OFF 2008 Printed Program

Welcome to the Oxford Film Festival!

This year, the festival turns five years old. It seems like only five years ago that it was brand new. Molly Fergusson, Michelle Emanuel, and me, Micah Ginn, are proud to say that the festival has continued in the spirit from which it came, which is to say, we’re still showing great movies, hosting eclectic parties, and having panel discussions with filmmakers and industry professionals.

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As we roll out the (imaginary) red carpet on this year’s event, be sure that the slate of movies offered in the Fifth Annual Oxford Film Festival was not easily arrived upon. We had an impressive number of submissions this year; combined with a lot of in-fighting between me, Molly, and Michelle, that all adds up to a pretty ugly scene come schedule-making time. We all have our favorites, and it was a very trying experience to get them to all fit into a four day schedule.

When the dust settled—and the restraining orders were lifted—the three of us reconvened to gaze upon what has to be considered the GREATEST FILM FESTIVAL LINEUP OF ALL TIME. Believe me, we’ve been to a few of these things, and when I say that Sundance calls us for tips, I’m lying. But I can say that you will have no difficulty in finding some incredible movies to watch. We’d like to consider ourselves the Baskin-Robbins of film festivals, only we don’t limit ourselves to thirty-one flavors. We limit ourselves to eighty-eight flavors. That’s right, we’ll be screening eighty-eight films in four days, and you—the citizens of Oxford/Lafayette County/North Mississippi/West Tennessee/Southeast/World—you, dear friends, are the beneficiaries.

Read on in these pages and discover for yourselves some of the amazing stories that will unfold before your eyes on the silver screen. Actually, it’s more of a sparklygray screen—almost a fog-like color infused with shiny flakes that seemed to have shaken loose from a unicorn’s tail. Ahh, such is the magic of film, and that magic is no more evident than at this year’s film festival.

Truly, you will find a slew of satisfying celluloid at this year’s festival. We’re happy you’re here!

Micah Molly Michelle

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Roll Credits …

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Fifth Annual Oxford Film Festival (2008) Co-directors: Michelle Emanuel, Molly Fergusson, Micah Ginn CLE/Panels Coordinator: Anne Pitts Documentary Curator: April Grayson Experimental Curator: Brooke White Hospitality Coordinator: Diala Chaney Volunteer Coordinator: Melanie Addington Sponsorship Coordinator: Clements Odom Poster and Ad Design: Amy Woodward Evans / Wide Eye Design Publication Design: Susan Bauer Lee Web Design: Dylan Parker Contributing Writers: Jamie Dakin, Michelle Emanuel, Molly Fergusson, Micah Ginn, April Grayson, Elizabeth Kaiser, Anne Pitts, Lisa Sloan, Twinkle Van Winkle, Brooke White Copy Editor: Elizabeth Stephan Screening Volunteers: Melanie Addington, Amanda Bennett, Ryan Bubalo, Bruce Butler, Jamie Dakin, Kirsten Dellinger, Oliver Dinius, Luke Duncan, Sarah Duncan, Amy Evans, Lisa Harrison, Christian Harrison, Lance Herrington, Mickey Howley, Jeff Jackson, Ryan Johnson, Minjoo Oh, Terry Ott, Julia Rholes, Donna Ruth Roberts, Laura Sheppardson, Skadi Snook, Elizabeth Stephan, Maggie Tate, Annette Trefzer Special Thanks To: Laura Antonow, Bill Beckwith, Camp Best, Rebecca Bourgeois, Sarah Kathryn Dossett Bridgers, John Currence, Daisy Cheng, Beth Ann Fennelly, Dianne Fergusson, Meta Poole Ginn, Susan Glisson, Matthew Graves, Andy Harper, Emily Johnston, Gloria Kellum, Dorothy Laurenzo, Nathan McDaniel, Julia Rholes, Chris Riddell, Judy Riddell, Donna Ruth Roberts, Karen Scott, Tony Seaman, Barton Segal, Ron Shapiro, Kevin Stuart, Smith Stuart, Hugh Stump, Randy Wadkins, Alice Walker, Joe York, and the citizens of Oxford.

The Oxford Film Festival is a project of the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, the official arts agency for Oxford-Lafayette County. The mission of this 501c3 non-profit agency is to celebrate and promote the arts to all people in the surrounding region. www.oxfordfilmfest.com Contact us! info@oxfordfilmfest.com See us on Myspace and join our Facebook group!

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The Yoknapatawpha Arts Council welcomes you to the Fifth Annual Oxford Film Festival! a When I arrived in Oxford in February 2007 to take over the reigns of the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, I fell headlong into the wonderful world of the Oxford Film Festival and its merry makers, Michelle Emanuel, Molly Fergusson, and Micah Ginn.

Oxford was in the middle of another chilly North Mississippi hill-country winter, but that was not all that was cool about this town. I thought I had dropped into another planet with all the celebrities, filmmakers, playwrights, musicians, and other assorted creative types that were hanging out all over our historic downtown square. I was fascinated by how the little town of Oxford had been transformed into an alternative reality of a miniature Sundance with touches of Cannes thrown in here and there, all the while maintaining the spirit of our beloved and bygone Hoka Theatre. It was pure magic.

I couldn’t imagine having to wait a whole year for this incredible cultural transformation to take place in my new hometown again, yet here I am at my desk writing this letter to you in the midst of great personal excitement that the time has drawn nigh once more. I warmly extend greetings to all of you who have chosen to treat yourself to this extraordinary multifaceted event in 2008—the films, the workshops, the panels, the parties, the people, the artistry, and the magic of the Oxford Film Festival. Enjoy!

N. Camp Best, Executive Director Yoknapatawpha Arts Council

Dear Oxford Film Festival visitors: Welcome to Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi, and one of the great smalltown communities in United States.

Oxford is very glad to be hosting this fifth annual Oxford Film Festival, which brings new, imaginative, and unusual films—and the people who create them—to our city.

Citizens here are the beneficiaries of Oxford’s long tradition as a center for the arts, and the Film Festival serves to enhance that tradition in a new and truly exciting way.

We hope that you will feel at home here and enjoy our diverse amenities. Please take the opportunity to get around town, and into the beautiful surrounding countryside, the setting of quite a few films.

On behalf of the board of aldermen and the people of Oxford, I extend this open welcome and wish you a great film festival here.

Sincerely, Richard Howorth Mayor

Box Office

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Tickets may be purchased in advance at www.malco.com or at Malco’s Oxford Studio Cinema on Jackson Avenue West during the festival, February 7-10, 2008. One Day Pass: $10 each or $7 with a valid student I.D. Festival Pass: $30 each or $20 with a valid student I.D. Children under 15 and accompanying adult will be admitted FREE on Saturday morning from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. for the children’s film on Screen 1.

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Isn’t That What’s His Name?

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Fans of both television and film will recognize many favorites in this year’s OFF lineup: Kabluey wins the prize for most familiar faces: Lisa Kudrow (Friends, The Comeback, Happy Endings), Terri Garr (Tootsie, Mr. Mom), Conchata Ferrell (Two and a Half Men), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Grey’s Anatomy, Weeds), Christine Taylor (Dodgeball, The Brady Bunch Movie), Chris Parnell (Saturday Night Live).

American Fork includes William Baldwin (Dirty Sexy Money, The Squid and the Whale), Kathleen Quinlan (Family Law, Apollo 13), and Mary Lynn Rajskub (24).

Blood Car features Anna Chlumsky (My Girl), all grown up and selling wheatgrass.

The Elephant King features Ellen Burnstyn (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore)as a mother worried about her sons in Thailand.

The Cake Eaters includes Bruce Dern (Big Love, The Astronaut Farmer) and Elizabeth Ashley (Evening Shade), and Jesse L. Martin (Law and Order, Rent).

In Goldfish, Carlos Alazraqui and Wendy McLendon-Covey ditch their Reno 911 uniforms to join Mindy Sterling (Austin Powers series, Robot Chicken), who also appears in Beyond the Pale.

The Frank Anderson reunites Richard Riehle and Stephen Root from Office Space alongside Jane Lynch (Best in Show, The 40-Year-Old Virgin).

A.W.O.L. includes David Morse (Hack, Disturbia) and John C. McGinley (Scrubs, Wild Hogs, Office Space).

Strange Culture, a documentary, features Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, Broken Flowers) and Peter Coyote (E.T., the Extraterrestrial, The 4400) in dramatic re-enactments.

In this weekend’s films, we will certainly find “faces to watch.” Alongside the big names, enjoy these not-yetfamous actors in films by up and coming directors on the verge of the next big project. Impress your friends by saying you saw them “when….”

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SPONSORS The Oxford Film Festival expresses its gratitude and appreciation to the following individuals and corporations: PRESENTING LEVEL Oxford Convention and Visitors Bureau Yoknapatawpha Arts Council

PATRON LEVEL The Oxford American R&B Feder Charitable Foundation for the Beaux Arts The University of Mississippi

FESTIVAL LEVEL Media Production, The University of Mississippi Mississippi Film Office New Colony Homes Office of Outreach, The University of Mississippi Donna Ruth Roberts WTVA-WLOV-WKDH

EVENT LEVEL The Alluvian Hotel Tricia Barrios City Grocery Fergusson Pitts, PLLC Kodak The Production Solutions Group Southern Growth Studio Y’all Magazine

CONTRIBUTING LEVEL The Inn at Ole Miss Hilton Garden Inn—Hampton Inn—Holiday Inn Express The Ink Spot Lazy Magnolia KidsFirst.Org Mississippi Handmade One Day Signs Scott Equipment Southside Gallery Tollison Law Firm University Sporting Goods

SPONSOR LEVEL Howorth & Associates Architects Neilson’s Oxford Banking Association Oxford University Bank The Plein Air Neighborhood Purple Haze

FRIEND LEVEL Laura Antonow Mooneen C. Emanuel Lizzie Harris Oxford Bicycle Company The Oxford Film Festival Fan Club, Dallas Chapter Square Books Two Stick

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2008 Festival Schedule

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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7 E.F. Yerby Center, University of Mississippi Campus Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law CLE 8:00 a.m.

6:00 p.m. The Devil Came on Horseback 8:00 p.m. Taylor + The First Saturday in May 10:00 p.m. Good Riddance

Registration

8:30 a.m. Intellectual Property for the General Practitioner 9:40 a.m. Intellectual Property Issues in Film 10:50 a.m. Covering Your Assets: Intellectual Property for Corporate/Business Practice 1:30 p.m. Protecting Identity: Issues in Privacy Rights, Rights of Publicity, and False Light Litigation 2:40 p.m. Navigating the Ethical Minefield in IP Law 3:50 p.m. IP Goes Online: Intellectual Property Issues and the Internet Malco’s Oxford Studio Cinema 7:00 p.m. If the Year Were Only Three Months + The Heist + Kabluey 9:00 p.m. Sorry We’re Open 10:00 p.m. Blue Mountain

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8 E.F. Yerby Center, University of Mississippi Campus Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law CLE 8:30 a.m. Finding the Money: Federal and State Tax Incentives for Film 9:50 a.m. Past in the Present: Licensing Issues for Archival Materials 11:00 a.m. Attorneys’ Roundtable 1:30 p.m. From Page to Film: Writers’ Issues on the Road from Idea to Screenplay to Screen and Beyond 2:50 p.m. In Synch: Music in Film 4:10 p.m. Film and the New Media: Writing about Film In Print and for the Blogosphere Malco Screen 1 12:00 p.m. Kiss and Ride + Aquarium + Summer Scars 2:00 p.m. Mississippi Chicken 3:50 p.m. Beyond the Call 5:45 p.m. Weeding by Example + Gimme Green 6:45 p.m. America Unchained 8:00 p.m. The Pipe + American Fork 10:00 p.m. From the Files of a Very Concerned Psychologist + Mantis Rhes + Blood Car Malco Screen 2 12:00 p.m. A.W.O.L. + The Hollywood Librarian 2:15 p.m. Greensboro: Closer to the Truth 4:00 p.m. In the Wake of Assassins

Malco Screen 3 12:00 p.m. Sylvia Hyman: Eternal Wonder + Testing Hope: Grade 12 in the New South Africa 1:15 p.m. Election Day 2:45 p.m. Miss Lil’s Camp 3:30 p.m. Angels Buried in the Soil 4:00 p.m. Droomtijd (Dreamtime) + Pismo (The Letter) + Boletos por Favor (Tickets Please) 5:00 p.m. The Listening Project 6:45 p.m. The Frank Anderson + The Book of Noah 8:15 p.m. Good Morning, Herr Horst + The Cake Eaters 10:00 p.m. Mule Lip Blues + The Importance of Being Russell

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9 Powerhouse Community Arts Center (413 S. 14th Street) 10:00 a.m. Children’s Filmmaking Workshop, Ages 6-11 1:00 p.m. Children’s Filmmaking Workshop, Ages 12-18 8:30 p.m. Awards Ceremony and Party ($15 person / $20 couple, not included in festival pass; catering provided by our sponsors) Malco Screen 1 10:00 a.m. Labou 11:45 a.m. Goldfish 12:00 p.m. Reflection/Refraction + Moving Midway 2:00 p.m. Mississippi Films: Wedding Bliss, Yesterday’s Charm, Falsifyin’, Forgotten Coast 4:00 p.m. Oh Paris + When the Light’s Red 4:40 p.m. Nobody 6:00 p.m. The Elephant King Malco Screen 2 10:00 a.m. Harry Crews: Survival is Triumph Enough 10:45 a.m. Strange Culture 12:00 p.m. DVD + I Love Hip Hop in Morocco 2:00 p.m. The Wine Bar + A Lawyer Walks into a Bar 4:00 p.m. Temporary Virgin + Quiet City 5:30 p.m. Silver Jew 6:30 p.m. Animation Block: An Introduction to Lucid Dream Exploration, Arjuna, Egg Ghost, Canvas, Papiroflexia, Bad Wicked Girl and a Red Wagon, Voodoo Bayou, Fault, Shuteye Hotel, The Waif of Persephone

All times are tentative and subject to change. Refer to our website, www.oxfordfilmfest.com, for the latest info on guest scheduling, panel and event info.

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Malco Screen 3 10:00 a.m. Panel: Fund Your Film 12:00 p.m. The Song of Pumpkin Brown 12:45 p.m. Beyond the Pale 2:30 p.m. Experimental Block and Panel: Waves, Memo to Pic Desk, Passing, Glimpse, Five Cents a Peek, Passage, Another Word for Family, Hypervibes, Testing the Undertow, Burren, August 4:00 p.m. Demonstration: Kodak 5:00 p.m. Workshop: Talent and Casting 6:30 p.m. Banished

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 10 Malco Screen 1 1:00 p.m. The Dixie Hummingbirds: 80 Years Young 3:00 p.m. Nominees: Short Formats 4:00 p.m. The Jesus Guy 5:00 p.m. Nominees: Documentaries * 7:00 p.m. Winners: Short Formats + Feature * Malco Screen 2 1:00 p.m. Nominees: Documentaries * 3:00 p.m. Nominees: Documentaries * 5:00 p.m. Nominees: Documentaries * 7:00 p.m. Winner: Documentaries *

Malco Screen 3 1:00 p.m. Nominees: 3:00 p.m. Nominees: 5:00 p.m. Nominees: 7:00 p.m. Nominees:

Features Features Features Features

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* Sunday Lineup will be announced and posted online after awards ceremony on Saturday night.

All films contain adult content and are not recommended for children under 18 unless otherwise indicated.

Ron Tibbett Audience Award Your vote counts! Be sure to turn in your ballot (available with your festival pass) to vote for your favorite film of the festival.

The award is named in memory of Ron Tibbett, founder of the Magnolia Film Festival, whose contributions to film in Mississippi will be forever remembered and appreciated.

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The Spirit of Hoka Award The Oxford Film Festival is committed to not only showing quality films, but also to rewarding the filmmakers who’ve worked so hard to make them. We reward each winner with a statuette. The Academy Awards might have their coveted “Oscar,” but only winners of the Oxford Film Festival competition will be able to get their hands on a “Hoka.” This means that in addition to receiving the respect of their peers, this year’s winners will be individually awarded statues to commemorate their achievements.

The model for these unique award statues is the legendary Chickasaw Indian princess, Hoka. Famous locally as the namesake of the Hoka Theater and the subject of a celebrated series of paintings by Oxford artist Bill Lester, Hoka was an even greater figure in the Oxford of the past.

“I came across Princess Hoka in the history of Lafayette County and was impressed that the first name on the land deed is a Native American, and a woman at that,” said Ron Shapiro, owner of the now-defunct Hoka Theater. “I believe she represents Native Americans, women and independence in a very positive way.”

The task of sculpting the award statues fell into the capable hands of renowned sculptor and now retired Ole Miss art professor Bill Beckwith. Oxonians might recognize Beckwith’s work from the life-size William Faulkner statue that occupies a bench in front of Oxford’s city hall; or they might have peeked into Beckwith’s spacious sculpture studio adjoining the popular Taylor Restaurant and Grocery.

Since no pictures of Hoka have survived, Beckwith relied on his own imagination and the inspiration of Native American folk music to create a likeness that was, to him, “…powerful, feminine and self-contained.”

“I depicted her as a young Chickasaw Indian girl wrapped in a deerskin,” said Beckwith, “Which is probably not accurate to the time period she lived in. The Chickasaw had lived with the white man for 300 years by then (the early-to mid-1800s) and had taken on their style of clothing.”

The statues themselves are 12-inch polymer sculptures painted to imitate bronze, using a method known as patina. The faux bronzing was even convincing enough to fool visitors to Beckwith’s studio.

“I had a mailman come into the studio and he couldn’t believe the statues weren’t bronze until he picked one up and felt how light it was,” said Beckwith.

Pieces such as the Hoka statues are personally significant to Beckwith, who has a fascination with, and a deep respect for, Native American culture.

“I think they had a better way of life than we do now,” said Beckwith, “…We get so egotistical about the progress we’ve made, but I don’t think it has all been for the best.” The award statues aren’t Beckwith’s first foray into American Indian subject matter; he has also been commissioned by the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma to create a likeness of the revered Chief Piomingo.

Whether a person is carving the features of a famous historical figure from a slab of clay or shooting a high concept, low-budget art film, Beckwith encourages people to tap into their creative sides.

“I think God smiles when you’re creative,” said Beckwith. “You’re happier, everything is better. It’s like the Christian idea of being reborn.”

— Sam McClatchy

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2008 Film List America Unchained

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Writer/subject Dave Gorman’s quest is a simple one: to drive crosscountry from Los Angeles to the Atlantic Ocean without spending a cent at a chain restaurant, chain hotel, or chain gas station. But in a country where the mom-and-pop shop is nearing extinction, does the independent spirit of America still thrive enough to go coast to coast?

And how do you do it all while being a vegetarian? Gorman and Devonshire’s insightful film opens up the back roads of the country to find the heart of America.

Director: Andy Devonshire Running time: 75 min.

Friday, 6:45 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

American Fork

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Tracy Orbison, an enormous grocery clerk in American Fork, Utah, is a dreamer, and his outsized sense of wonder fuels a series of tragicomic adventures. Tracy enrolls in an acting class, falling under the spell of the arrogant instructor, a Z-list actor named Truman Hope (William Baldwin) while at home, Tracy fends off Agnes (Kathleen Quinlan), his God-fearing, self-loathing mother, while his sister Peggy (Mary Lynn Rajskub), a perennial lonely heart, at long last finds somebody to love.

Director: Chris Bowman Running time: 89 min.

Friday, 8:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

www.americanforkmovie.com

Angels Buried in the Soil

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An Iraqi Kurdish girl earns a living for her ill father by selling the bones of Iranian soldiers buried behind enemy lines to their families across the Iran-Iraq border. After witnessing a terrorist attack upon an American soldier, she risks everything to help him.

Director: Babak Amini Running time: 31 min.

In Kurdish with English subtitles.

Iran Friday, 3:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

R & B Feder Charitable Foundation for the Beaux Arts P.O. Box 1943 Ocean Springs, MS 39566 rnbfeder@cableone.net

Inspiring Diversity and Exploration

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In this experimental documentary, the filmmaker returns to her small hometown in the Mississippi Delta to explore the burden of its troubled history and its impact on her own life. Through both new Super 8 footage and family archives, the film confronts how a community and its individuals deal with the legacy of racism.

Director: April Grayson. Running time: 17 min.

Grayson’s films, Brother/Sister and The Space Between Memory, played in the fourth Oxford Film Festival (2007).

Presented by the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Malco Screen 3

For a kid growing up in the suburbs, the truth can lie at the bottom of a fish tank.

Director: Rob Meyer. Running time: 17 min.

Friday, 12:00 p.m. = Malco Screen 1

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Arjuna

Renowned for his archery skills, Arjuna was a pivotal character in the Indian epic, The Mahabharata. It was as a youth, however, that he first displayed the uncanny concentration and discipline that would subsequently make him a hero.

Bloggity-Blog-Blog (

Director: Arjun Rihan Running time: 3 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

Blog [blog, n.] an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called web log. (See Webster’s) You may ask, what is a “Blog”? Well, it’s a blog. Each blog is as different as each human being on the planet. Some blogs are factual, some are not. There are parent blogs, cookie recipe blogs, blogs about country and western music, and blogs about how to change your oil. There are blogs about how to write blogs, and blogs about other blogs.

What? OK. Let’s break it down even more. The days of the cigar-chomping editor yelling about deadlines are over.

Those harrowing twenty-seven-hour days in a cubicle typing away in some skyscraper are over. Although some have still not caught the wave of new media and the converging of print, broadcast, and the multi-layered approach of reaching the public, certainly at some point, they’ll have to catch the last boat or get left behind.

New media and the idea of blogging have opened a door to a chamber that was securely guarded for many years, allowing the public hundreds of thousands of new voices. It allows the writer to take advantage of whatever situation in which they exist, on what plane they choose to write. Nietzche would be proud. Heck, I could see him blogging away about stars and chaos on a Palm Pilot right now if he were actually here.

The pros (or “prose”) about blogging more than outweigh the cons, and yes, the discussion about whether or not blogs are truly “journalism” is still being battled in the real world as well as the virtual, but at some point someone will win, and more than likely it will not be the ones who are decaying in some dusty old newsroom, but the ones with the larger server.

Let’s face it—journalism is evolving. Rapidly pulling itself out of the primordial ooze of inverted pyramids and printing presses, this “institution” is becoming—oh wait—it is already happening? And where were you? That’s right folks. You got left behind. New media is not only not gonna wait around for you, it is going to make it real hard for you to catch up. It’s nothing personal, but the Internet waits for no one.

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Aquarium

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August Impressions and presences evocated through a hand-working of glimpses, of lighted moments.

Director: Vanessa O’Neill Running time: 5 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

A.W.O.L.

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The year is 1972. An American soldier, Marquette (David Morse), is captured and tortured in Vietnam. At the height of agony, Marquette suddenly finds himself home, living an idyllic life in the United States with a loving wife and children—a family he doesn’t recall ever having seen before. As he struggles to take in what’s happening, he discovers that the cruel pain of war isn’t over after all. As the clock strikes midnight every night, he is back in Vietnam where his torture resumes. Trapped in unending cycle of pain, he must find a way to endure, unless, with the clock counting down, Marquette can cheat fate.

Director: Jack Swanstrom Running time: 22 min.

Friday, 12:00p.m.

Malco Screen 2

— Twinkle Van Winkle Meet film journalists and bloggers at our panel “Film and the New Media”, Friday at 4:10 p.m. in the Yerby Center.

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c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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a Bad Wicked Girl and a Red Wagon

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Four girls spend the day riding a red wagon. One of the girls, however, has a different interpretation of what fun means.

Director: Laura Cavett. Running time: 4 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m. = Malco Screen 2

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Banished

From the 1860s to the 1920s, dozens of towns and counties across America violently expelled their entire African-American communities. One hundred years later, many of these towns remain all white. In the long and contentious history of race relations in the United States, this is one example that has previously gone relatively unacknowledged. Banished, directed by Marco Williams (Two Towns of Jasper), tells the story of three of these counties (Pierce City, Missouri; Harrison, Arkansas; and Forsyth County, Georgia)—of the black descendants returning to learn their shocking history, and the white residents struggling with their hidden past. Both are faced with the question: what can be done to repair past racial injustice today?

Director: Marco Williams. Running time: 86 min.

Presented by the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation Saturday, 6:30 p.m. Malco Screen 3 www.banishedthefilm.com/index.htm

Ed Artis, James Laws and Walt Ratterman are three middle-aged men whose idea of adventure is taking desperately needed food and medicine into the world’s most forbidding yet beautiful places on Earth—the front lines of war. The three men are self-styled Knights of Malta, fusing Mother Teresa and Indiana Jones. In 1995, they formed Knightsbridge International, a unique humanitarian aid organization, whose motto is “High Adventure and Service to Humanity.”

Director: Adrian Belic Running time: 82 min.

Belic’s previous film, Genghis Blues, played in the first Oxford Film Festival (2003) Friday, 3:50 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

Mississippi Connections

www.beyondthecallthemovie.com

A variety of Mississippi-themed films—either filmed and set in Mississippi or made by those with Mississippi ties—will be featured in this year’s OFF. Local musicians Dent May and his Magnificent Ukulele as well as Thacker Mountain Radio favorites the Lexington Brothers each have music videos in this year’s festival.

Local documentary filmmaker April Grayson shows her experimental side in Another Word for Family. Rick Baldwin evokes the silent film era in his narrative short, Wedding Bliss, while Jarratt Taylor takes a nostalgic tour of Oxford in his documentary short, Yesterday’s Charm. Mississippi Chicken, which looks at fragile yet hopeful world of the Latin American immigrants who work in Mississippi’s poultry processing plants, uses Super 8 film to elicit a connection between the struggle of current immigrants and the Civil Rights Era, when Super 8 film was popular. Falsifyin’, another documentary filmed in Mississippi, examines the boogie-woogie piano scene at Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. In her documentary, Forgotten Coast, director Jamie Christensen Johnson reminds us that our neighbors on the Gulf Coast sill need our attention.

Previous festival winners continue to pursue Mississippithemed projects. Joe York, winner of the 2007 Best Mississippi Film (Whole Hog), revisits the Hoka, where Ron Shapiro (Ronzo) and Barton brought cool and unusual films to Oxford long before there was an Oxford Film Festival. In Blue Mountain, Thad Lee, winner of the 2003 Best Short (October), follows Oxford’s favorite alt-country band (of the same name) into the studio.

Ole Miss alumnus Tate Ellington, seen in The Elephant King with Academy Award winner Ellen Burnstyn, will take part in Saturday’s Talent and Casting Workshop.

Finally, Friday night’s The Pipe adapts a short story by Jack Pendarvis. As this year’s John and Renee Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi, we consider him an “honorary” Mississippian.

The prize for this year’s Best Mississippi film has been donated by Mississippi Handmade.

Beyond the Pale

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Beyond the Call

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Sasha Plotzkin is an eccentric thirteenth-year grad student in English who is unable to finish his dissertation and faces expulsion unless he can make a name for himself at an upcoming academic conference— though he isn’t invited. His passion, and subject of the conference, is reclusive J.D. Nochpynne’s 1,000-page opus Pale Queen of Night, a controversial work within the academic community who can’t even agree on the pronunciation of the author’s name. A satire of literary academia inspired by the director’s years teaching at the University of Michigan.

Director: Victor Fanucchi Running time: 86 min.

Saturday, 12:45 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

www.gobeyondthepale.com

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Blood Car

This gory satire of horrifying dimensions is set in a world where gas prices have reached forty dollars a gallon. Responding with good oldfashioned American ingenuity, a vegan kindergarten teacher accidentally invents a car that consumes human blood. An absurdist take on the world’s current addiction to oil.

Director: Alex Orr Running time: 75 min.

Friday, 10:20 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

www.bloodcar.com

c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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Blue Mountain

A brief look into the Oxford trio’s rehearsal, studio, and live recordings.

Director: Thad Lee. Running time: 20 min.

Lee’s film, The Town in Late Afternoon, played in the fourth Oxford Film Festival (2007).

Thursday, 10:00 p.m. Malco Screen 1

Boletos por Favor (Tickets Please)

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A man traveling on a train without a ticket tries to avoid being caught by the ticket collector. But there is only one way to escape.

Director: Lucas M. Figueroa Running time: 14 min.

In Spanish with English subtitles.

Argentina Friday, 4:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

The Book of Noah

Donna Ruth Roberts supports the Oxford Film Festival

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In an effort to prove he’s a worthy beau to his friend Paul’s ex, Noah decides to finance a surprise romantic getaway by dog-knapping. But once Paul finds out, his best friend becomes his worst enemy. Angela, the ex, is also going through a transition. She’s decided to give up her silly dreams, and get a real career. Plus, a new love interest looks promising, though he has his own dark past. Big plans end up a big mess in this dark dramatic comedy about knowing who you are, and being happy with it.

Director: Drew Smith Running time: 76 min.

Memphis filmmaker Friday, 7:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Burren

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To move among stones. A rendering of the transformation of place as suggested in the weathering of rock—in its expanses and fissured depths.

Erosion evidencing the slow mark of time and a sense of its passage.

Director: Vanessa O’Neill Running time: 13 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

152 Courthouse Square Oxford, Mississippi 38655 662.232.8080

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The Cake Eaters

Director: Mary Stuart Masterson Running time: 95 min.

Friday, 8:15 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Easy, the Kimbrough family patriarch, is grieving over the recent loss of his wife. His youngest son, Beagle, who was left to care for his ailing mother, falls in love with Georgia, a terminally ill, fifteen-year-old girl. His older brother, Guy, missing from the family for years while pursuing his rock star dream, returns home after missing the funeral. The Cake Eaters, the first feature from both writer Jayce Bartok and director Mary Stuart Masterson, is a sensitive and sweet story of losing and finding your family.

The Winter Institute Presents….

Founded in 1999, the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation helps to build more inclusive communities by promoting diversity and citizenship and by supporting projects that help communities solve local challenges. Named for former Mississippi Governor William Winter, who served from 19801984, the Institute serves as a trusted and effective national resource and facilitator for communities, businesses and trade associations, not-for-profit and non-government organizations, and government entities seeking to understand and reconcile past and present inequities and achieve fuller cooperation among the races. Based at the University of Mississippi, it aims to build a world class multi-disciplinary center for scholarly research, study, and teaching on race and the impact of race and racism across traditional academic areas.

Under the leadership of its Executive Director, Susan Glisson, the Winter Institute answers the calls of communities throughout Mississippi by assisting them in a variety of projects, and to date it has had a presence in almost two dozen communities across the state. These include the Philadelphia Coalition in Neshoba County, which called for justice in the previously unprosecuted murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, and the Emmett Till Memorial Commission in Tallahatchie County, which is working to help its community confront the legacy of the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. The Institute also serves the city of McComb and the McComb School District in community projects and curriculum development around local civil rights history, as well as the Steps Coalition, an alliance of local groups and organizations working on the Mississippi Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina.

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Canvas

An artist struggles with a blank canvas. He struggles to find a new way to look at it and infuses it with such energy that, in a creative frenzy, it comes to life and attacks. Filmed in Hi-Def stop-motion animation.

Director: Allan Holt Running time: 5 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

The Devil Came on Horseback

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Using the exclusive photographs and first hand testimony of former United States Marine Captain Brian Steidle, The Devil Came on Horseback takes the viewer in an emotionally charged journey into the heart of Darfur, Sudan, when an Arab government is systematically executing a plan to rid the province of its black African citizens.

Director: Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern Running time: 85 min.

Presented by the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation Friday, 6:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 2 www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com

As a convener of the Mississippi Coalition for Racial Justice, the Winter Institute is helping to lead a long-term initiative in the state and is in the midst of the first year of that plan, called The Welcome Table: A Year of Dialogue on Race (www.welcometable.net). Since the beginning of the year of dialogue, several other communities, including Greenwood and West Point, have sought the Institute’s aid to begin local projects.

For more information on the Winter Institute and its work, visit www.winterinstitute.org.

This year the Winter Institute is happy to partner with OFF in presenting the films Another Word for Family, Banished, The Devil Came on Horseback, Greensboro: Closer to the Truth, and Moving Midway.

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The Dixie Hummingbirds: 80 Years Young

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The Dixie Hummingbirds, multiple Grammy winners and charter members of the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, have been a major influence to four generations of sacred and secular singers ranging from B.B. King, James Brown, and The Temptations to Paul Simon and Take 6. They are still led by eighty-two-year-old gospel legend Ira Tucker, who joined the group at age thirteen and quickly helped the group rise to the top of the highly charged gospel field, then in its golden age. The film features the newest edition of The Birds (some in their early twenties) performing, rehearsing, and reminiscing at theaters, clubs, and churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington D.C., Hawaii, and back home in

c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

southerngrowthstudio.com

662.236.8030

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Philadelphia. Stevie Wonder claimed that “No other group has been more important in the history of African American music,” and they are certainly deserving of this long-overdue tribute.

Director: Jeff Scheftel Running time: 94 min.

Sunday, 1:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

q

Coming Spring 2009 Droomtijd (Dreamtime)

In a work-driven world where time is the ultimate dictator, a mysterious sandman spreads chaos and confusion. Even the best employees get infected by his wondrous dream powder and lose sight of the once-dominating clock. Alex Deprins, future employee of the year, becomes one of those victims. In his dreams, he comes into contact with a strange new world, where a lady in red captivates his heart. Once awake, he has to make a difficult decision. Does he stay in his familiar, but deadly rulebound world or does he seek the road to salvation in his dreams?

Director: Tom Van Avermaet Running time: 20 min.

In Dutch with English subtitles.

Belgium Friday, 4:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

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DVD

est. 1990

407 Jackson Avenue Mon. - Fri. 10-6 • Sat. 10-4 236.6507

The classic story of boy meets girl as told by movie, video-game and comic-book geeks. Take a peek inside the geek world as if you were watching a DVD, with audio commentary, scene selection, music video, trailer, deleted scenes, alternative ending, etc.

Director: Ciro Altabas. Running time: 18 min.

In Spanish with English subtitles.

Spain Saturday, 12:00 p.m. Malco Screen 2

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Egg Ghost

Egg ghost is a female ghost, without a face, but can regain her face after she kisses a guy.

Director: DongKeun Lee Running time: 4 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

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c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

a of Jake’s decadence and self-destruction dawns on Oliver, he’s forced to decide whether he will save his brother’s life or his own.

Election Day

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Election Day follows a dozen voters over a single day, November 2, 2004, from dawn until long past midnight. An ex-felon in New York votes for the first time in his life at age fifty, a factory worker in Oklahoma debates gay marriage with his coworkers, and a frenzied pollworker in Ohio tries to maintain her sanity amidst chaotic lines of voters. While the mainstream media focuses on “red states” vs. “blue states,” Election Day moves beyond the horserace to look at the stories of the electorate itself.

Director: Katy Chevigny Running time: 85 min.

Friday, 1:15 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

www.electiondaythemovie.com

The Elephant King

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Facing fraud charges in the United States, Jake has escaped to Thailand where he has found a life of whiskey, women, and petty crime—until his introverted younger brother Oliver (Tate Ellington, Ole Miss alum) comes to visit. Sent by a domineering mother (Ellen Burstyn) to bring Jake home, Oliver becomes swept into Jake’s intoxicating good times— and into the arms of the alluring bartender Lek. But as the true extent

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Director: Seth Grossman Running time: 92 min.

Saturday, 6:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

Falsifyin’

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This film captures the powerful impact of Boogie Woogie music in Clarksdale, Mississippi, through its impact on five piano-playing greats and the town’s people. Through interviews and performances by Jerry Lee Lewis, Pinetop Perkins, Marcia Ball, Henry Gray, and newcomer Little Red Clay, we share one raucous night of celebration at Ground Zero Blues Club. Falsifyin’, also a unique piano technique, features narration by club owner, Morgan Freeman.

Director: Gregory Sabatino Running time: 30 min.

Saturday, 2:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

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Fault

He’s out of his element, driving his little red ego straight into hell. The story of a guy we all love to hate.

Director: Stewart Shaw Running time: 5 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

The First Saturday in May

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The Kentucky Derby is known as “the most exciting two minutes in sports.” Just to get a horse to the gate in the world’s most prestigious race defies the odds. The Hennegan Brothers’ involving and unexpectedly moving film follows the lives of the teams of people, and their extended families, that train horses for glory. Focusing on the lead up to the 2006 Derby, complex portraits are drawn of six organizations that range from the sure things to the scrappy underdogs, and you are taken into the driven world of professional horse racing.

Director: Brad and John Hennegan Running time: 90 min.

Friday, 8:15 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

www.thefirstsaturdayinmay.com

Five Cents a Peek

Call 601.359.3297 For your Mississippi Location and Production Guide

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Five Cents a Peek is a filmic interpretation of a poem by Sharon Olds where the circus becomes a metaphor for a woman’s performance in, and for, the world. The film incorporates animation, archival circus footage, and distortions of the female form to explore ideas of performance, spectatorship, and the male gaze. The eye is a reoccurring trope in the film, referencing the spectator/audience looking at the subject and the subject looking inward at herself. Because the circus is a spectacle whose very existence derives from performance and illusion, the performative, and illusory aspects of the film are exaggerated.

Director: Vanessa Woods Running time: 7 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

P. O. Box 849 Jackson, Mississippi 39205 www.mississippi.org/film

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c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

a Forgotten Coast

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Forgotten Coast explores the surprising economic effects that Hurricane Katrina is having on the Gulf Coast region of Alabama and Mississippi due to the devastating effects of the storm. The Mississippi Coast, with a majority of its houses and businesses gone, has become a clean slate.

This has allowed developers to quickly enter the area and reshape the climate and culture. Coastal Mississippi is awash in economic development and reconstruction, while areas of coastal Alabama are struggling just to keep their main industry from dying. What is the ultimate cost to the locals of this region? This is a documentary about the people who have struggled to reconstruct their lives while holding on to their rapidly changing culture.

Director: Jamie Christensen Johnson Running time: 52 min.

Saturday, 2:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

q

The Frank Anderson

Frank (Richard Riehle, Office Space) has a sizeable problem that his insurance company doesn’t want to help him with: man-boobs. Can he learn to love his breasts and find true happiness?

Director: Dave Perkal Running time: 13 min.

Friday, 6:45 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

www.thefrankanderson.com

From the Files of a Very Concerned Psychologist

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Once a can’t-miss Olympic gold medalist, Worthington Basset’s dreams, as well as his right ankle, were shattered when he stepped on a panhandler’s change cup. With years of therapy and a successful career as a stockbroker behind him, does Basset still harbor any animosity towards the homeless?

Director: Sam Frazier, Jr Running time: 2 min.

Frazier’s film, Programming to Die For, played in the third Oxford Film Festival (2005).

Friday, 10:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

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Gimme Green

A humorous look at America’s obsession with the residential lawn and the effects it has on our environment, our wallets, and our outlook on life.

Director: Isaac Brown Running time: 27 min.

Friday, 6:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

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Glimpse

What started as a study of the life of artist and painter Willem de Kooning, using stop motion photography, evolved into a stream of consciousness narrative concerning freedom from imprisonment, and the impermanence of life. Drawing on top of slate from deserted schoolhouses, the artist used hard pastels to create a dark, uncertain world, sometimes concrete, sometimes abstract. With the camera set up with a timer on sixty-second intervals, the artist hand drew the forty-five hundred stills necessary to complete the nine-month project.

Director: Dustin Grella Running time: 9 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

“One day he just come up missin’ ”: Jerry Bell’s Camel Cash River Raft I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not

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Goldfish

Two girls break into their elementary school to save their classroom’s goldfish. But everything they know is working against them.

having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

—J. D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey During the winter of 2001, Jerry Bell landed at the Coast Guard station in Memphis after having navigated the Mississinewa, Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers in an inflatable canoe he bought with Camel Cash. The self-proclaimed “modern day Huck Finn” told tales of heartache and tough breaks that mesmerized locals and got the attention of Alan Spearman and Lance Murphey, photojournalists for The Commercial Appeal, who spent the next five years making a documentary based on Jerry’s adventures. In 2000, Jerry found himself in a rough place: he owed back child support to his ex-wife, his girlfriend Mitzi had left him, and his mother had just passed away from cancer at fifty-three. Rather than remain stuck in a painful situation and face jail time over the child support issue, Jerry decided to use the points he earned from 20,000 cigarettes (which he claims he did not smoke alone) to get an inflatable canoe and sail toward the Mississippi River from Marion, Indiana.

Murphey and Spearman enter the picture after Jerry “married” the Mississippi River, crossed several locks and dams, and ripped his canoe on a tree branch 100 miles north of Memphis.

Using duct tape, he manages to make it to the Memphis Coast Guard station, which leads him to the filmmakers. In the city, he parties on Beale Street, befriends some homeless locals, and settles for the winter to earn money for a real canoe.

During calls home, Jerry learns of family losses, including his son’s suicide. He is so wracked by guilt and despair that he does not return home for the funeral and starts drinking heavily, eating out of dumpsters, and collecting cans for booze money.

Ultimately, the Mississippi washes out his camp, taking with it all of Jerry’s possessions. Resiliently, he takes this as a sign to finish, so he bids Memphis farewell and continues his journey.

Nobody is a compelling glimpse into the life of a “river rat” and reminder about perseverance. As a whole, this film is intimate, hits the mark, has broad appeal, and entertains completely.

Director: Joe Wein Running time: 13 min.

Saturday, 11:45 a.m.

Malco Screen 1

Good Morning, Herr Horst

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Artist: Mando Diao Director: Lovisa Inserra Running time: 3 min.

Friday, 8:15 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Good Riddance

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When Madalyn Murray O’Hair, “The Most Hated Woman in America,” disappeared, it seemed like the world just shrugged its shoulders. The details of her demise perhaps would never be known if not for a reporter and a private investigator that teamed up to solve this Austin, Texas, missing persons case. Private investigator T.R. Young’s first feature probes the life of both O’Hair and her killer, and shows that to catch a killer you must learn what their killer knew—you don’t need to commit the perfect crime to get away with kidnapping and murder, all you need are the perfect victims.

Director: T.R. Young Running time: 93 min.

Friday, 10:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

Got a cig?

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c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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Greensboro: Closer to the Truth

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During the Greensboro Massacre of 1979, the Ku Klux Klan murdered five members of the Communist Workers Party. Despite extensive television footage of the attack, no one was ever convicted. The film portrays a number of the participants—five of the survivors and two Klansmen—who have been scarred by murdered spouses, physical injuries, public and judicial persecution, and shifting political realities over the past quarter century. From the years 2004 to 2006, the characters converge as Greensboro mounts a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to re-investigate the event, the first time such a form of justice was utilized in the United States.

Director: Adam Zucker Running time: 83 min.

Presented by the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation Friday, 2:15 p.m.

Malco Screen 2 www.greensborothemovie.com

Harry Crews: Survival is Triumph Enough

7

This powerful film documents the hardships, tragedy and loss suffered by the prolific Southern writer and novelist Harry Crews. Interviewed by artist and filmmaker Tyler Turkle, Crews’ state of mind is revealed in a rapid-fire and startling narrative of emotional and physical pain and suffering. From his home in Gainesville, Florida, Crews provides details of his near fatal childhood coupled with stark tales of his adult alcoholism and drug abuse and the tragic, accidental drowning of his first born son. Throughout, Crews remains as tough as nails in his delivery of personal experiences and exploits which he sums up by quoting Mark Twain: “I have reached the age of seventy by strictly following a regime that would have killed anybody else.�

Director: Tyler Turkle Running time: 30 min.

Saturday, 10:00 a.m.

Malco Screen 2

The Fifteenth

Oxford Conference for the Book The University of Mississippi Oxford, Mississippi

April 3–5, 2008 Celebrating the writing of

Zora Neal Hurston and other authors.

Delta Literary Tour March 31–April 3 For more information, contact: Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi telephone 662-915-5993 • e-mail cssc@olemiss.edu Internet: www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com

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The Heist

Has a determined inventor finally found a means to possess the object of his desire? Sitting in a bathrobe, surrounded by his previous experiments, an inventor toils away on his latest, greatest project. The grand plan is taking shape, and he is moments away from setting it in motion, but will it work out as he expects?

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Director: Ben Peters Running time: 5 min.

Thursday, 7:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

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a Film: Jack Pendarvis

A Beat 108.5 FM radio station DJ has buried himself alive for forty-six days in a cheap publicity stunt. The only thing keeping him alive is an air pipe and an emergency bell—and two men working the night shift. These men, “a pill-popping paramedic and a stoic security guard,” find, well, interesting, ways to pass the hours between midnight and 6:00 a.m. Who could come up with such a story? Jack Pendarvis. A combination of sometimes pathetic, always comic characters and what Pendarvis describes as “lots of snappy dialogue” makes his short stories a perfect partner for the silver screen.

Pendarvis’s connection to film began with his childhood in Bayou La Batre, Alabama—“one of the places Forrest Gump lived.” As an adult, Pendarvis moved to Atlanta, where he took a job with Turner Broadcasting, writing thirty-second “promo copy along the lines of, ‘Coming up next: Earth is endangered from a giant bird! The Giant Claw on TBS!’ ” Over the next few years, Pendarvis moved up in the ranks, becoming co-creator for shows like “Dinner and a Movie” and “The Rudy and Gogo World Famous Cartoon Show,” for which Pendarvis also acted as writer and voice for “Boney Bonerton.”

Pendarvis currently resides in Oxford, Mississippi, as the 2007-2008 Grisham Writer-In-Residence at the University of Mississippi. To date, he has published two collections of short stories: The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure (2005) and, most recently, Your Body is Changing (2007). His first novel, titled Awesome, is slated for publication next year.

Pendarvis’s work has also appeared in The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and the 2006 Pushcart Prize anthology (Pendarvis won the Pushcart Prize for fiction the same year). He also acts as contributing writer to The Oxford American and contributing editor of the music magazine Paste.

The short film The Pipe is director Dan Brown’s vision of Pendarvis’s short story of the same name (“The Pipe” appears in The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure). When asked how film adaptation differs from screen writing, Pendarvis replied, “It’s almost like asking, ‘What’s the difference between building a house and flying a helicopter?’ ” They may be two completely different experiences, but Pendarvis is a self-proclaimed lover of both film and novels: “I love movies and have never been afraid of my precious words being sullied in translation to film. Sometimes I like movies better than books. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, for example. It does things a book could never do. Of course, books do things that movies can’t do.” To see exactly what a movie can do, check out The Pipe, appearing at this year’s festival.

—Lisa Sloan See The Pipe on Friday at 8 p.m.

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The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians Through Film

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They have more cardholders than VISA, more customers than Amazon, and more outlets than McDonald’s. Meet America’s librarians in a vivid blend of factual documentary, feature film and storytelling: the first-ever film about librarianship. Interviews with librarians are intercut with film clips of cinematic librarians in order to examine such issues as literature, books and reading, censorship, library funding, citizenship, and democracy. For the first time, we will see and understand the real lives and real work of American librarians who for decades have been a cultural force hiding in plain sight.

Director: Ann Seidl Running time: 96 min.

Friday, 12:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

www.hollywoodlibrarian.com

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Hypervibes

Aluminum bars with resonators and motor driven fans. This is the vibraphone, a keyboard percussion instrument played with mallets and bows. With vibraphone sounds combined with abstract images, Hypervibes takes you on a journey through your subconsciousness.

Director: Dae In Chung Running time: 3 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

If the Year Were Only Three Months

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Artist: The Lexington Brothers Director: Durant and Pickens Lexington Running time: 5 min.

Thursday, 7:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

I Love Hip Hop in Morocco

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A group of Moroccan Hip-Hop artists share a single dream: to stage a professional concert for a hometown crowd. Unfortunately, resistance is strong in their society and resources scarce. With the help of the American filmmaker, they appeal to the American Embassy for funding and begin the journey that will lead to the “I Love Hip Hop in Morocco” festival. This film reflects the thoughts and dreams of the true future of the Arab world.

c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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Director: Jennifer Needleman and Josh Asen Running time: 80 min.

Saturday, 12:20 p.m.

Malco Screen 2 www.ilovehiphopinmorocco.com

The Importance of Being Russell

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Russell Hawker and his wife Sissy battle Patricia Van de Meer and her “citified” minions over the fate of the world and their ten year marriage.

Can Russell, Harlan, and Jamon withstand the perils of Big City and a really stinky thumb? Or will they succumb to the dark forces behind Cranium Concepts Global Corporation and its scheme to “citify” the world?

a refreshingly modern approach to interior design

5 furniture decorative accessories lighting fabrics interior design

Director: Sean Plemmons Running time: 99 min.

Memphis filmmaker Friday, 10:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3 www.russellmovie.com

In the Wake of Assassins

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In the mob-controlled town of Phenix City, Alabama in the 1950s, a crusading lawyer is assassinated after he is elected attorney general on a platform of “Man Against Crime.” His son, John Patterson, reluctantly takes his place, vowing to clean up Phenix City and find his father’s killers. Later he uses the race issue to be elected governor so that he can continue his fight against the mob, but his stand as a segregationist leads to tragic results.

Director: Robert Clem Running time: 87 min.

Clem’s previous film, Company K, played in the third Oxford Film Festival (2005).

Friday, 4:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

1417 University Avenue Oxford, Mississippi 38655 662.234.6266

Trademark • Copyright Entertainment Law

An Introduction to Lucid Dream Exploration

Film and Music Rights

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This four-minute silent animation was created by hand, frame-by-frame on an Etch-a-Sketch. It starts with a live-action setup of the director falling asleep in a train car, then zooms into his mind for an animated dream sequence.

Director: John Grigsby Running time: 4 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

Molly E. Fergusson Anne E. Pitts Attorneys at Law Representing film and music projects including The Oxford Film Festival since 2002

Molly E. Fergusson: 662.832.0418 mfergusson@fergussonpitts.com

Anne E. Pitts: 662.801.1884 aepitts@fergussonpitts.com Licensed to practice in Mississippi and Tennessee

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The Jesus Guy

Over twelve years, forty-seven states and thirteen countries, the spiritual quest of an anonymous, barefoot preacher has attracted media coverage from “20/20” to Time—and invited comparisons to everyone from Jesus Christ to St. Francis of Assisi.

Janet Tiller from Kodak will demonstrate Kodak’s VISION3 500T Color Negative Film 5219/7219, “the next step in the evolution of motion picture film,” by using the film itself in her presentation.

Running time: 40 min.

Saturday, 4:00 p.m. Malco Screen 3

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Ineffectual Salman comes to help his sister-in-law (Lisa Kudrow) tend to his holy terror nephews while Salman’s brother fights in Iraq. After a failed attempt as a babysitter he must take a humiliating job as a giant blue corporate mascot in order to help make ends meet and hold the family together.

Director: Scott Prendergast Running time: 90 min.

Thursday, 7:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1 www.kabluey.com

Who is the Jesus Guy? In his directorial debut, The Jesus Guy, filmmaker Sean Tracey spent three years following the nomadic lifestyle of a man who refers to himself only as “What’s Your Name”. An itinerant holy man, he looks like Jesus and speaks like St. Francis of Assisi. He calls himself a “servant of Jesus.” The film is an intimate look at the daily life of a man and his faith, frequently at odds with life in the Internet-driven twenty-first century. He does not wear shoes, does not carry money, and wears only white robes through heat and cold, rain and shine.

His journey has taken him through forty-seven states and thirteen countries in sixteen years. What’s Your Name, also referred to as “James Joseph,” does not believe he is Jesus himself, but has decided to live his life exactly as the Bible tells him: he eats only when food is offered and sleeps only when shelter is offered, nor does he ask for help.

In a nation that worships money, he’s penniless. In a culture that idolizes celebrities, he’s forsaken his identity. He is not without his detractors, however, as the film illustrates. Some are suspicious of his lifestyle, claiming that his status as a “Barefoot Evangelist” is all a publicity stunt. Others are bothered that he does not show more gratitude before moving on to the next town.

On Sunday at 4 p.m. come see the film recently featured on ABC’s 20/20, Time, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal and decide for yourself!

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Artist: Dynamite Walls Director: Kent Allison Running time: 4 min.

Friday, 12:00 p.m. Malco Screen 1

Kodak Demonstration

Director: Sean Tracey Running time: 66 min.

Sunday, 4:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

Kabluey

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Kiss and Ride

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Labou

Three unlikely friends set out on a journey to find the dreaded Ghost of Captain LeRouge, whose ship was lost in the Louisiana bayou over two hundred years ago. What they find is true friendship and the adventure of a lifetime.

Director: Greg Aronowitz. Running time: 95 min.

Sponsored by KidsFirst.org Saturday, 10:00 a.m. Malco Screen 1

A Lawyer Walks into a Bar

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As six law students prepare for the California Bar Exam—which has the highest failure rate in the nation—the filmmakers examine America’s love/hate relationship with lawyers and people’s fascination with suing each other. Lawyers both famous and infamous, as well as comedians, discuss other lawyers, frivolous lawsuits, and litigiousness in America.

Director: Eric Chaikin. Running time: 90 min.

Saturday, 2:20 p.m. Malco Screen 2 www.alawyerwalksintoabar.com/home.html

The Listening Project

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With the 2008 Presidential campaigns underway, candidates are promising to “restore America’s image abroad.” But what does the world actually think of America? This simple question led to a global quest for four Americans. During a thought-provoking journey thorough fourteen countries, four American “listeners” linger in some unforgettable places, from a bling-bling Shanghai hip-hop club to a bullet-pocked Afghan village.

Emotional encounters with diverse and fascinating characters reveal the breadth of United States impact on ordinary people’s lives around the world. The result is an inspiring appeal to the viewer and American voter to consider the meaning of citizenship in a globalized world.

Director: Dominic Howes Running time: 84 min.

Friday, 5:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

www.thelisteningprojectfilm.com

c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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A supermarket owner comes home from a hard day of work to find a bug that bugs him.

Director: Thad Lee. Running time: 5 min.

Lee’s film, The Red Dawns, played in the third Oxford Film Festival (2005).

Friday, 10:00 p.m. Malco Screen 1

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Memo to Pic Desk

This film is an idiosyncratic look at staging in news photography, using materials from the archives of a Toronto daily. Moral codes, delinquency, and autonomy are pulled into an altered coherence, as vintage photos are examined next to their typewritten trail.

Director: Chris Kennedy and Anna van der Meulen Running time: 7 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Mississippi Chicken

7B

Questions of race, workers’ rights, and exploitation form the crux of this intriguing documentary about Latin American immigrants living in rural Mississippi, where poultry plants promise jobs but little else. Shot on Super 8mm film, which gives it a lustrous, saturated color, Mississippi Chicken reveals the textures, moods, and struggles of the New South.

Director: John Fiege Running time: 82 min.

Friday, 2:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

www.mississippichicken.com

Miss Lil’s Camp

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At an exclusive all-girls summer camp in Georgia, director, Lillian Smith, or “Miss Lil’,” as the campers called her, taught privileged young women in the Jim Crow South that segregation was wrong.

Some young campers were repulsed by her ideas while others embraced them. Radical as the camp was for the times, nothing prepared the South for Smith’s first novel, Strange Fruit, published in 1944. The book was labeled obscene, banned in Boston, and distributed around the South in a paper bag. In Miss Lil’s Camp, three former campers and a former camp employee return to Laurel Falls Camp in Clayton, Georgia, in fall 2003. Through the memories of these women, and rare audio-visual archival footage, Laurel Falls Camp and Lillian Smith are brought back to life.

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Have you heard of a Mumblecore?

Director: Suzanne Niedland Running time: 26 min.

Friday, 2:45 p.m.

Malco Screen 3 Encore screening: Monday, Feb. 11 at 12:00 p.m. in the Sarah Isom Center for Women (Johnson Commons) on the University of Mississippi campus, as part of their Brown Bag Lecture Series

As seen in Rolling Stone’s annual Hot Issue (October 2007).

Mumblecore [muhm-buhl-kohr, adj.] refers to a style of filmmaking characterized by low-budget production, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors, with stories frequently focusing on the relationships of twenty-somethings. (See Wikipedia.)

The adjective is used to describe to the films of Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Aaron Katz, and Joe Swanberg—filmmakers who first met in 2005 at the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, and kept running into each other on the film festival circuit. Eventually, they began to collaborate on each other’s projects, as writers and actors as well as directors. The term first appeared in an interview in Indiewire magazine where Bujalski attributed it to a comment made by his sound editor, Eric Masunaga. The term, which was supposed to be a joke, stuck, and has since been appearing left and right in recent film and entertainment publications.

Those who love Mumblecore find it reminiscent of Eric Rohmer, John Cassavetes, or even Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith. Digital or DIY filmmaking has allowed Mumblecore filmmakers to be extremely prolific. Swanberg has had feature films in the last three SXSW festivals (Kissing on the Mouth, LOL, Hannah Takes the Stairs—all available on video). In the Spring 2007 issue of Filmmaker Magazine, Alicia Van Couvering writes, “[Mumblecore] films employ handheld, vérité-style digital camerawork and long takes. Budgets are tiny. The plots hinge on everyday events. The stories are often obvious reflections of the filmmakers’ lives. Most characters are white and educated and pursue creative endeavors when not pursuing one another.

They are sensitive. They are sincere. A lot of tension ensues over the answering or non-answering of cell-phone calls.

Characters frequently attend and perform in sparsely populated weeknight music shows. There is an abundance of road trips.

Technology is ever present.” In an August 2007 issue of The Village Voice, J. Hoberman writes, “Mumblecore is demographically self-contained. Straight, white, middle class. The movies suggest college, without the course load. There are almost no grown-ups—which is to say anyone over thirty.”

Meanwhile, those who hate Mumblecore find it narcissistic and self-absorbed, with the movement’s inevitable backlash gaining momentum. In the November/December 2007 issue of Film Comment, Amy Taubin calls it an “indie movement that was never more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding,” though she did admit that Aaron Katz’s Quiet City has “a lyric beauty rarely associated with digital cinematography.”

Is Mumblecore a flash in the pan? Is it a movement past its prime? Is it the twenty-first century equivalent of the French New Wave? You decide….

www.misslilscamp.com/index.html

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Moving Midway

Award-winning Southern film critic Godfrey Cheshire uses the relocation of his family’s North Carolina plantation as the occasion to examine the Southern plantation in American history and culture, including its impact on areas as diverse as music, movies, and contemporary race relations. Part present-tense family drama, part cultural essay, the film also involves an ongoing dialogue between Cheshire and Dr. Robert Hinton, an African-American history professor whose grandfather was born a slave at Midway Plantation.

Director: Godfrey Cheshire Running time: 98 min.

Presented by the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation Saturday, 12:15 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

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Mule Lip Blues Artist: Harpo Director: Mark Glidewell Running time: 4 min.

Friday, 10:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Nobody

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In the winter of 2001, a drifter walked into the Memphis Coast Guard station seeking a boat to take on the Mississippi River. He spoke about a red-haired vixen named Mitzi, a Midwestern steel shop where he worked ninety-hours a week, and an epic journey down four rivers from Marion, Indiana, to Memphis, Tennessee.

See Quiet City on Saturday at 4:00 p.m., and see what the buzz is about.

Director: Lance Murphey and Alan Spearman Running time: 66 min.

Memphis film Saturday, 4:40 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

— Michelle Emanuel

www.nobodythefilm.com

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c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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Oh Paris Artist: Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele Director: Dent May and Rory Fraser. Running time: 4 min.

Saturday, 4:00 p.m. Malco Screen 1

Papiroflexia

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Papiroflexia (Spanish for origami) is the animated tale of Fred, a skillful paper folder who could shape the world with his hands. Originally created as a poem by the director, it was turned into a short animated film for the UCLA Animation Workshop.

Vintage, Purple HazeInternet Music, and Cafe’

Director: Joaquin Baldwin Running time: 3 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

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Passage

505 Heritage Drive | Oxford, Mississippi 38655 662.236.3232 (phone) 662.236.3234 (fax) Lunch, Tuesday - Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Dinner, Thursday - Saturday from 5:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Closed daily 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Dine in or carry out

An inquiry into memory, landscape, and departure, this film visually catches sight of experience, as it moves past. In this work, the artists create a layered encounter with streams of imagery and sound. The music employs 19-tone equal temperament tuning, which provides many acoustically very pure melodic and harmonic intervals, but also “blue” notes and intervals that tend to sound “stretched” or ”compressed”. The music is anchored by a slowly evolving flute-like theme that is threaded through an everchanging landscape of harmonic, rhythmic, and coloristic textures.

Open 7 days a week 11 AM to 9 PM 1004 N. Lamar Blvd.

Oxford, MS 38655 662.234.6669 www.purplehazeoxford.com www.myspace.com/ purplehazeoxfordms

Director: Peter Byrne Running time: 7 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Passing

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To create this short film that explores the idea of passing (passing time, passing histories, and passing away), self-portrait photographs of the filmmaker, taken in an abandoned home, were used as a stage to reinhabit and reinvent through single frame animation. Mark making, collage, and sound engender a new history in the spaces of a vanishing home.

Director: Vanessa Woods Running time: 2 min.

Woods’s films, What the Water Saw and The Touch, played in the fourth Oxford Film Festival (2007).

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

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The Pipe

A pill-popping paramedic and a stoic security guard work the midnight shift, protecting the air pipe of a radio personality who has been buried alive for forty-six days as a publicity stunt. A lot can happen when two crazy people are left alone in the dark with a pipe. Based on a short story by Jack Pendarvis (John and Renee Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence, the University of Mississippi, 2007-08).

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Pismo (The Letter)

After spending nearly three years as a partisan fighter in the wilderness, Stepan is badly wounded and rescued by advancing regular army. Healed and sent home, the battle for Stepan is hardly over as a new, different battle has only just begin.

Director: Matvei Zhivov Running time: 15 min.

In Russian with English subtitles.

Canada Friday, 4:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Director: Dan Brown Running time: 15 min.

Friday, 8:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

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Quiet City

Silver Who? “It’s like Footloose. I come into town… liberate the feet of the teens.” –David Berman In the summer of 2006, the collective heart of Silver Jews fans skipped a beat when the band announced their first-ever world tour after almost twenty years together. For those not yet initiated into the obsession, the Joos are one of indie rock’s most celebrated rock bands.

A beautiful and strange combination of indie rock, country-rock and lo-fi with lyrics both witty and profound, the Silver Jews were formed in 1989 by writer/musician David Berman with his friends, Pavement’s guitarist/singer Stephen Malkmus and drummer Bob Nastanovich, while they were students at the University of Virginia. After graduation, they took the budding project with them to New York where their music thrived in the city’s frenetic air. The band’s roster has changed continuously, but Berman, a heartbreaking writer and constant innovator, as well as the only constant member in the band, has always been at the center. It’s his project, his voice.

Famously elusive, the band’s guitarist/singer has chronicled disaffection and loss with quirky, intelligent humor and sharp, often ambiguous lyrics. Famous for his slightly Southern-inflected and often talky delivery of simultaneously vague and vivid places, people, and psychological states, Berman’s lyrics garner close attention. He’s an accomplished poet published in bigtime literary journals—his book, Actual Air, is well worth picking up—but in his songs lie simple truths which poetry often struggles to confront. His eye for detail and achingly careful craftsmanship carries over into his music.

As a music documentary, Silver Jew includes typical behind-the-scenes moments of a band on tour, but unexpectedly portrays a moving account of Berman’s spiritual experience in Israel. A secular Jew until a few years ago, the tour’s Israeli leg is, for Berman, a true pilgrimage, and the heart of Michael Tully’s film. Silver Jew is a film for both diehard fans and those new to the band.

–Elizabeth Kaiser See Silver Jew on Saturday at 5:30 p.m.

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Jamie has come to New York to visit her friend Samantha, but Samantha is nowhere to be found—now Jamie is lost alone in the city. Charlie just quit his job, and isn’t sure where he’s going next. Their paths cross late at night on an empty subway platform, and from this chance encounter an unlikely connection is formed. Together they share twenty-four hours drifting from late night diners, to city parks, to abandoned apartments, to a party, and art gallery deep in the heart of industrial Brooklyn.

Director: Aaron Katz Running time: 78 min.

Saturday, 4:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

www.dancepartyusathemovie.com/quietcity/?cat=7

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Refraction/Reflection Artist: John Latartara Director: April Grayson . Running time: 5 min.

Saturday, 12:00 p.m. = Malco Screen 1

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Shuteye Hotel

In this film noir murder mystery set in a sleazy hotel, cops become victims of an evil force as they investigate a series of gruesome murders.

What Jaws did to swimming, Shuteye Hotel will do for sleeping.

Director: Bill Plympton Running time: 7 min. www.plymptoons.com Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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Silver Jew

Not your typical music documentary, Silver Jew is an intimate portrait of reclusive poet/musician David Berman, the guiding force behind one of indie rock’s most revered bands, the Silver Jews. In the midst of their first-ever world tour, Berman, his wife Cassie, and the rest of the group traveled to Israel to play two shows and visit Jerusalem.

Director: Michael Tully Running time: 51 min.

Saturday, 5:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

www.silverjewmovie.com

The Song of Pumpkin Brown

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In 1961, ten-year-old Pumpkin Brown loses his preacher father and their rural South Carolina home. Sent to the Jenkins Orphanage, the shy, lonely boy is introduced to the jazz trumpet as a means of dealing with his grief, a form of expression that will set Pumpkin on a course of lifelong creativity and music. The film creates a moving, fictional tale within the real-life context of the infamous Jenkins Orphanage Band, renowned by jazz historians as the “jazz nursery” that put instruments in the young hands of legendary musicians like Jabbo Smith, Freddie Green, and Cat Anderson.

1-Day Signs 2422 South Lamar Blvd 236.5441 www.onedaysign.com

Director: Brad Jayne Running time: 32 min.

Saturday, 12:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Sorry, We’re Open

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A tribute to the Hoka, a cotton warehouse turned movie theater that served as the heart of Oxford’s cultural and counter-cultural life from the late 1970s through the middle 1990s. Owner and creator of the Hoka, Ron(zo) Shapiro and a cast of Hoka regulars remember the gonzo theater that took its name from Princess Hoka, the Chickasaw matriarch who sold the land that is now Oxford, and lends its name to the award presented to winners of the Oxford Film Festival. From Charlie Chaplin to cheesecake, live wrestling matches to midnight skin flicks, B-movies to bulldozers, the Hoka, though gone, still stands in the memories of those who lived it and loved it as an enduring symbol of the power of good film, great friends, and better times.

emsimms@gmail.com

TOLLISON LAW FIRM, P.A. Attorneys at Law 100 Courthouse Square Post Office Box 1216 Oxford, Mississippi 38655

Tel. (662) 234-7070 Facsimile (662) 234-7095 www.tollisonlaw.com

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York’s films, Above the Line: Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch House, Whole Hog, and Hot Chicken, played in the fourth Oxford Film Festival (2007).

Thursday, 9:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

Hoka Talk Sorry We’re Open, Joe York’s latest documentary short, tells the story of the infamous Hoka Theater, Oxford’s one-time cotton warehouse-turned-movie theater, run by its owner, Ron Shapiro, and trusty projectionist, Barton Segal. Though the theater closed in 1996, and the building completely torn down in 2007, “Ronzo” (as he is known around Oxford) and Barton are still huge movie fans, and can talk for hours about movies both old and new.

Recently, Ronzo and Barton sat down to interview each other for a segment called “Hoka Talk,” taped for Ole Miss TV’s Channel 99. This is a segment from that interview, currently in rotation: Ron Shapiro: Now what would you do, if we were in the same situation as just a one-screen movie theater, what we did back then as my idea was to show like an art film at 8:00, something kind of college-y …

Barton Segal: Right. The one thing I would look into, in this day and age, I wouldn’t have a single-screen [theater] …

RS: Well no, I was just saying…

BS: I would have like a twin … I would not have a single screen house. With a twin or a three [screen], you have three films side by side. One of them will go gangbusters. One of them may be mediocre, and one of them may tank. But if you have a single screen house…

RS: Yeah, you’re putting everything in one basket…

BS: And another thing, in this day and age of film rental, you couldn’t have a single screen and do what we did back then [such as] run three different films, [as] the advance would kind of eat you alive. And remember one time? We actually ran FOUR films in one day! We ran Peter Pan, Women [on] the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown…

RS: John Cassavetes?

BS: No, it was that [Pedro Almodóvar].

RS: Oh yeah, from Spain.

BS: And then Erik the Viking, and then Rocky Horror. And after that day, you’ll recall, that’s the only day that that ever happened, because I would not allow it to happen again.

RS: What, did we start at 6:00? How’d we do four?

BS: 6:00, 8:00, 10:00, and 12:00.

RS: Heh heh.

BS: No…6:30, 8:00, 10:00, and 12:00. But that was simply TOO MUCH FILM. Even when we had what came to be known as “the basement”, under the platter, even still that was simply TOO MUCH. TOO MUCH FILM! And you, remember how I was so adamant about starting a film on time? The reason why I was adamant was, especially if we were Running two two-hour films back to back, I was adamant because of the domino effect.

RS: Right, if you’re late on one, it just backs up…

BS: It’s one thing to have to start the film, but to have to deal with the tickets, starting the film, and … it would be a bit too intense which is why, [when] sometimes you weren’t there, I’d actually start the previews five minutes early!

RS: Right. I always wanted to start late because I thought people came late…

BS: No, no! Okay, in that case, YOU can run the film!

RS: Right.

BS: You can handle it! If you want to start it late… If you had done that one time yourself…

RS: Yeah, I’d understand.

BS: You do understand. There was this one time….

RS: Well, listen, we’re going to have to talk about that later, because we are out of time.

To see more of Ron and Barton, be sure to check out Sorry We’re Open on our opening night, Thursday, February 7 at 9 p.m.

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Strange Culture

The surreal nightmare of internationally-acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure.

Police arrived, became suspicious of Kurtz’s art, and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected “bioterrorist” as dozens of agents in hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife’s body.

Today Kurtz and his long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell, former Chair of the Genetics Department at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, await a trial date. Includes a re-enactment of events with acclaimed actors Tilda Swinton and Peter Coyote.

Director: Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Running time: 75 min. www.lynnhershman.com/newprojects.htm Saturday, 10:45 a.m. Malco Screen 2

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Summer Scars

In this dark, coming-of-age thriller, six fourteen-year-old kids blow off school to play hooky in the woods where a power struggle emerges between the two rival leaders, Bingo and Paul. Who will be first to ride the stolen moped, and who will be first to impress Leanne, the only girl in the group? After a hit-and-run incident involving the scooter, the kids are befriended by the victim—a drifter named Peter. He recruits the boys in a military-style game designed to test their endurance. But as Peter’s behavior becomes increasingly aggressive, the kids are forced to settle their differences and embrace the dark side of human nature if they are going to survive the ordeal.

Director: Julian Richards Running time: 73 min.

United Kingdom Friday, 12:25 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

Sylvia Hyman: Eternal Wonder

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Sylvia Hyman was in her forties when she first began working in clay, quickly gaining international recognition. Five decades later she continues to re-invent herself as an artist as she pushes the boundaries of her medium. The film traces the evolution of Hyman’s career as an artist.

As a master of trompe l’oeil clay, Hyman’s sculptures inspire both disorientation and delight when viewers realize that everyday objects that appear to be made of wood, cardboard, and paper are actually superbly realized simulations made of clay. Sylvia Hyman: Eternal Wonder pro-

c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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vides a truly inspirational portrait of both the artist and the person, as we discover an artist at the peak of her powers as she prepares for her ninetieth birthday.

721 north lamar oxford, mississippi 38655

Director: Curt Hahn Running time: 24 min.

Friday, 12:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

3 blocks north of the square in mid-town shopping center

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Natalie, an Upper East Side girl, has made a different kind of adoption.

She sets out on Fifth Avenue heading for Central Park where she’ll introduce the new baby to her grandmother. She encounters friends and one stranger who all have strong reactions to the baby in the buggy.

Director: Holly Robertson. Running time: 5 min.

Friday, 8:00 p.m. Malco Screen 2

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Temporary Virgin

Artist: Ringo Shiina Director: Tastushi Momen Running time: 3 min.

Japan Saturday, 4:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

Testing Hope: Grade 12 in the New South Africa

662.236.0096

mississippi

Made

hand

Taylor

oxford, mississippi

Prize for 2008 Best Mississippi Film Donated by Mississippi Handmade Hand turned by Ray Morton of Tupelo, MS

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Chronicles the lives of four young people in Nyanga township, South Africa, as they work towards their crucial Matric exams, which one student calls, “the decider.” These students began school in 1994, the same year apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela became president.

While this is the new South Africa, many vestiges of apartheid persist.

The film follows the students as they prepare for the exams they believe will determine their future. It explores what hangs in the balance if students pass Matric and what awaits those who do not. How do they achieve their dreams in a country where so many obstacles remain?

Director: Molly Blank Running time: 40 min.

Friday, 12:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

The Oxford Film Festival, Dallas Chapter is fired up and ready for another great weekend of movies and events.

If you would like to start your own fan club chapter, send an email to sponsor@ oxfordfilmfest .com

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Testing the Undertow

weird electric static. Dizzy from its recently acquired shock, the mosquito buzzes into a dilapidated, deserted shack, and bites a voodoo doll stuck with pins, causing the doll to come to life.

Testing the Undertow is a personal examination of class, pride, and identity as it has played out on the landscape of Marin County, California, from the 1980s to the present.

Director: Jennifer Proctor Running time: 13 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 3

Director: Javier Gutierrez Running time: 12 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

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The Waif of Persephone

Based on the legend of Persephone, this film explores the way commerce and political agendas can destroy the purity of art and nature.

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Voodoo Bayou

Director: Nick Cross Running time: 12 min.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

On a stormy night, in a deep, dark corner of the Louisiana Bayou, a distracted mosquito is struck by a fierce bolt of lightning, leaving it with a

Who’s Judging Whom?

Our panel of esteemed festival jurors will select award winners in each category from nominees selected by the festival co-directors, based primarily on feedback from the volunteer screening committee.

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Waves An abstract study in color, texture, and light.

Director: David M. Yun. Running time: 2 min.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Malco Screen 3

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Feature Category Jack Barbera is a Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He teaches courses in film and twentieth-century literature.

Scott Weinberg is a writer and film critic for Cinematical.com, Fearnet.com, and eFilmCritic.com.

Erik Jambor is the director of the BendFilm Festival in Bend, Oregon. He was a co-founder of the Sidewalk Moving Pictures Festival in Birmingham, Alabama.

Wedding Bliss

Sebastian proposes to Agnes in their favorite park. She accepts and they dance off into the sunset with a promise to meet at the same spot the following day. The next day, however, Sebastian is late, and as Agnes approaches “their” spot, she sees a man that appears to be Sebastian propositioning to a prostitute. Working under a misunderstanding, Agnes schemes to get revenge on an innocent Sebastian.

Documentary Category Jeff Scheftel is a film and television producer (TV Junkie, Grammy telecast), and documentary filmmaker (Welcome to Death Row).

Director: Rick Baldwin Running time: 15 min.

Saturday, 2:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

Kim Voynar is a writer and film critic for Cinematical.com.

Camp Best is a local artist and Executive Director of the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council.

Short Formats Category (include Narrative Short, Documentary Short, Animated Short, Music Video) Alice Walker is a local artist and filmmaker (Glorious Mail).

Kelly Williams is the Film Program Director of the Austin Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

Tom Huckabee is the Artistic Director of the Lone Star International Film Festival in Fort Worth, Texas.

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Weeding by Example

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City Park, one of the oldest and most-visited public parks in America, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The 1,300-acre park, a retreat for New Orleanians since 1854, sustained over forty million dollars in damages and lost ninety percent of its employees. Less than twelve months after the storm, the Mow-Rons, a small group of residents from City Park’s Lakeview Neighborhood, decided to come together to bring their park back, one weed at a time. Weeding by Example

c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

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tells the story of these New Orleanians as they rebuild their personal lives and work to preserve the park and the city they love.

Director: Sarah McKnight and Kathleen Ledet Running time: 13 min.

Friday, 5:45 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

When the Light’s Red

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What do you do when a panhandler asks for money? Do you feel discomfort, contempt, compassion? When the Light’s Red is a humorous and poignant look at the complex interaction between drivers and intersection panhandlers. It is an examination of privilege, power, reality, and the way in which these forces intersect inside our heads and outside our comfort zone.

Director: Keith Wilson Running time: 11 min.

Wilson’s film, Southern Family, played in the third Oxford Film Festival (2005).

Saturday, 4:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

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The Wine Bar

On a winter night in New York City, Henry, an average guy, wanders into an upscale wine bar looking for a beer. Obviously out of place, Henry innocently offends both the snooty Bartender and Evelyn, the pretty young woman quietly reading next to him. When Steven, Evelyn’s hotheaded boyfriend, comes in looking for a fight, Henry decides to take matters into his own hands. The Wine Bar is a short comedy about saying what you mean and not judging a book by its cover.

Director: Christian Remde Running time: 12 min.

Saturday, 2:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 2

Yesterday’s Charm

150 Courthouse Square Monday - Saturday: 10 - 6 Sunday: 12 - 5 www.southsideartgallery.com 662.234.9090

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Filmmaker Jarratt Taylor tours Oxford, Mississippi, with his mother as she visits landmarks from past and present and recalls the years she spent there as a student and for family gatherings.

Director: Jarratt Taylor Running time: 7 min.

Taylor’s film, The Farm, played in the fourth Oxford Film Festival (2007).

Saturday, 2:00 p.m.

Malco Screen 1

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Oxford Film Festival 2008 Genre/Category List

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ANIMATED SHORTS

Gimme Green = Fri., 6:00 p.m. = Screen 1 Harry Crews: Survival is Triumph Enough = Sat., 10:00 a.m. = Screen 2

Block = Saturday, 6:30 p.m. = Screen 2 Arjuna

Miss Lil’s Camp = Fri., 2:45 p.m. = Screen 3 Bad Wicked Girl and a Red Wagon Sorry, We’re Open = Thu., 9:00 p.m. = Screen 1 Canvas Sylvia Hyman: Eternal Wonder = Fri., 12:00 p.m. = Screen 3 Egg Ghost Fault

Testing Hope: Grade 12 in the New South Africa = Fri., 12:30 p.m. = Screen 3

An Introduction to Lucid Dream Exploration

Weeding by Example = Fri., 5:45 p.m. = Screen 1

Papiroflexia

When the Light’s Red = Sat., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Shuteye Hotel

Yesterday’s Charm = Sat., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Voodoo Bayou The Waif of Persephone

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EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS Block = Sat., 2:30 p.m. = Screen 3

DOCUMENTARY FEATURES

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Another Word for Family

America Unchained = Fri., 6:45 p.m. = Screen 1

August

Banished = Sat., 6:30 p.m. = Screen 3

Burren

Beyond the Call = Fri., 3:50 p.m. = Screen 1

Five Cents a Peek

Election Day = Fri., 1:15 p.m. = Screen 3

Glimpse

The First Saturday in May = Fri., 8:15 p.m. = Screen 2

Hypervibes

Forgotten Coast = Sat., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Memo to Pic Desk

Good Riddance = Sat., 10:00 p.m. = Screen 2

Passage

Greensboro: Closer to the Truth = Fri., 2:15 p.m. = Screen 2

Passing

The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians Through Film = Fri., 12:30 p.m. = Screen 2

Testing the Undertow Waves

I Love Hip Hop in Morocco = Sat., 12:20 p.m. = Screen 2 In the Wake of Assassins = Fri., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 2 MISSISSIPPI FILMS The Jesus Guy = Sun., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 1

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(includes Mississippi Filmmakers and/or Subjects) A Lawyer Walks into a Bar = Sat., 2:20 p.m. = Screen 2 Another Word for Family = Sat., 2:30 p.m. = Screen 3 The Listening Project = Fri., 5:00 p.m. = Screen 3 Bad Wicked Girl and a Red Wagon = Sat., 6:30 p.m. = Screen 2 Mississippi Chicken = Fri., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1 Blue Mountain = Thu., 10:00 p.m. = Screen 1 Moving Midway = Sat., 12:15 p.m. = Screen 1 Falsifyin’ = Sat., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1 Nobody = Sat., 4:40 p.m. = Screen 1 Silver Jew = Sat., 5:30 p.m. = Screen 2

If the Year Were Only Three Months / Lexington Bros. = Thu., 7:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Strange Culture = Sat., 10:45 a.m. = Screen 2

Mississippi Chicken = Fri., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1 Mule Lip Blues / Harpo = Fri., 10:00 p.m. = Screen 3

DOCUMENTARY SHORTS

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Blue Mountain = Thu., 10:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Oh Paris / Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele = Sat., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Falsifyin’ = Sat., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Reflection/Refraction = Sat., 12:00 p.m. = Screen 1

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c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

a Sorry, We’re Open = Thu., 7:00 p.m. = Screen 1

NARRATIVE SHORTS

Wedding Bliss = Sat., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Angels Buried in the Soil = Fri., 3:30 p.m. = Screen 3

Yesterday’s Charm = Sat., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Aquarium = Fri., 12:00 p.m. = Screen 1

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A.W.O.L. = Fri., 12:00p.m. = Screen 2 MUSIC VIDEO

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Good Morning, Herr Horst / Mando Diao = Fri., 8:15 p.m. = Screen 3

Boletos por Favor (Tickets Please) = Fri., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 3 Droomtijd (Dreamtime) = Fri., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 3 DVD = Sat., 12:00 p.m. = Screen 2

If the Year Were Only Three Months / Lexington Bros. = Thu., 7:00 p.m. = Screen 1

The Frank Anderson = Fri., 6:45 p.m. = Screen 3

Kiss and Ride / Dynamite Walls = Fri., 12:00 p.m. = Screen 1

From the Files of a Very Concerned Psychologist = Fri., 10:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Mule Lip Blues / Harpo = Fri., 10:00 p.m. = Screen 3 Goldfish = Sat., 11:45 a.m. = Screen 1 Oh Paris / Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele = Sat., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 1

The Heist = Thu., 7:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Reflection/Refraction = Sat., 12:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Mantis Rhes = Fri., 10:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Temporary Virgin / Ringo Shiina = Sat., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 2

The Pipe = Fri., 8:00 p.m = Screen 1

NARRATIVE FEATURES

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Pismo (The Letter) = Fri., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 3 The Song of Pumpkin Brown = Sat., 12:00 p.m. = Screen 3

American Fork = Fri., 8:30 p.m. = Screen 1

Taylor = Fri., 8:00 p.m. = Screen 2

Beyond the Pale = Sat., 12:45 p.m. = Screen 3

Wedding Bliss = Sat., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 1

Blood Car = Fri., 10:20 p.m. = Screen 1

The Wine Bar = Sat., 2:00 p.m. = Screen 2

The Book of Noah = Fri., 7:00 p.m. = Screen 3 The Cake Eaters = Fri., 8:15 p.m. = Screen 3 The Elephant King = Sat., 6:00 p.m. = Screen 1 The Importance of Being Russell = Fri., 10:00 p.m. = Screen 3 Kabluey = Thu., 7:00 p.m. = Screen 1 Labou = Sat., 10:00 a.m. = Screen 1 Quiet City = Sat., 4:00 p.m. = Screen 2 Summer Scars = Fri., 12:25 p.m. = Screen 1

YOUR FILM COULD BE HERE! The Oxford Film Festival will be accepting submissions for our Sixth Annual Festival (February 2009) from April 15 to September 15, 2008. For submission information, please refer to our website: www.oxfordfilmfest.com

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Panels and Workshops 2008 THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7 E.F. Yerby Center, University of Mississippi Campus Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law CLE 8:00 a.m. Registration 8:30 a.m. Intellectual Property for the General Practitioner 9:40 a.m. Intellectual Property Issues in Film 10:50 a.m. Covering Your Assets: Intellectual Property for Corporate/Business Practice 1:30 p.m. Protecting Identity: Issues in Privacy Rights, Rights of Publicity, and False Light Litigation 2:40 p.m. Navigating the Ethical Minefield in IP Law 3:50 p.m. IP Goes Online: Intellectual Property Issues and the Internet

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8 E.F. Yerby Center, University of Mississippi Campus Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law CLE 8:30 a.m. Finding the Money: Federal and State Tax Incentives for Film 9:50 a.m. Past in the Present: Licensing Issues for Archival Materials 11:00 a.m. Attorneys’ Roundtable 1:30 p.m. From Page to Film: Writers’ Issues on the Road from Idea to Screenplay to Screen and Beyond 2:50 p.m. In Synch: Music in Film 4:10 p.m. Film and the New Media: Writing About Film in Print and for the Blogosphere

Children’s Filmmaking Workshop

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Is your child the next Martin Scorsese or Sofia Coppola? Does she like to be in front of the camera? Would you like to get him off the couch for two hours on a Saturday? Then sign him or her up for our Children’s Filmmaking Workshop!

The members of Laff Co., Oxford’s own sketch, improv, and comedy troupe, will lead the Oxford Film Festival’s Children’s Film Workshop to be held at the Powerhouse Community Arts Center. There will be two workshops that day: the first (10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.) will be for younger children, while the second (1:00-3:00 p.m.) will be for pre-teens and teenagers.

The morning workshop, for ages 6-11, will focus on telling a story through film. The first half of the workshop will help the kids work in groups to create a story format; the second half will be used to shoot a short film based on the group’s story selection.

A pizza lunch for both workshops will be provided by Domino’s at noon.

The afternoon workshop, for ages 12-18, will focus on the structure of filmmaking. The first half of the workshop will help the kids develop a storyline; the second half will be used to film a short feature that focuses on some of the finer aspects of story development.

Advance registration is required. The workshop is free for participants, but is limited to thirty children for each session. To register, please call the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council at (662) 236-6429.

Laff Co., recently crowned champions of the 2007 South Eastern Comedy Arts Festival, performs on the first Thursday of (almost) every month. To learn more about Laff Co., check out their MySpace page online at www.myspace.com/laffco.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9 Powerhouse Community Arts Center (413 S. 14th Street) Children’s Filmmaking Workshop 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Ages 6-11 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Pizza lunch, sponsored by Domino’s 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Ages 12-18 Free for participants—Advanced Registration is required (236-6429) Malco Studio Cinema, Screen 3 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Fund Your Film!: A Workshop with Stu Pollard 2:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. Experimental Block and Panel 5:00 p.m. Talent and Casting Workshop NOTICE: All panelists are scheduled to appear at the time of this printing. Due to the nature of the industry, however, some panelists may not be available at festival time.

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Continuing Legal Education Panels: Legal and Ethical Issues in Film (Detailed schedule on page 40) The world of film and television is a minefield of legal issues. From setting up a production company, taking advantage of tax incentives, and licensing music for a film, lawyers play a necessary and integral role in the development of film and television. This year, the Oxford Film Festival brings the lawyers back to the table to sound off on these issues that have a resounding effect in the daily life of global business.

Attorneys from around the region come together to share their

knowledge and experience in intellectual property, technology, communications, and entertainment law. Attending attorneys can earn credits for continuing legal education (CLE), but the topics presented on Thursday and Friday appeal to a wider audience as well. Filmmakers, musicians, production companies, technology companies, and students can all learn the nuances of the important issues at the heart of the business of film.

The first day of the program, Thursday, February 7, provides an array of topics on intellectual property. From a primer on handling intellectual property issues in a general law practice, to the intricacies of the Internet and e-commerce, the program offers in-depth knowledge on these very current topics. Morning panelists include Stephan L. McDavid (Harris Shelton Hanover Walsh, PLLC), Anne E. Pitts (Fergusson Pitts, PLLC, Oxford, Miss.), and Terry Morris (Morris Law Firm, Prairieville, La.). Also on Thursday, Bill Luckett, Clarksdale attorney (Luckett Tyner Law Firm), and co-owner of Ground Zero Blues Club and Madidi’s Restaurant, discusses his lawsuit against the makers of the film Borat. Memphis attorney Grady Garrison (Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz) discusses his negotiations to turn the true life story of a legendary mountain climber into a major motion picture. Additional afternoon panelists include Will Wilkins (University of Mississippi) and Hemant Gupta (Butler, Snow, O’Mara, Stevens & Cannada, Memphis, Tenn.).

The second day of the program, Friday, February 8, is packed full of exciting panels on issues that are part of the daily filmmaking process. Each panel teams up attorneys with industry professionals including filmmakers, screenwriters, producers, and musicians to talk about the current issues that they grapple with to get their story idea onto the screen. Attorneys discuss the legal implications of these issues and the legal incentives and protections available. The morning begins with a discussion and Q&A on federal and state tax incentives for filmmakers and investors, led by Hal “Corky” Kessler, an attorney with Levin & Ginsburg (Chicago, Ill.). And did you know that libraries across the country have a significant role in filmmaking? Library archives contain a treasure trove of film clips, photographs, and other valuable tools that help tell a filmmaker’s story. Finding copyright holders and licensing issues can be a confusing maze. This panel will help you get through it.

A roundtable discussion will bring together attorneys from around the region to share concerns, solutions, and ideas on the issues they face in practice and ways to provide the best services to clients in intellectual property and entertainment law.

After lunch, the program continues with issues that affect writers for film and television. Heard of the Writer’s Guild strike? Whether you’re a filmmaker or just a fan of the popular TV series Lost, you feel the effects of this strike everyday. Screenwriters, television writers, and attorneys discuss this and other issues that concern the writer throughout the process of turning a script into film.

Finishing the CLE on Friday are two very exciting topics. First, an all-star panel discusses the use of music in film. Whether it’s a dramatic orchestra or a new pop star’s hit, the music sets the tone, the emotion, and the pace of the film. This panel discusses how music is made for film, including how to license it and how to choose it. The CLE will end with a panel on “new media” and its role in the life and success of a film. From big conglomorate media companies to Internet bloggers, the face of media has certainly changed. Media expert and law professor Gary Myers and the best in film writing today discuss these changes and how crucial the media is for your film’s success.

Attorneys may register for the CLE at www.oxfordfilmfest.com/intel_prop.pdf to receive up to twelve hours of continuing legal education credit, including one hour of ethics.

Filmmakers, students, and the general public, however, may attend any topic free of charge with purchase of any film festival pass.

Experimental Block and Panel

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Experimental Films = Non-mainstream Experimental Films = Avant-Garde Experimental Films = Animation, New Narrative, New Genre Documentary, altered 16 mm filmstock.

Experimental Films = Something new and different.

Experimental Films = The best block at this year’s OFF! It is difficult to categorize experimental films, they have been called non-mainstream, avant-garde, or moving paintings; no matter how they are labeled, experimental films are definitely not “Hollywood.”

Experimental films have provided the viewer an alternative to the traditional viewing experience because the films do not follow a specific structure. At the same time, they provide filmmakers an outlet for using cutting-edge techniques. Historically, experimental films were focused on the actual manipulation of the film through physical alterations to the film’s surface. Today’s experimental filmmakers are embracing new digital strategies that are focused on pushing and manipulating the medium of film and video in new ways to express their ideas. This year’s experimental block will feature a wide range of exciting work that defines how varied and complex experimental filmmaking is today. The films featured this year’s block include: animation, altered 16 mm film stock, new genre documentary, and new narrative storytelling. It is a new generation of experimental filmmaking that we are excited to introduce at this year’s OFF!

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a An Interview with Tate

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Not so long ago, Tate Ellington was a student at the University of Mississippi, dreaming of a life outside of his home state. Now a working actor in New York City, in plays Off-Broadway and in films such as The Elephant King (Saturday, 6:00 p.m.), Tate answered a few questions from festival co-director Micah Ginn.

Micah Ginn: What first drew you to acting?

Tate Ellington: Well, I had always wanted to try acting, but we didn’t have a class at my high school. So, my junior summer going into my senior year, I took a two-week class at New Stage Theatre in Jackson. Turns out, it was more of a daycare than a class, and I was one of the oldest people there. However, the instructors liked me and asked that I audition for the role of Peter in their upcoming production of The Diary of Anne Frank.

I did, and I got the part. The six weeks of rehearsals and performances that followed where some of the best in my life. I loved every minute of it. I had never experienced anything like it. In the middle of our second to last performance it suddenly hit me that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

MG: Was it difficult to pack your bags after college and leave your home-state?

TE: Yes and No. I was nervous, but more than anything I was excited. I had always planned to go live somewhere else, so it was just the next step. I had a job at a sort of sketch comedy place in Ohio that I had already lined up so when it was time to go, I went. After my contract was finished with that place, I moved to New York. I had a lot of friends in New York, most of them graduated from Ole Miss, so it was a pretty easy transition. However, always double check where you are moving to. I didn’t and ended up spending my first year in New York in one of Brooklyn’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Good Times.

MG: What do you love most about where you live now?

TE: That’s hard to say. Pizza at two in the morning. I love that in a city of eight million plus people it is possible to literally run into a friend you haven’t seen in six months or two years. That you get to see it all. You get to see the best that people have to offer and the worst that people have to offer, usually at the same time. I love it when the snow falls outside my window.

MG: What do you miss most about Mississippi?

TE: Silence.

MG: How did you get your role in The Elephant King?

TE: I was performing in an Off-Off Broadway show in SoHo titled Finding Graffenberg. A friend of one of the performers, who also happened to be friends with Seth Grossman, the writer/director of The Elephant King, had come to see the show. She called me a few months later asking if she could submit me for the role. She did, and I was asked to audition a few weeks later. I did. This would be the first of four auditions. During which I was informed that I had the role, at which point I was on cloud nine and then later, a week before Christmas, I was informed that I did not have the role. At which point I was somewhere around cloud one or two. However, after the holidays when I had been placed sufficiently through the emotional ringer, I was informed that I did, indeed, have the role, and that I would be boarding a plane for Thailand in a week. At which time, I realized I did not have a passport. But, that is another story.

MG: What’s next for you?

TE: Pilot season, which is always a blast. That is, if there even is a pilot season this year. I will also have some post-production work on my first horror film. Otherwise, I am working on my first screenplay, aren’t we all?, and I have an art show coming up in August for a gallery in L.A., which is a dream come true.

Film and the New Media: Writing About Film In Print and for the Blogosphere Everwonderhowfilmcriticsselectthefilmstheywriteabout?Orwhytheyhatethefilmsthatyoulove?(Orperhaps, made?)Whatmakesafilmbuzzworthyora“mustsee?”Evenworse,aflop?Well,ifyouwanttheanswerto thesequestionsandmanymoreaboutfilmsandthepeoplewhohelpformfilmopinions,youwon’twanttomiss FilmandtheNewMedia:WritingaboutFilminPrintandfortheBlogosphere.

Writers and bloggers will discuss how they choose the films they write about, what provokes them to promote a film, and why they bother to write about the bad ones. They’ll share the techniques they use for developing their critiques and give you some insight on what they’re looking for in both good and bad films.

Join Paul Cullum (writer, LA Weekly, Variety), Jen Yamato (senior editor, writer, film critic, RottenTomatoes.com), Godfrey Cheshire (writer, film critic, New York Times, Newsweek, Variety, Village Voice), Kim Vonyar (writer, film critic Cinematical.com), and Scott Weinberg (writer, film critic, Cinematical.com, Fearnet.com, EfilmCritic.com) as they talk about their work as online and print critics.

They’ll discuss films they have loved, films they have hated, and what inspires them to do what they do.

In addition to experience on the workings of film critics, this session also provides insight into the legal aspects of new media and film criticism. Gary Myers, Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi and a renowned expert in intellectual property and media law, will discuss both the expansions and the limitations of the media, and the new legal issues developed out of this information age.

If you are a filmmaker, a film lover, or an aspiring print critic or blogger, this is one panel you won’t want to miss!

From Page to Film: Writers’ Issues on the Road from Idea to Screenplay to Screen and Beyond Without writers, actors would have nothing to say. But how do the writers’ words become those infamous lines that we quote to our friends? In this panel, working screenwriters will discuss their experiences with having their scripts interpreted for the big screen. How did they get their project made? Did their vision change along the way from page to film? Can directing the project themselves make a difference?

What do they wish that they had known in advance? In light of the recent strike by the Writers Guild of America, the panelists will also discuss issues in intellectual property with regard to online content.

David Sheffield has written for Saturday Night Live, and worked with Eddie Murphy on numerous projects, including Coming to America, Boomerang, and The Nutty Professor. Scott Prendergast is the writer-director-star of our opening night film, Kabluey and has also written episodes of Celebrity Deathmatch. Lee Gutkind co-founded the literary magazine Creative Non-Fiction and gives frequent writing workshops across the country. His most recent book is called Almost Human: Making Robots Think. Anita Modak-Truran is an attorney with Butler, Snow, O’Mara, Stevens, & Cannada, PLLC and was the writer-director-producer of the independent film Belles and Whistles.

She also contributes film reviews to Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

Hal “Corky” Kessler, an attorney with Levin & Ginsburg (Chicago, Ill.), also shares his perspective.

All writers—experienced and aspiring—are invited to share their experiences with and ask questions of our visiting panelists.

Ellington will also take part in our Talent and Casting Panel (Saturday, 5:00 p.m.).

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c = Kid Friendly • B = Mississippi • q = Narrative • 7 = Documentary v = Experimental • M = Animation • f= Music Video

a Fund Your Film!: A Workshop with Stu Pollard Funding your film is no easy task, but respected veteran filmmaker, writer, and producer Stu Pollard can give you the tools to getting your independent film out of your head and onto the screen. This workshop has been lauded by film festivals across the country as a candid, sensible and engaging presentation.

Pollard takes the audience step by step through the necessary steps of raising private financing from the essential elements of a business plan and how to communicate with potential investors to forming companies and selling shares in your film.

Stu Pollard’s expertise comes from years of experience in film production, filmmaking, and acquiring financing. His film Keep Your Distance earned major awards at film festivals across the country and is currently airing on the Showtime family of networks. Nice Guys Sleep Alone, a romantic comedy which Pollard adapted from the best-selling Bruce Feirstein book, was the first title acquired by Netflix’s Red Envelope Entertainment division and was also picked up by HBO. He recently served as executive producer on Dirty Country, a documentary directed by Found Footage Festival founders Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett.

He is presently developing a number of projects, including the southern comedy Wonderdog, based on the Inman Majors novel. Taking his expertise to other filmmakers, Pollard freelances as a consultant, specializing in distribution and private equity financing. Collectively, his business plans have raised more than $6 million in production funds.

In Synch: Music in Film Love music? Need music for your film? Whether you’re a big fan or a filmmaker with questions, this panel has everything you need. This all-star cast will sound off about what it takes to create the perfect score, the memorable soundtrack and what you need to know about securing the rights.

Film and television producer Jeff Scheftel moderates this discussion and brings in his own vast experience with music and celluloid. He has produced critically acclaimed films like TV Junkie, Welcome to Death Row, and the Sounds of Memphis, and is segment producer of episodes of Martin Scorsese’s PBS series The Blues, in addition to the Grammy Awards telecast. Joining him is John Sutton-Smith, cofounder of the Grammy organization’s Living Histories oral history program and co-producer of the Sounds of Memphis. As music supervisor on film productions, Sutton-Smith guides the choices, creation and the use of music in pivotal film moments and on soundtracks.

We are thrilled to welcome local maestro Scott Bomar from Memphis, Tennessee. Bomar has received much critical acclaim for composing the score for Craig Brewer’s award winning films, Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan. Undoubtedly recognized for having his pulse on the soul of southern music, in 2003 he served as musical director for a segment of Martin Scorsese’s PBS series The Blues. Bomar has appeared as the subject of an episode of BET’s The Music Makers. He has also performed at London’s Barbican Arts Centre as part of the It Came From Memphis music and film series.

Attorney John Strohm will add practical insight to the legal issues of licensing music for use in your film and soundtrack. Strohm practices law in Birmingham, Alabama, with the law firm of Johnston, Barton, Proctor & Rose, LLP where he works as a transactional intellectual property and entertainment lawyer, representing musicians, songwriters, and independent record labels, among others. Strohm is also a guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He co-founded the indie rock trio Blake Babies in 1986 with Juliana Hatfield and Freda Love. Strohm has performed with Antenna, Velo

Deluxe, and Hello Strangers, and has also recorded and performed extensively as the guitarist and drummer of the Lemonheads. Strohm has released three acclaimed solo albums, Caledonia (Flat Earth, 1997), Vestavia (Flat Earth, 2000), and Everyday Life (Superphonic, 2007).

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Past in the Present: Licensing Issues for Archival Materials For documentary filmmakers, archives are like a strange candy shop, where all the candy is kept in acid-free folders and boxes and you have to wear gloves while eating it. Documentary filmmakers love archival materials, but archivists often view documentary filmmakers with the same trepidation that the owner of a china shop might feel at the sight of an approaching bull.

Archival materials may include manuscripts and letters, films and photographs, sound recordings, and interviews. The role of the archives is to acquire, conserve, and make available the collections in their chosen subject areas. For filmmakers, these items provide clues to unlock the mysteries of their project, as well as context and credibility.

However, finding the right items in both the catalog and finding aids is only the first challenge. Many filmmakers are unprepared for what comes after they find that perfect photograph or recorded interview: adherence to copyright law and subsequent licensing fees.

This panel—consisting of three experienced archivists and one attorney—will provide insight into the best way to conduct research in an archive and explain why archival photographs can be so expensive.

Jennifer Ford is the Head of Archives and Special Collections in the University of Mississippi Libraries as well as a Southern historian. Her book, The Hour of Our Nation’s Agony: The Civil War Letters of Lt. William Cowper Nelson of Mississippi, was recently published by the University of Tennessee Press. Snowden Becker is one of the cofounders of the Center for Home Movies, which started the international Home Movie Day in 2002. (Oxford held its first Home Movie Day in August 2007; the 2008 event will be held in October.) Formerly an archivist for the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, Becker is now pursuing a Ph.D. in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Will Wilkins is the director of the Mississippi Law Research Institute at the University of Mississippi and frequently answers questions about copyright law.

Talent and Casting Workshop: How an Actor Gets the Part If you’ve ever considered taking the plunge and pursuing acting as your career, this panel can help you along your way. Revealing the experiences of both actors and casting agents, the Talent and Casting Panel is an in-depth look at path of the actor. From head-shots and auditions to cold-reads and callbacks, these professionals are here to tell their stories and answer your questions.

Our panel this year will consist of two casting agents: Mary Gail Artz (Rushmore, The Martian Child) and Beth Blanks (Dirty Sexy Money, Six Degrees). Both can answer questions the aspiring actor might have about how to make the right impression during an audition. Also on the panel will be actors Tate Ellington (The Elephant King, You are Alone), Scott Prendergast (writer, director, Kabluey, Celebrity Deathmatch), and Johnny McPhail (Ballast, Chasing the White Dragon).

If you have ever wanted to know what goes in to being a working actor, these three can certainly share their war stories as well as sound advice on the journey of the artist. Come and grab a seat for the Talent and Casting Panel and gain insight to a life in front of the camera.

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Intellectual Proprty & Entertainment Law C.L.E. Presented by: Oxford Film Festival • Fergusson Pitts, PLLC University of Mississippi Center for Continuing Legal Education • Intellectual Property Section of the Mississippi Bar E.F. Yerby Conference Center on the University of Mississippi campus • Oxford, Mississippi

8:00 a.m. – 8:25 a.m.

Registration

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Roundtable: Attorneys Discuss Issues in Developing and Maintaining their Intellectual Property Practices, presented by the Intellectual Property Section of the Mississippi Bar

8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.

Intellectual Property for the General Practitioner Stephan L. McDavid, Harris Shelton Hanover Walsh, PLLC (Oxford, Miss.)

12:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.

Lunch on your own

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2008

9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.

Intellectual Property Issues in Film Anne E. Pitts, Fergusson Pitts, PLLC (Oxford, Miss.)

10:50 a.m. – 11:50 a.m.

Covering Your Assets: Intellectual Property for the Corporate/Business Practice Terry Morris, Morris Law Firm (Prarieville, La.) 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Attorney Luncheon: provided 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.

Protecting Identity: Issues in Privacy Rights, Rights of Publicity and False Light Litigation William O. Luckett, Jr., Luckett Tyner Law Firm (Clarksdale, MS) Grady Garrison, Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz (Memphis, Tenn.)

2:40 p.m. – 3:40 p.m.

Navigating the Ethical Minefield in IP Law Will Wilkins, University of Mississippi 3:50 p.m. – 4:50 p.m.

IP Goes Online: Intellectual Property Issues & the Internet Hemant Gupta, Butler, Snow, O’Mara, Stevens & Cannada (Memphis, Tenn.)

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 200 8:30 a.m. – 9:40 a.m.

Finding the Money: Federal & State Tax Incentives for Film Hal “Corky” Kessler, Attorney, Levin & Ginsburg (Chicago, Ill.) 9:50 a.m. – 10:50 a.m.

Past in the Present: Licensing Issues for Archival Materials Will Wilkins, Attorney, University of Mississippi Jennifer Ford (Head of Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries) Snowden Becker (Co-Founder, Center for Home Movies / International Home Movie Day; former archivist for Academy Film Archive) Jennifer Sidley (Film archivist, Mississippi Department of Archives and History)

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1:30 p.m. – 2:40 p.m.

From Page to Film: Writers’ Issues on the Road from Idea to Screenplay to Screen and Beyond Anita Modak-Truran, Attorney, Butler, Snow, O’Mara, Stevens & Cannada (Jackson, Miss.)

Hal “Corky” Kessler, Attorney, Levin & Ginsburg (Chicago, Ill.) David Sheffield (screenwriter/tv & film producer, Coming to America, The Nutty Professor, The Honeymooners) Lee Gutkind (writer, founder of the literary magazine Creative Non-fiction, known for “Immersion Journalism”) Scott Prendergast (screenwriter, director, producer, Kabluey, The Delicious, Anna Is Being Stalked) 2:50 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

In Synch: Music in Film John Strohm, Attorney, Johnston, Barton, Proctor & Rose, LLP (Birmingham, Ala.) Scott Bomar (record producer/engineer, music supervisor, film scorer, Black Snake Moan, Hustle and Flow, Barnyard) Jeff Scheftel (film & tv producer, documentary filmmaker, TV Junkie, Welcome to Death Row, Grammy Awards telecast) John Sutton-Smith (music supervisor, journalist, filmmaker, producer, Sounds of Memphis, co-founder of Grammy organization’s Living Histories oral history program) 4:10 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.

Film and the New Media: Writing about Film in Print and for the Blogosphere Gary Myers, Attorney and Professor of Law, University of Mississippi Paul Cullum (writer, L.A. Weekly) Jen Yamato (writer, film critic, Senior Editor: Rotten Tomatoes) Godfrey Cheshire (writer, film critic, New York Times, Newsweek, Variety, the Village Voice; filmmaker, Moving Midway) Kim Voynar (writer, film critic, Cinematical.com) Scott Weinberg (writer, film critic, Cinematical.com, Fearnet.com, EfilmCritic.com)

Proud Sponsor of the 2008 Oxford Film Festival