from the Jefferson Airplane (“Embryonic Journey”) and Kaukonen (“Wolves and Lambs”) catalogs.
With his memoir now in the rearview mirror, Kaukonen says the biggest gift that came out of the project was his ability to hone his narrative craft.
“I found that I really enjoyed the process and was utterly un-self-conscious about telling my story, which would not have been true four years ago,” he says. “I really enjoyed the process and when you think about writing a memoir and put down the last period, what do you do? Drop dead? I was just thinking this morning that I might want to write something else. I don’t know what it’s going to be about — I’ve already told that story, so I can’t go back. But we’ll see.”
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