22nd Maine International Film Festival Program Guide

Illustration by Shawn Brewer | Photograph by Paul Cyr A Project of

Ticket Information

Individual Tickets $10–15

Individual tickets for all festival screenings and events are available online at miff.org. Advance tickets may also be purchased at the Festival Box Office, located in the Railroad Square Cinema lobby beginning July 10 from 2:00–7:00 p.m. on weekdays and 12:00–7:00 p.m. on weekends. Advance ticket sales will cease four hours before showtime. After the cut-off time, tickets may only be purchased at the door at festival venues shortly before showtime, subject to availability. Most screenings: $10 | Special events: $15

Partial Pass* $95

Ten admissions to festival screenings; good for up to two admissions per screening. Priority access to all screenings.

Full Festival Pass* $200

Admits one with priority access to all public festival events.

*Priority admission is guaranteed until 15 minutes prior to showtime for pass holders. Individual ticket holders who have purchased in advance (online or at the Festival box office) are seated approximately 15 minutes prior to showtime; at-door sales will also begin at this time. Pass holders arriving less than 15 minutes prior to showtime will be required to queue with those purchasing tickets. All seating is subject to availability.

Festival Venues

Railroad Square Cinema

17 Railroad Square

Waterville, ME 04901

Phone: 207-873-6526

railroadsquarecinema.com

Film lovers enjoy a unique moviegoing experience at this threescreen independent cinema, one of only 23 theaters in the country officially recognized as a Sundance Institute Art House.

Waterville Opera House

1 Common Street

Waterville, ME 04901

Phone: 207-873-7000 operahouse.org

A beautifully restored 810-seat historic theater, specially outfitted with 35mm and digital projection equipment.

Old Post Office

1 Post Office Square (Corner of Main St. and Elm St.) Waterville, ME 04901

MIFFONEDGE returns to the turn-of-the-century building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Parking & Transportation

Free parking is available at Railroad Square Cinema, as well as at Head of Falls and The Concourse parking lots in Downtown Waterville. Enforced two-hour parking is also available on Main St.

Contact Us

Maine International Film Festival

10 Water Street, Suite 106 Waterville, ME 04901 info@miff.org miff.org

General Information

Camera Policy: No cameras or recording devices may be used during film screenings. Your presence in or around festival events or venues constitutes your consent to being included in such recordings.

Festival Sponsors 4–5 Mid-Life Achievement Award Honoree: 6–7 Hilary Brougher Jay Cocks Introduces: 8 A Tribute to Verna Bloom Opening Night 13 Centerpiece Film 14 Closing Night 15 A Tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci 16 Wind, Water, and Music: 17 Ethnographic Iran New Argentine Cinema 18–19 Special Events 22–23 Re-Discovery 26–29 MIFFONEDGE 30–31 MIFF-at-a-Glance Schedule 32–33 New Features 40–49 Shorts Programs 50–54 Festival Staff 62 Festival Guests 63 Index 64

@miffmaine; #miff22

Maine International Film Festival

10 Water Street, Suite 106 – Waterville, ME 04901

Phone: (207) 861-8138

Email: info@miff.org – miff.org

Welcome to the Maine International Film Festival!

These are the ten best days of the summer in Maine.

Waterville is a great place to spend time experiencing the best of American, international, and classic cinema, and our work at the Maine Film Center is aimed at continuing to grow our hometown’s unique reputation as a destination for film lovers of all ages. If you’re visiting from away, just imagine: if you lived here, you could enjoy cinema like this year-round through the Maine Film Center’s programming.

We’re thrilled to welcome Hilary Brougher back to MIFF to present her with the Mid-Life Achievement Award at the Maine premiere of her latest feature, South Mountain. We have a number of world premieres, too, ranging from the Centerpiece Gala screening with live jazz concert featuring The Gathering, to the family-friendly Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm. And be sure to check out the provocative and experimental lineup slated for MIFFONEDGE, which returns to the Old Post Office for Volume 7.

Our staff and team of volunteers have worked tirelessly to make this 22nd festival the best one yet. Our partners and sponsors, both within our hometown of Waterville and across the state, give generously to illuminate our annual celebration and to welcome visitors from around the world; I hope you’ll support these restaurants, hotels, and businesses during your stay and throughout the year, and that you’ll take a moment to experience the natural beauty of our surrounding area.

I look forward to seeing you at the movies.

Mike Perreault Festival Director

2 Presenting Sponsors

3

Festival Sponsors

Presenting Sponsors

Day Sponsors

Venue Sponsors

Media Sponsors

Supporting Sponsors

A Project of MIFFONEDGE Sponsor

Funded in part with a grant from

4 Presenting Sponsors

Jonathan Lee in Memory of Shepard Lee Official Vehicle Sponsor Showrunner Sponsor Hospitality Sponsors Centerpiece Gala Sponsor

Producer’s Club

Lee Feigon

Juliet Goodfriend and Mark Moreau

Steve Miller and Sharon Lee

Peter and Lee Lyford

The Phillips-Sandys

Director’s Club

Barbara and Ted Alfond

Patricia Clark

Janelle Hamel and Charlie Simmons

Vivianne Martineau

Ray and Martha Phillips

Nancy Sanford

Kathryn Slott

MIFF Fan Club

Barbara Allen and Lenny Reich

Joan and Peter Beckerman

John and Judy Bielecki

Elizabeth Eames

Carol Godfrey

Jill Gordon

Shannon Haines

Patricia King

Chris and Andrea Kuhlthau

Karen Kusiak

Bill and Jean Marie Layton

Roy and Lisa Miller

Brian Robitaille

Chris Rusnov and Bobby Hayes

Tobi Schneider and Steve Neumeister

Leslie Stein and Douglas Van Horn

Jennifer Strode

Danielle Tognato

Janna Townsend

Friends of the Festival

Chip and Bette Jane Bessey

Melinda Blake

Colette Bouchard

Laura Juraska and Richard Fochtmann

Harriett Matthews

Marilyn Renfrew

Barbara Shea

Michael and MaryEllen Stein

Film Sponsors

Christopher Hastings Confections

Deep Groove Records

David and Kim Hallee, Boy Locksmith

Steve and Charlie Katz

Jeff Matranga and Jeri Wilson

Mid-Maine Global Forum

Julie Miller-Soros

Kate O’Halloran, Red Sky Consulting

Lisa Oakes

SBS Carbon Copy

Sunset Home of Waterville

Valley Beverage

Hospitality Sponsors

Thanks to the following companies for providing local specialty products to our festival guests!

5 Presenting Sponsors

Festival Sponsors

Mid-Life Achievement Award Honoree: Hilary Brougher

Hilary Brougher came to MIFF in its first year with her first feature, The Sticky Fingers of Time. In the 21 years since then, as American independent filmmaking has gone from being something seemingly edgy and exciting to something too often falsely trendy, Hilary has fulfilled the meaning of the word “independent” and the promise of that movement. Her films are her own—she is the one who has both written and directed them, and they feature universally terrific performances from a wide variety of actors both famous and less so. Sometimes her films are playful; sometimes they are quite intensely serious—and they often mix the two. Her latest film, just completed this year, South Mountain, is a triumph like the others, a movie with a modest surface and a towering interior. Lucky are the students whom she teaches as Chair of the Film Division at Columbia University’s School of the Arts; they learn not just the technical aspects of great filmmaking, but the soul of what that term really means. It’s a true joy to welcome Hilary Brougher back to MIFF for the fourth time, and to honor her with a richly deserved Mid-Life Achievement Award.

South Mountain

USA—2019—DCP—82 Minutes

In English Director, Screenplay: Hilary Brougher

Producers: Susan A. Stover, Maria Roenblum, Kristin Frost

Cast: Talia Balsam, Macaulee Cassaday, Scott Cohen, Violet Rea, Guthrie Mass Print courtesy: Hilary Brougher

Hilary Brougher returns with her wondrous latest, a meditation on a particular sort of love that grows in the wreckage of broken things. Lila (Talia Balsam) is an artist and teacher who has built a modest rural paradise in New York’s Catskill Mountains with her writer/husband, Edgar (Scott Cohen). The two have been married for two decades. When Edgar unexpectedly announces the birth of a child with another woman, Lila tests her bonds to her best friend Gigi and begins a friendship with a younger man. All is changing, or so it seems. Set in the lush span of a single summer, the film is a portrait of a woman at a moment of loss and reconfiguration. Something new is being birthed—perhaps.

Stephanie Daley

USA—2006—DCP—92 Minutes

In English Director, Screenplay: Hilary Brougher

Producers: Jen Roskind, Samara Koffler, Lynette Howell, Sean Costello

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Amber Tamblyn, Timothy Hutton, Melissa Leo

Print courtesy: Hilary Brougher

Hilary Brougher’s terrific second feature is a potent film with a potent cast indeed, toplined by Tilda Swinton, Amber Tamblyn, and Timothy Hutton. When 16 year old Stephanie Daley (Tamblyn) faces murder charges in connection with the death of her newborn, pregnant forensic psychologist Lydie Crane (Swinton) is tapped to unravel the truth. The teen claims to have been unaware of her pregnancy, but as their sessions intensify, Stephanie’s state of denial and Lydie’s fears regarding her own pregnancy leads to a revelation that will change them both. “The facts in this case are well known....This case is not about facts,” says Lydie. “It’s about what we believe.” What Brougher has made here is a mystery with no easy solution, and no easy answers.

The Sticky Fingers of Time

USA—1997—Digital Projection—82 Minutes

In English Director, Screenplay: Hilary Brougher

Producers: Isen Robbins, Susan A. Stover, Jean Castelli

Cast: Terumi Matthews, Nicole Zaray, James Urbaniak, Belinda Becker

Print courtesy: Hilary Brougher

The year is 1998. The Maine International Film Festival opens its proverbial doors. Among the programs: a selection of films from the independent film production company Good Machine; films by exciting, distinctive young filmmakers making their debut or second films, directors like Hal Hartley (Trust), Todd Haynes (who was to go on to get an Oscar nomination for Far From Heaven), Ang Lee (who was to win two, for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi), and Hilary Brougher, who came to the fest with The Sticky Fingers of Time. When Tucker Harding, a writer of hard-boiled fiction, steps out to buy coffee one day in 1953, she finds herself mysteriously transported to 1997. Wandering confused through New York’s East Village, she meets Drew, a desperately depressed woman to whom Tucker finds herself deeply attracted. They soon realize they are both “time freaks”—souls who are able to live time out of order. Tucker and Drew join forces to unravel the mystery of Tucker’s impending murder in the ’50s. Their efforts are confounded by femme fatale Ophelia and homme fatal Isaac.

Jay Cocks Introduces: A Tribute to Verna Bloom

Jay Cocks Introduces A Tribute to Verna Bloom

Verna Bloom was a frequent MIFF guest and dear friend who came for the first time in 2002 and for the last in 2017, when she was one of the special returning guests for our 20th year celebration. In 2004, we honored the richly-deserving Verna with a special section, and in the catalog that year, we said: “What a pleasure it is to welcome Verna Bloom back to MIFF, and, for the first time, to officially honor one of the finest actresses of our era with a tribute to her brilliant work. Verna has graced MIFF with her presence each of the past two years with screenings of Peter Fonda’s masterpiece The Hired Hand, in which her unforgettable performance established a new standard, defining women’s strength in the traditionally male domain of westerns. Verna went on to co-star with Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter and Honky Tonk Man, to play no less a personage than Mary, Mother of Jesus, in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and to make an indelible appearance in Scorsese’s After Hours after a memorable turn in the original Animal House. Lots of great acting. Lots of films. Verna Bloom.”

Verna, who lived in Maine part of each year, returned to MIFF many more times, but we never showed After Hours. We get to rectify that this year, and also show her amazingly incendiary first starring film, Medium Cool, shot in part around the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention, as a way of honoring such a wonderful presence, such a wonderful actress, one who we miss today and always will.

35mm print! After Hours

USA—1985—35mm—97 Minutes

In English Director: Martin Scorsese

Screenplay: Joseph Minion

Producers: Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne, Robert F. Colesberry

Cast: Griffin Dunne, Verna Bloom, Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard, Catherine O’Hara, Tommy Chong, Cheech Marin, Will Patton

Print courtesy: Warner Brothers

A most unusual film in the canon of both director Martin Scorsese and one of its stars, Verna Bloom, After Hours is both very particular to its mid’80s era and New York locale and timeless in its evocation of paranoia and black humor. “Martin Scorsese transforms a debilitating convention of ’80s comedy—absurd underreaction to increasingly bizarre and threatening situations—into a rich, wincingly funny metaphysical farce. A lonely computer programmer is lured from the workday security of midtown Manhattan to an expressionistic late-night SoHo by the vague promise of casual sex with a mysterious blonde (Rosanna Arquette)”—Dave Kehr. The computer programmer’s (Griffin Dunne) almost Joycean odyssey is populated by one of the more remarkable casts of the era, including Bloom’s June, an unusual creator of unusual sculptures, as well as Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard, and Catherine O’Hara.

35mm print! Medium Cool

USA—1969—35mm—111 Minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Haskell Wexler

Producers: Jerold Wexler, Haskell Wexler, Tully Friedman

Music: Mike Bloomfield

Cast: Verna Bloom, Robert Forster, Peter Bonerz, Mariana Field Print courtesy: The Academy Film Archive,The Film Foundation, Paramount Pictures

There simply is no film like Medium Cool. Shot on location in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention, which turned into a national nightmare when police started beating anti-Vietnam War protesters, cinematographer Haskell Wexler turns director in a fiction film with a script that unexpectedly became a hybrid of fiction and incendiary documentary. This was an unprecedented moment in American history, following the 1967 Summer of Love, as the counterculture proposed something different to a war and murders at home (Bobby Kennedy was assassinated just a month earlier) that seemed to contradict that vision in the worst possible way. Against this incredible background, a TV news cameraman (Robert Forster) and an Appalachian woman, achingly played by Verna Bloom, might dare to fall in love. “A kind of cinematic Guernica”—Vincent Canby, New York Times

New England premiere! Blow the Man Down

USA—2019—DCP—90 Minutes

In English

Directors, Screenplay: Bridget Savage Cole, Danielle Krudy

Producers: Drew Houpt, Alex Scharfman

Music: David Coffin

Cast: Sophie Lowe, Morgan Saylor, Margo Martindale, June Squibb, Annette O’Toole, Marceline Hugot, Will Brittain

Print courtesy: Drew Houpt, Alex Schafman

Friday, July 12, 6:30 p.m., WOH

Saturday, July 20, 6:30 p.m., WOH

This is not your ordinary everyday Made-in-Maine movie, if there is such a thing. Blow the Man Down was shot in late winter, not midsummer. Yes, it was shot on the coast, but…the Chambers of Commerce there might not really use it to sell the area—or maybe they will, because this is one terrific movie, even if the skies are often gray in it. Co-directors and screenwriters Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy will storm you like a nor’easter with their film’s amazing combination of dark humor, suspense, saltiness (in all the meanings of the word), and just plain originality. It all starts with a chorus of sea shanty singers and moves on to Priscilla and Mary Beth Connolly, whom we join on the day of their mother’s funeral after a long illness. They need a break—but they won’t get one. A dead body, three seriously busybody friends of their mom’s (played by great actresses Annette O’Toole, June Squibb, and Marceline Hugot), and a friendly but inquisitive young local cop (Will Brittain) combine with towering local inn-keeper—okay, it’s actually a brothel—Enid (the unforgettable Margo Martindale) to make the Connolly sisters’ lives complicated.

Sponosored by Joan and Peter Beckerman

13 Presenting Sponsors Special Events: Opening Night

World premiere!

The Gathering: Roots and Branches of Los Angeles Jazz

Followed by a live concert with a trio of the L.A. jazz musicians in The Gathering: Jesse Sharps–woodwinds, Bobby West–piano, Pete Jacobson–cello

USA—2019—Digital Projection—105 Minutes

Director, Producer: Tom Paige

Print courtesy: Tom Paige

Celebrating and continuing the legacy of underrecognized jazz genius Horace Tapscott and the South Central African American community around Leimert Park in Los Angeles to which he devoted his life, The Gathering: Roots and Branches of Los Angeles Jazz world premieres at MIFF. Following the film, a concert bringing The Gathering’s musicians, under the leadership of bandleader, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Jesse Sharps, will help make the evening one of MIFF’s must-see events. The Gathering, an informal and revolving group of south L.A. musicians, are among the direct musical descendants of Horace Tapscott, the pianist, composer, and leader for two decades of the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra (also known as P.A.P.A. or The Ark). Though he was a true jazz original, recognized by critics as “a completely distinctive jazz genius on a par with Thelonious Monk or Rahsaan Roland Kirk,” Tapscott never achieved their widespread recognition because he chose to devote his life and leadership to the South L.A. community, including Watts and areas between it and downtown L.A., birthing an African American Arts and Jazz renaissance. Among the musicians who came out of The Ark to greater recognition worldwide are Arthur Blythe, Kamasi Washington, David Murray, Azar Lawrence, and many more. With Tapscott’s death in 1999, Jesse Sharps who at times was the bandleader of the group, helped birth an offshoot group that became The Gathering.

Tuesday, July 16, 6:30 p.m., WOH

Director Tom Paige started work on his film capturing the group’s unique, vibrant, and exploratory yet highly accessible jazz with concert footage from a 2005 celebratory event, and has continued for almost 15 years on his labor of love, featuring a wealth of priceless interviews and more recent live recordings. As the original “Gathering” event in 2005 was a celebration, so will be the long-awaited premiere showing of Paige’s film at MIFF. The concert in Waterville in conjunction with the premiere—a first for the group as such on the East Coast—will feature Sharps, continuing in his legacy as a leading keeper of the Ark’s and Tapscott’s flame, as part of a trio of the Ark’s other great players, with pianist supreme Bobby West and pioneering cellist Pete Jacobson. They will play music that celebrates an under-the-radar cultural explosion that has gone unnoticed for far too long.

Presented by Camden National Bank

Luce USA—2019—DCP—109 Minutes

In English

Director: Julius Onah

Screenplay: J.C. Lee, Julius Onah, based on the play by J.C. Lee

Producers: Andrew Yang, John Baker, Julius Onah

Cast: Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer, Tim Roth, Kelvyn Harrison Jr.

Print courtesy: Neon

An all-star high school athlete, straight-A student, and debater par excellence, Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is a poster boy for the new American Dream, as are his white parents, Amy and Peter (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth), who adopted him from war-torn Eritrea a decade earlier. When Luce’s teacher, Ms. Wilson (recent Oscar winner Octavia Spencer) makes a shocking discovery in his locker, Luce’s stellar reputation is called into question. Is he really at fault, or is Ms. Wilson preying on dangerous stereotypes? “In two short years, Trump’s toxic America has turned race, privilege, and class into incendiary topics while amplifying intolerance, and Julius Onah‘s powerfully constructed Luce mixes all these socio-political subjects into a provocative Molotov cocktail that shatters, burns, and leaves no easy answers. It’s one of the most relevant films about today’s poisoned America and, as it stands, is destined to become one of the very best movies of the year”—Jordan Ruimy, The Playlist

Bertolucci

A Tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci

This year’s MIFF is dedicated to two cinematic giants whom we’ve lost since last year’s festival. One, Verna Bloom, was a frequent MIFF guest and friend. The other is Bernardo Bertolucci, who was never able to make it here because of the back condition stemming from a fall and failed sur gery that kept him confined to a wheelchair and otherwise limited during the last five years of his life. His lovely, little-known final film, Me and You, was featured at the festival when it was made, and he has been a presence here, as he has in so much of the world, with his towering, simultaneously epic and intimate films; just last year, for instance, with our screenings of two of his most staggering works, The Conformist and 1900, introduced by one of their stars, Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Dominique Sanda.

A committed leftist and a committed explorer of sexual and emotional intensity and intimacy, with an overwhelming cinematic command—and a wry and unexpected sense of humor that pops up when least expected— Bertolucci made films that could not be ignored for two reasons: because he refused to stop where even great conventional filmmakers did; and because he was a towering artistic genius born to make movies, as Picasso was to paint. Sometimes his films were met with great public and critical recognition. (And who else would have accepted their Oscar [for The Last Emperor, which won nine, including Best Director and Best Film], by saying “If New York is the Big Apple, to me, Hollywood, tonight, is The Big Nipple?”). Sometimes they were not, or met with huge controversy (as with Last Tango in Paris, a film—like virtually all of his work—that remains vital, relevant, and demanding years, decades later, today). His next to last film, The Dreamers, has the same youthful vitality, sexuality, idealism, and joy that his work from almost 40 years earlier had. What a loss for us, for everyone. What a gift to have had his work, and to have it still to watch, as we will at MIFF this year.

Rare 35mm print! The Dreamers

France/Italy/UK—2003—35mm—115 Minutes

In English and in French with English subtitles

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Screenplay: Gilbert Adair, based on his novel

Producer: Jeremy Thomas

Cast: Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Jean-Pierre Léaud

Print courtesy: Fox Searchlight Pictures

The tumultuous political landscape of Paris in 1968 is the backdrop as three young cineastes (stunningly incarnated by Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel) are drawn together through their passion for film. Matthew, an American exchange student, discovers in French twins Theo and Isabelle a relationship unlike anything he has ever experienced or will ever encounter again–and he longs to be a part of it. “Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is an ambitious and exciting piece of work, a movie about sex and movies made by a filmmaker who understands the power of each to set off fantasy, create addiction, incite danger, and transform the spirit. The film also touches on politics, but politics at a time when politics was also inseparable from fantasy—the spring of 1968, in Paris—a period of student protest and riots. Three young cinephiles shut the door of their Paris apartment and barely leave it, creating an emotional and sexual psychodrama as the world outside beckons, threatens, and influences their interaction”—Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle.

Last Tango in Paris

Italy/France—1972—DCP—126 Minutes

In English and in French with English subtitles

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, Agnès Varda

Producer: Alberto Grimaldi

Music: Gato Barbieri

Cast: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Léaud

Print courtesy: Park Circus Films

Pauline Kael, perhaps the most important movie critic in American history (see What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael elsewhere in this year’s festival), said this in The New Yorker when Last Tango in Paris first appeared in 1972: “Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history....Exploitation films have been supplying mechanized sex—sex as physical stimulant but without any passion or emotional violence. The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters’ drives. Marlon Brando, as Paul, is working out his aggression on Jeanne (Maria Schneider), and the physical menace of sexuality that is emotionally charged is such a departure from everything we’ve come to expect at the movies that there was something almost like fear in the atmosphere of the party in the lobby that followed the screening. Carried along by the sustained excitement of the movie, the audience had given Bertolucci an ovation, but afterward, as individuals, they were quiet....Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?” What else is there to say now? A lot.

Saturday, July 13, 9:30 p.m., WOH

Wednesday, July 17, 6:30 p.m., RR1

Wednesday, July 17, 9:30 p.m., WOH

Thursday, July 18, 6:30 p.m., RR1

16 Presenting Sponsors

A Tribute to Bernardo

Wind, Water, and Music: Ethnographic Iran

International premiere! Baad (The Wind)

Iran—2019—DCP—51 Minutes

In Farsi with English subtitles

Director, Researcher: Hamid Jafari

With: Gholam-Shah Margiri, Nesa Samaei

Print courtesy: Venera Films

The Wind is a poetic depiction of the story of the “Zar” in southern Iran, a spiritual ritual. Spirits ride the wind of the seas and spread illness into the bodies of human beings. The only cure for this wind-carried illness is based on the beliefs of the Zar religion. The Zar ceremony can free the body from evil spirits with the assistance of music and song. Those who perform this ceremony are called MamaZar or BabaZar (The mother or father of the wind). The BabaZar in this film is Gholam-Shah Margiri, the most prominent BabaZar of southern Iran. In this film, accompanied by a MamaZar, he struggles to cure a patient with the help of immortal spirits. Many of the events captured in this documentary have never been filmed before.

New Argentine Cinema

What is happening down there?! As will be clear when you see the films in our special section on the current Argentine Cinema: a heck of a lot!

From the most seemingly small scale, quietly and precisely observed, to the ambitious in both length and vision, from the charmingly funny to the deeply moving, it’s a lot of terrific and original work, the likes of which are not as easy to find in some more widely recognized sections of the film world these days. Perhaps it’s a coincidence—nah, it’s not!—that all the films we’re showing in this section are the works of individual director/writers, their own distinct visions. Half are by women and all have strong female presences (to say the least!). After that? Lots to talk about over a glass or two of malbec.

North American premiere! Cetáceos

Argentina/Italy 2018—DCP—77 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Florencia Percea

Producers: Mercedes Cordova, Florencia Percea, Valeria Forster

Cast: Elisa Carricajo, Rafael Spregelburd, Susana Pampín, Esteban Bigliardi

Print courtesy: Florencia Percea

Marked by a wry, understated humor that seems to come from another world than the one of bombast and flash we’ve become used to, Cetáceos is a first feature from Florencia Percea that delivers genuine satisfaction through its modest but ultimately deep approach. Clara and Alejandro are moving to a new home; he travels for work and she stays surrounded by boxes and wrapped objects. Compelled by the disfunction, she lives new and unforeseen experiences, postponing her mundane work obligations. Alejandro constantly communicates with her via skype to tell her about his professional success, and though Clara seems to act normally, she hides parties, the people she meets, and her life from his narcissistic gaze. As she lies, something awakens inside her; she starts noticing that things are no longer in the same place that they used to be.

New England premiere! Familia Submergida (A Family Submerged)

Argentina/Norway/Germany/Brazil 2018—DCP—91 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: María Alché

Producer: Bárbara Francisco

Cast: Mercedes Morán, Esteban Bigliardi, Marcelo Subiotto, Laila Maltz

Print courtesy: Visit Films

“The emerging writer-director harnesses the experience and passion from her photographic work in order to achieve a different, transformative kind of quality in storytelling. The film’s protagonist, middle-aged Marcela, wife and mother of three young-adult children, has to come to terms with her sister’s passing. Even though the events seem to maintain the usual continuation in her household, she becomes mentally disconnected from her life and family, although she keeps up the appearance and preserves the interactions with family members while clearing up her sister’s apartment. The latter, however, does not turn into a purging ritual at the end of which Marcela would attain a catharsis or closure and return to her daily routine. On the contrary, Alché conjures up a new dimension, a parallel world for her heroine, where she is not attempting to come to terms with the loss, but encounters deceased aunts and family members and revels in their company in a more radical drift from reality and presence. The film has a spellbinding and palpable effect, turning the viewing experience into lucid dreaming. Strange and disquieting, A Family Submerged is masterfully orchestrated delusion, as memory and past collide with higher planes of perception and eternity. María Alché’s film is a small, ethereal, and evocative offering, with a profound and lasting effect”—

Film Anarchy

Sponsored by Chris Rusnov and Bobby Hayes

Sunday, July 14, 9:00 p.m., RR3

Saturday, July 20, 3:00 p.m., RR3

Saturday, July 13, 3:00 p.m., RR3

Sunday, July 21, 3:00 p.m., RR3

18 Presenting Sponsors

New England premiere! La Flor (The Flower)

Shown in 4 parts

Argentina 2018—DCP—Part 1: 226 Minutes; Part 2: 218 Minutes; Part 3: 223 Minutes; Part 4: 224 Minutes

In Spanish and other languages with English subtitles and in English Director, Screenplay: Mariano Llinás

Producer: Laura Citarella

Cast: Elisa Carracajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, Laura Paredes

Print courtesy: Grasshopper Films

Okay. It’s true that La Flor is over 14 hours in all. It’s also true that you don’t have to see all four parts to be able to have a totally fulfilling time. Or see them in order (though...why not?!). But the thing is: see them! Anyone who saw director/writer Mariano Llinas’ Extraordinary Stories (MIFF 2009) will actually need no urging: this is among the most mind-bendingly inventive and just plain entertaining cinema made in this century. We are screening it in four parts. But actually there are six parts, four without endings, one without a beginning and one with everything! What’s it about? Well...four fantastic women, who reinvent themselves in each section, from scientists in a B-movie-ish cursed mummy story to pop music divas in a crazy musical melodrama to spies in an international thriller. Of course, it’s about movies. It’s about stories. It’s about invention and creativity itself. It is one of the most amazing accomplishments in cinematic history and absolutely the most fun 14 hour movie ever made. Be the first one on your block (and possibly the last) to see it!

Sponsored by Leslie Stein and Doug Van Horn

Part 1:

Fri, July 12, 8:15 p.m., RR2

Mon, July 15, 2:00 p.m., RR2

Part 2:

Sat, July 13, 8:00 p.m., RR3

Tues, July 16, 2:00 p.m., RR3

U.S. premiere! La Omisión (The Omission)

Argentina/The Netherlands/Switzerland 2018—DCP—90 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Sebastián Schjaer

Producer: Melanie Schapiro

Cast: Sofía Brito, Lisandro Rodríguez, Malena Hernández Díaz, Victoria Raposo

Print courtesy: Patra Spanou

In snowy Patagonia, in the south of Argentina, Paula, a 23-year-old girl from Buenos Aires, starts an intense job hunt with the sole purpose of saving money. The lack of a job, a home, and a stable emotional environment will end up turning that search into a personal and introspective journey. She will have to deal with the hard living conditions in the south as well as with the unsolved aspects of her life, which she herself is just beginning to be able to see. She knows she is shouting, but she can’t hear herself. This is a deeply affecting film from an area of the world that’s 7,000 miles south of Maine, yet remarkably close to home in both landscape and feeling.

Cinematographer Roman Kasserollur introduces: Los Miembros de la Familia

(Family Members)

Argentina 2019—DCP—85 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Mateo Bendesky

Producers: Agustina Costa Varsi, Diego Dubcovsky, Mateo Bendesky

Cinematographer: Roman Kasseroller

Cast: Laila Maltz, Tomás Wicz, Alejandro Russek

Print courtesy: Patra Spanou

In an off-season seaside resort town that’s seen better days, siblings Gilda and Lucas are trying to fulfill their mother’s last, cryptic wish: to throw her dismembered hand into the ocean. In Mateo Bendesky’s first feature (his wonderful short, Nosotros Solos, was at last year’s MIFF) there are greater, more inexplicable mysteries to be solved, though not really voiced, between the two—and with the rest of the world, including Gilda’s chakra stones and tarot cards, and the attention Lucas is starting to receive from an older bodybuilder on the beach. Closely observed, whimsical, comic, and sweet, Family Members marks the emergence of a filmmaker whose sensibility is unique, unusual, and very human.

Special Events

Parties & Receptions

Opening Night Party

Friday, July 12, 8:30 p.m.

Castonguay Square

(Just outside the Opera House)

Join us as we kick-off MIFF 22! Enjoy music by Muddy Ruckus and a live screen-printing demo by Outbound Press. Sponsored by Are You Ready to Party??

Centerpiece After Party

Tuesday, July 16, 9:00 p.m.

Me Lon Togo

220 Main Street

Welcome the director and an amazing trio of musicians from the exceptional Centerpiece Gala film, The Gathering: Roots and Branches of Los Angeles Jazz—a world premiere!

Student Filmmakers’ Reception

Saturday, July 20, 2:30 p.m.

Portland Pie Co.

173 Main Street

Connect with some of Maine’s most talented young filmmakers and celebrate their outstanding work.

MIFFONEDGE

Opening Party

Saturday, July 13, 8:30 p.m.

Old Waterville Post Office

(Corner of Elm and Main)

Come and greet this year’s incredible MIFFONEDGE artists! Delicious treats provided by Amici’s Cucina.

Party for Hilary Brougher

Sunday, July 14, 8:30 p.m.

OPA

139 Main Street

Join this year’s Mid-Life Achievement Award recipient as we eat, drink, and celebrate!

(stillness) Foraged Hors d’oeuvres

Friday, July 19, 8:00 p.m.

Old Waterville Post Office

Meet some of the dynamic artists/performers associated with “(stillness)18”—including Rachel Alexandrou, who will provide a lovely sampling of foraged foods.

Closing Night Party

Sunday, July 21, 9:00 p.m.

Mainely Brews Restaurant and Brewhouse

1 Post Office Square

Join the whole MIFF staff as we close the festival and celebrate another successful MIFF!

22 Presenting Sponsors

Free Community Workshops at MIFF

July 14 at 11:00 a.m. MIFF Bioblitz at the RiverWalk before Aquarela screening

Ever wondered what animals and plants are around Waterville? Join some local experts for a Mini MIFF Bioblitz to explore what lives near and around the RiverWalk. Meet us at the Two Cent Bridge to explore and document what thrives in Waterville—this walk is appropriate for all levels of experience and all ages.

MIFFONEDGE Performances

Audrey Harrer: Lavender Saturday, July 20, 8:00 p.m.

Audrey Harrer’s “Lavender” is a multi-sensory song cycle that celebrates how memory shapes and guides us. Audience members will receive a “Sensory Program” with six sealed envelopes that correspond with each piece. Surrounded by projections created by cinematographer Michael Pessah, Harrer performs her works on harp/vocals/electronics with cellist Jesse Christeson, complimented by dancers Lonnie Stanton and Tony Guglietti (choreography by Kristin Wagner and Tony Guglietti). From customized refreshments to essential oils to experiments with light, “Lavender” is a meditative journey that encourages audiences to place their own narrative in this immersive experience.

July 18 at 4:00 p.m. Art in the Park: Popcorn Art at the Riverwalk

In honor of the incredible Maine International Film Festival, join us as we make popcorn art! Popcorn is a terrific, healthy snack, but it can also be used to create flower blossoms, paintings, and more! (Don’t worry, we will have some for snacking, too!)

Narcissa Gold: My Body is Your Body is Everybody is Nobody: Consent, Intent, & Boundaries

July 15, 17 + 18 8:30 p.m.

“Consent, Intent, & Boundaries” is a series of live interactive performances exploring specific methods of touch. Each performance will focus on two specific types of interaction: observing, caressing, squeezing, slapping, kissing, and washing. The rationale for each performance builds on the idea that people will attend multiple performances and become more comfortable with interacting with the performer. Touch work tests the boundaries of consent and comfort. Performances are fraught with power dynamics. Our society markets a woman’s body as a commodity to be protected, policed, covered, and used. The “My Body is Your Body is Everybody is Nobody” thesis is a radical act of rebellion where the artist maintains agency while offering a platform to explore touch.

Special Events 23 Presenting Sponsors

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Rare 35mm print! Blue Velvet

USA—1986—35mm— 120 Minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: David Lynch

Producer: Fred Caruso

Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, Dean Stockwell

Print courtesy: Park Circus Films

David Lynch had already introduced himself to an unwary world with Eraserhead (and his relatively normal—sorta—studio-backed film, The Elephant Man) when he unleashed Blue Velvet on an unsuspecting world in 1986. We really haven’t been the same since. “As fascinating as it is freakish,” said the New York Times’ reviewer, Elvis Mitchell, at the time. “It confirms Mr. Lynch’s status as an innovator, a superb technician and someone best not encountered in a dark alley.” Really, you’d only see the kinds of characters and the kind of plots populating Blue Velvet in your nightmares, not dark alleys. Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, and, most unforgettably, Dennis Hopper, no longer seem like actors, but like phantoms amidst the film’s plot, which leads inexorably from a human ear in a field to a beautiful, troubled nightclub singer and the psycho criminals who kidnapped her child. Yikes!

New digital restoration! Chronicle of the Years of Fire

Algeria—1975—DCP—177 Minutes

In Arabic and in French with English subtitles

Director: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina

Screenplay: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Rachid Boudjedra, Tewfik Fares

Cast: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Yorgo Voyagis, Leila Shenna

Print courtesy: Cineteca di Bologna, The Film Foundation

In 1975, Chronicle of the Years of Fire won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, the most coveted film festival prize in the world. And yet, it went virtually unseen. “Underneath its overt political exterior and its epic ambitions, there is a delicate personal story to be found. The film relays the tragedy of colonialism, through the eyes of those affected the most; the common citizen. The story follows Ahmad, a poor farmer who starts out living with his family in a tiny decrepit village where the rivers are dry and the land is barren. Through the course of the film...we witness Ahmad go through difficult times, each one more brutal and tragic than the other, and we see that it’s not necessarily radical religion or oppressive politics that give rise to revolution, but a much simpler explanation: that of just trying to survive. Throughout the film there is also one other prominent character who appears from time to time, a homeless madman by the name of Miloud (played amusingly by the director himself), who serves as an unofficial narrator, providing some comic relief, while preaching mostly to an empty graveyard, with remarkable wisdom on the mostly terrible events that will unfold”—Bonjour Tristesse.

Restoration supported by the George Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, created by The Film Foundation, FEPACI and UNESCO–in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna–to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

New digital restoration! The Cranes are Flying

Russia—1958—DCP—95 Minutes

In Russian with English subtitles

Director, Producer: Mikhail Kalotozov

Screenplay: Viktor Rozov, based on his play

Cast: Tatiana Samoylova, Aleksey Balakov, Vasily Merkurev

Print courtesy: Janus Films

If you’ve seen I Am Cuba (shown at MIFF recently) you have some idea of the unbelievable visual treat you have in store for you with director Mikhail Kolotozov’s earlier, similarly wildly creative The Cranes Are Flying. If not...well, you are in for a treat. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, The Cranes Are Flying is a superbly crafted drama, bolstered by stunning cinematography and impassioned performances. Veronica and Boris are blissfully in love, until the eruption of World War II tears them apart. Boris is sent to the front lines–and then communication stops. Meanwhile, Veronica tries to ward off spiritual numbness while Boris’s draft-dodging cousin makes increasingly forceful overtures. A stunning new digital restoration of a visually ravishing film.

Newly restored 35mm print!

Detour

USA—1946—35mm—68 Minutes

In English

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Screenplay: Martin Goldsmith

Producer: Leon Fromkiss

Cast: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake

Print courtesy: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Film Foundation, Janus Films

“Who knows when fate or some other mysterious force may put the finger on YOU...for no reason at all!” That’s the unforgettable last line of Detour, which really doesn’t give away much—except its worldview and the fact that it pretty much defines film noir, arriving in 1945 to a country psychically trying to deal somehow with World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the sudden advent of what was to be called The Cold War. Edgar G. Ulmer’s legendary noir deals with none of that, at least in any overt way. There are really only two characters to speak of: a hitch-hiker and his blackmailer. Made for about 13 cents and absolutely NOT for a major studio, but boasting the darkest of black and white beauty in this wonderful new 35mm restoration, Detour is set almost entirely in flashback. New York nightclub pianist Al Roberts hitchhikes to Hollywood to join his girl Sue. On a rainy night, the sleazy gambler he’s riding with mysteriously dies; afraid of the police, Roberts takes the man’s identity. Thanks to a blackmailing dame, Roberts’ every move plunges him deeper into trouble.

Restored in 2018 by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, The Museum of Modern Art, Cinémathèque Française. Restoration funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Newly restored 35mm print! Enamorada (Enamored)

Mexico—1946—35mm—99 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director: Emilio Fernández

Screenplay: Emilio Fernández, Benito Alazraki

Producer: Benito Alazraki

Cast: María Félix, Pedro Armendáriz, Fernando Fernández, José Morcillo

Print courtesy: Televisa, UCLA Film and Television Archives, The Film Foundation

“Set in the town of Cholula during the Mexican Revolution (sometime between 1910 and 1920), Enamorada was one of the biggest hits of director Emilio Fernández’s career and a high-water mark for nearly everyone involved. Structurally, the film is a bit odd, beginning as it does with a long sequence in which General José Juan Reyes, a Zapatista peasant leader who has just taken the town, calls in its wealthiest businessmen to demand they fork over treasure and property to the revolution. But then Beatriz, whom we met earlier as the daughter of the richest man in town, saunters across Cholula’s square. José Juan catches a glimpse of her legs and whistles, and she slaps him—twice, with an energy Joan Crawford would have applauded. He murmurs to himself that here is the woman he will marry, and, presto, we are no longer in the political-science classroom. We are instead watching a Mexican Taming of the Shrew, complete with full-throttle physical comedy”—Farran Smith Nehme, Village Voice

Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in collaboration with Fundacion Televisa AC and Filmoteca de la UNAM. Restoration funded by the Material World Charitable Foundation.

New digital restoration! The Fate of Lee Khan

Hong Kong/Taiwan—1973—DCP—105 Minutes

In Mandarin with English subtitles

Director: King Hu

Screenplay: King Hu, Chung Wang

Cast: Li Li-Hua, Angela Mao, Helen Ma, Hsu Feng, Roy Chiao

Print courtesy: Film Movement

In his follow up to the fantastic A Touch of Zen, trailblazing filmmaker King Hu brings together an all-star cast of female martial arts actresses including Hong Kong cinema stalwart Li Li-Hua and Angela “Lady Whirlwind” Mao in this lively comic adventure. When Lee Khan, an official working for Mongolian Emperor Yuan of the Yuan dynasty, procures the battle map of the Chinese rebel army, Chinese resistance fighters, aided by an undercover girl-gang within Khan’s ranks, strive to corner him at an inn. Featuring stunning action sequences choreographed by Jackie Chan’s “kung fu elder brother” Sammo Hung, and a generous mix of intrigue and humor, The Fate of Lee Khan is a legendary wuxia masterpiece.

New digital restoration! One More Spring

USA—1935—DCP—87 Minutes

In English

Director: Henry King

Screenplay: Edwin Burke, based on the novel by Robert Nathan Cast: Janet Gaynor, Warner Baxter, Walter Woolf King

Print courtesy: 20th Century Fox, The Film Foundation, The George Lucas Family Foundation

This remarkable Depression era major studio film feels, in many ways, close to home. Without giving away the specifics, there’s a line of dialog uttered by the film’s sympathetic, sincere banker that is likely to bring down the house in 2019! Janet Gaynor, the luminous silent cinema star of Sunrise and the original A Star is Born plays a young homeless woman who, as an alternative to having to live in the streets, takes up chaste residence in New York’s Central Park in a maintenance shed, along with two other victims of the era’s social ills, a formerly affluent antiques dealer and a brilliant violinist. Many comic moments and some tragic ones abound in this certainly unrealistic studio production, but One More Spring is a film with real heart— and more than that one particularly great laugh, too. There is, to be noted, a racist stereotyped character who appears briefly, played by Stepin Fetchit.

Restored by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Passion of Joan of Arc

France—1928—DCP—81 Minutes

Silent, with English intertitles

Director, Producer: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Screenplay: Joseph Delteil, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Cast: Maria Falconetti, Antonin Artaud, Michel Simon, Eugene Silvain

Print courtesy: Janus Films, Gaumont Films

“You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti. In a medium without words...to see Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is to look into eyes that will never leave you. Falconetti (as she is always called) made only this single movie. ‘It may be the finest performance ever recorded on film,’ wrote Pauline Kael. She was an actress in Paris when she was seen on the stage of a little boulevard theater by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968), the Dane who was one of the greatest early directors. It was a light comedy, he recalled, but there was something in her face that struck him: ‘There was a soul behind that facade.’ He did screen tests without makeup, and found what he sought, a woman who embodied simplicity, character, and suffering. Dreyer had been given a large budget and a screenplay by his French producers, but he threw out the screenplay and turned instead to the transcripts of Joan’s trial. They told the story that has become a legend: of how a simple country maid from Orleans, dressed as a boy, led the French troops in their defeat of the British occupation forces. How she was captured by French loyal to the British and brought before a church court, where her belief that she had been inspired by heavenly visions led to charges of heresy. There were 29 cross-examinations, combined with torture, before Joan was burned at the stake in 1431. Dreyer combined them into one inquisition, in which the judges, their faces twisted with their fear of her courage, loomed over her with shouts and accusations.”—Roger Ebert.

Side Up

USA—1929—DCP—121 Minutes

In English

Director: David Butler

Screenplay: Buddy G, DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson

Producers: David Butler, Buddy G. DeSylva

Cast: Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Marjorie White, El Brendel

Print courtesy: 20th Century Fox

Longtime MIFF friend and guest and Whales of August producer Mike Kaplan will introduce the art of the movie musical poster before a showing of this great early musical. “Silent screen sweethearts Gaynor and Farrell take the musical plunge in this Cinderella story from the dawn of sound. Broadway tunesmiths De Sylva, Brown and Henderson provide the show-stopping production number ‘Turn Up the Heat’ which can, ‘with Spartan restraint, only be termed a lulu’”—Richard Barrios. Many early musicals were adaptations of Broadway plays, but Sunny Side Up was one of the first original musicals written for the screen. Fox wanted a special project to serve as the talking picture debut of “America’s Favorite Lovebirds” (and box office champs) Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. There are numerous, delightful Pre-Code moments, culminating in an enormous production number, perhaps the first one with a purely cinematic design and execution. “‘Turn on the Heat’ is wonderful mainly because no one concerned felt any need to hold back or any constraint—not from sound men judging what wouldn’t work, or from the Hays Office, or from innate finer feelings, or even from the studio fire marshall. They got up and did it, all energy and jubilant trashiness”—Barrios.

New 4K digital restoration! Winchester ’73

USA—1950—DCP—92

In English

Director: Anthony Mann

New 4K digital restoration! Wings of Desire

Minutes

Screenplay: Robert L. Richards, Borden Chase, based on a story by Stuart N. Lake

Producer: Aaron Rosenberg

Cast: James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephen McNally

Print courtesy: Universal Pictures, The Film Foundation

The first of a sextet of truly groundbreaking westerns that esteemed director Anthony Mann made with Jimmy Stewart in the 1950s, Winchester ’73 is as tough and spare a western as you’ve seen, with a hero who’s problematic rather than two-dimensionally phony—and, among other things (like brief appearances by then unknown but soon-to-be stars like Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis), some absolutely spectacular black and white western landscape cinematography by the legendary William Daniels. The film follows Stewart’s Lin McAdam, who wins the title rifle in a marksmanship contest, only to have it stolen by the contest’s runner-up, initiating a “la ronde”-like passage from one ill-fated owner to another as McAdam himself becomes a changed man.

Minutes

In English and in German and multiple other languages with English subtitles

Director: Wim Wenders

Screenplay: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke

Producers: Anatole Daumon, Wim Wenders

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Peter Falk, Curt Bois

Print courtesy: Janus Films

Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black and white and color by the legendary Henri Alekan, is movie poetry, a film for all time, and the height of director Wim Wenders’ (The American Friend, Paris Texas) film artistry.

miffonedge vol 7

MIFFONEDGE Vol.7 invites us to expand our perceptions regarding disciplinary boundaries as we engage with six artists and multiple interactive performances. How does sensory memory influence our futures? What is the relationship between natural history, myth, and individual story?

We will take a ceremonial journey that blends nature, music, dance, storytelling and performance art. We will explore longing, loss, and vulnerability, we will experience a radical act of rebellion where the artist maintains agency while offering a platform to explore touch, and we will contrast digital and

analog media with a modern, abstract visual take on the first Cape Verdean novel. With an incredibly experimental group of artists sharing deeply personal work, the 2019 program promises to be unforgettable.

Audrey Harrer Lavender

Audrey Harrer’s “Lavender” is a multi-sensory song cycle that celebrates how memory shapes and guides us. Audience members will receive a “Sensory Program” with six sealed envelopes that correspond with each piece. Surrounded by projections created by cinematographer Michael Pessah, Harrer performs her works on harp/vocals/electronics with cellist Jesse Christeson, complimented by dancers Lonnie Stanton and Tony Guglietti (choreography by Kristin Wagner and Tony Guglietti). From customized refreshments to essential oils to experiments with light, “Lavender” is a meditative journey that encourages audiences to place their own narrative in this immersive experience.in environments as varied as rock clubs, galleries, house shows, hospitals, studios, and recital halls.

Susan Bickford (stillness)18

A five-screen synced simultaneous projected video installation made from a ceremonial journey across a pastoral field to a spectacular lake. A group dressed in white led by a woman with a red umbrella walk slowly across the rolling fields and encounter nature, music, dance, storytelling, and performance art. Many of the scenes are ambient, trees, or water, until you see the actors move dreamily through. Run time 60 minutes.

Narcissa Gold

My Body is Your Body is Everybody is Nobody: Consent, Intent, & Boundaries

“Consent, Intent, & Boundaries” is a series of live interactive performances exploring specific methods of touch. Each performance will focus on two specific types of interaction: observing, caressing, squeezing, slapping, kissing, and washing. The rationale for each performance builds on the idea that people will attend multiple performances and become more comfortable with interacting with the performer. Touch work tests the boundaries of consent and comfort. Performances are fraught with power dynamics. Our society markets a woman’s body as a commodity to be protected, policed, covered, and used. The “My Body is Your Body is Everybody is Nobody” thesis is a radical act of rebellion where the artist maintains agency while offering a platform to explore touch.

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Schedule

• July 13: 12:00–9:00 p.m. with opening reception at 8:00 p.m.

• July 14: 12:00–7:00 p.m.

• July 15: 2:00–7:00 p.m. with Narcissa Gold’s “Consent, Intent, & Boundaries” pt. 1 at 8:30 p.m.

• July 16: 2:00–7:00 p.m.

• July 17: 2:00–7:00 p.m. with Narcissa Gold’s “Consent, Intent, & Boundaries” pt. 2 at 8:30 p.m.

• July 18: 2:00–7:00 p.m. with Narcissa Gold’s “Consent, Intent, & Boundaries” pt. 3 at 8:30 p.m.

• July 19: 2:00–7:00 p.m. with “(stillness)” foraged hors d’oeuvres at 8:00 p.m.

• July 20: 12:00–7:00 p.m. with Audrey Harrer’s “Lavender” at 8:00 p.m.

• July 21: 12:00 p.m.–close

Portraits of Chiquinho

Inspired by the first Cape Verdean novel, this visual experience borrows its title from the African island on which it was filmed: the remote and deeply rural Ilha de São Nicolau, affectionately known as Chiquinho. The piece offers a modern, abstract visual take on the seminal contribution to Cape Verdean literature, written in 1936. It contrasts digital and analog media, optically alludes with an array of camera angles, and features aerial cinematography and Super 8 film. Emphasizing synchrony with music and punctuated by Portuguese narration, Portraits of Chiquinho invites the audience to explore the exotic, mountainous topography in both the visual and auditory realms. It brings to the screen a snapshot of Cabo Verde’s isolated communities, exposes stunning vistas viewed from a bird’s eye, and offers intimate images captured in the archipelago’s heartland. This experimental and dynamic work endeavors to be at once an authentic portrait of the people and geographic survey of the surreal landscape it spotlights.

Narration by Helton Carlos Gonçalves Ribeiro and Marilanda Silva Patrícia Fonseca Contina.

Heather Lyon Longing for Other Worlds

A two-channel, site-specific video installation incorporating video projection, props from the videos, and rope. Imagery from the video reveals a woman standing at the edge of a liquid nether space using simple repeated actions taken from daily life to explore longing, loss, and vulnerability.

Walking Backwards (Birger’s Walk)

Set in a 17th Century ropewalk in Karlskrona, Sweden, “Walking Backwards (Birger’s Walk)” takes the form of a video that braids together imagery from performers in the ropewalk and the surrounding landscape of southern Sweden. The text weaves together historical descriptions collected from rope makers, ropemaking manuals, and fragments from Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 Voyage Around my Room amplified and enlarged by a piece of original fiction woven within the fragments to create an account of a ropewalker whose lover is lost at sea.

miffonedge vol 7

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Julie Poitras Santos Caleb Baker

MIFF-at-a-Glance Schedule

VENUES

WOH Waterville Opera House (810 seats)

RR1 Railroad Square Cinema screening room #1 (150 seats)

RR3 Railroad Square Cinema screening room #3 (50 seats)

Date WOH RR1 RR2

Friday, July 12 6:30 p.m. Blow the Man Down 9:30 p.m. The Fate of Lee Khan

Saturday, July 13 12:30 p.m. One More Spring 3:30 p.m. Before You Know It

p.m. Cassandro, the Exotico! 9:30 p.m. The Dreamers

Sunday, July 14 12:30 p.m. Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm

3:30 p.m. Sunny Side Up

6:30 p.m. South Mountain & Mid-Life Achievement Award Ceremony 9:30 p.m. [Censored]

Monday, July 15

3:30 p.m. The Sticky Fingers of Time

6:30 p.m. After Hours

p.m. Insulaire (Islander)

12:30 p.m. Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm

3:30 p.m. The Cranes are Flying 6:30 p.m. Stephanie Daley 9:30 p.m. In Fabric

12:30 p.m. Aquarela

3:30 p.m. Vita & Virginia

6:30 p.m. Before You Know It 9:30 p.m. Medium Cool

p.m. La Flor Part 1

12:15 p.m. Ága

3:15 p.m. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

6:15 p.m. It’s Rough Out There! Shorts

p.m. Kardeşler (Brothers)

12:15 p.m. International Shorts

3:15 p.m. Los Miembros de la Familia (Family Members)

6:15 p.m. Winchester ‘73

9:15 p.m. Cassandro, the Exotico!

3:30 p.m.

American Factory

2:00

p.m. Pupille (In Safe Hands)

p.m. Midnight Family

6:30 p.m.

Vita & Virginia

Last Tango in Paris

p.m. Stephanie Daley

The Passion of Joan of Arc

In Fabric

p.m. Enamorada (Enamored)

6:30

9:30

3:30 p.m. Maine Shorts

3:15

6:15

p.m. Uncommon Visions Shorts

p.m. His Master’s Voice

p.m. Maine Student Film & Video Festival

p.m. Maine Shorts

Mike Wallace is Here

32 Presenting Sponsors

8:15

9:30

6:30

9:15

6:30

9:30

6:15

9:30 p.m. Enamorada (Enamored) 9:15

p.m. Maine Shorts

p.m. Teoria do Ímpeto (Theory of Impetus)

p.m. La Flor Part 1

9:15

Tuesday, July 16 3:30 p.m. Mike Wallace is Here 6:30 p.m. The Gathering & Centerpiece Gala Concert 3:30 p.m. Winchester ‘73

p.m. Blue Velvet

p.m. The Cranes are Flying

p.m. Midnight Family

9:30 p.m.

6:30

9:30

9:15

Wednesday, July 17 3:30 p.m. Insulaire (Islander)

p.m. The Dreamers

p.m. Jay Myself 3:15 p.m. [Censored] 6:15 p.m. Divino Amor (Divine Love)

p.m. Içerdekiler (Insiders)

3:30

6:30 p.m.

9:30 p.m.

3:30 p.m. Detour 6:30 p.m.

9:30 p.m. International Shorts 3:15

6:15

The Wind/Waterfolks 9:15 p.m. Wings of Desire

3:30

6:30 p.m.

9:30 p.m.

3:30 p.m.

6:30 p.m. Wings of Desire 9:30 p.m.

Movie? 3:15 p.m. South Mountain 6:15 p.m. Alice 8:45 p.m. La Flor Part 3

12:30

3:30

6:30 p.m.

9:30 p.m. Aquarela 12:30

3:30 p.m.

6:30 p.m. Around the Sun 9:30 p.m. Detour

3:15

6:15

9:15

12:30 p.m.

7:00 p.m. Luce 12:30 p.m.

3:30 p.m.

the Moon’s

12:15 p.m.

3:15 p.m. Hjärtat

Thursday, July 18

Last Tango in Paris

p.m. Around the Sun

p.m.

Friday, July 19

Içerdekiler (Insiders)

Blue Velvet

Sunny Side Up

Have You Seen My

Saturday, July 20

Blow the Man Down

p.m.

In the Moon’s Shadow

12:15 p.m. American Factory

p.m. The Fate of Lee Khan

p.m. Alice

p.m. Divino Amor (Divine Love) Sunday, July 21

La Flor Part 4

Pupille (In Safe Hands)

In

Shadow

Los Tiburones (The Sharks)

(The Heart)

RR2 Railroad Square Cinema screening room #2 (90 seats)

We’ve made every effort to ensure the schedule and information in this publication is as accurate as possible and that all screenings and performances take place as planned. We cannot be responsible for inadvertent errors and changes in the schedule that are beyond our control.

9:00 p.m. Los Tiburones (The Sharks) 8:30

12:00 p.m. La Omisión (The Omission)

3:00 p.m. Familia Submergida (A Family Submerged)

6:00 p.m. The Wind/Waterfolks

12:00 p.m. Have You Seen My Movie?

3:00 p.m. Kardeşler (Brothers)

3:00 p.m. Change the Subject

6:00 p.m. Los Miembros de la Familia (Family Members)

2:00 p.m. La Flor Part 2

6:00 p.m. Jay Myself

12:00–7:00 p.m.

8:30 p.m. Opening Party for MIFFONEDGE, Old Post Office Saturday, July 13

11:00

a.m. MIFF Bioblitz at the RiverWalk

Sunday, July 14

8:30 p.m. Party for Hilary Brougher, OPA, 139 Main Street

2:00–7:00 p.m. MIFFONEDGE

8:30 p.m.

9:00 p.m. La Omisión (The Omission) MIFFONEDGE

9:00 p.m. Centerpiece After Party, Me Lon Togo, 220 Main Street

Monday, July 15

Tuesday, July 16

2:00 p.m. La Flor Part 3

6:00 p.m. Hier (Yesterday)

2:00 p.m. La Flor Part 4

6:00 p.m. Ága

9:00 p.m. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

2:00–7:00 p.m.

9:00 p.m. Uncommon Visions Shorts MIFFONEDGE

Wednesday, July 17

6:00 p.m. Hjärtat (The Heart)

9:00 p.m. It’s Rough Our There! Shorts

3:00 p.m. Cetáceos

6:00 p.m. Change the Subject 8:00 p.m. Chronicle of the Years of Fire

12:00 p.m. Teoria do Ímpeto (Theory of Impetus)

3:00 p.m. Familia Submergida (A Family Submerged)

2:00–7:00

MIFFONEDGE 4:00

MIFFONEDGE—Narcissa

2:00–7:00 p.m. MIFFONEDGE

Thursday, July 18

Friday, July 19

12:00–7:00 p.m. MIFFONEDGE 2:30 p.m. Student

8:00 p.m. MIFFONEDGE

Saturday, July 20

10:00–6:00

MIFFONEDGE 9:00

Closing Night Party, Mainely Brews, 1 Post Office Square Sunday, July 21

33 Presenting Sponsors MIFF-at-a-Glance Schedule

Special Events Date

RR3

p.m. Opening

Castonguay

Friday,

Night Celebration

Square

July 12

8:00 p.m. La Flor Part 2 MIFFONEDGE

6:00 p.m. His Master’s Voice 9:00 p.m. Cetáceos

MIFFONEDGE

12:00–7:00 p.m.

2:30–4:00 p.m. Garden Party to celebrate the community capital campaign in support of the Paul J. Schupf Art Center, Castonguay Square

MIFFONEDGE—Narcissa

9:00 p.m. One More Spring

Gold’s “Consent, Intent & Boundaries” pt. 1

2:00–7:00 p.m.

8:30 p.m. MIFFONEDGE—Narcissa Gold’s “Consent, Intent & Boundaries” pt. 2

p.m.

p.m. Art in the Park: Popcorn Art at the Riverwalk 8:30 p.m.

Gold’s “Consent, Intent & Boundaries” pt. 3

2:00 p.m. Chronicle of the Years of Fire

12:00 p.m. Hier (Yesterday)

Filmmakers’ Reception, Portland Pie Co., 173 Main St.

– Audrey Harrer’s “Lavender”

p.m.

34

35

36

37

38

39

Ága

Bulgaria/Germany/France—2018—DCP—96 Minutes

In Yakut with English subtitles

Director: Milko Lazarov

Screenplay: Simeon Ventsislavov, Milko Lazarov

Producers: Veselka Kiryakova

Cast: Mikhail Aprosimov, Feodosia Ivanova, Sergei Egorov

Print courtesy: Big World Films

In a yurt on the snow-covered fields of the North, Nanook and Sedna live following the traditions of their ancestors. Alone in the wilderness, they look like the last people on Earth. Nanook and Sedna’s traditional way of life starts changing–slowly, but inevitably. Hunting becomes more and more difficult, the animals around them die from inexplicable deaths, and the ice has been melting earlier every year. Chena, who visits them regularly, is their only connection to the outside world and to their daughter, Ága, who left the icy tundra a long time ago due to a family feud. When Sedna’s health deteriorates, Nanook decides to fulfill her wish. He embarks on a long journey in order to find Ága. There’s little question that director Milko Lazarov names his protagonist after Robert Falherty’s Eskimo hero in his pioneering film Nanook of the North, and this Nanook—and his wife Sedna—are perfectly heroic, too. Though this is the same world, it is also a changed one from the time of Flaherty and Nanook, nearly 100 years ago.

France/Australia/UK—2019—DCP—103 Minutes

In French with English subtitles Director, Screenplay: Josephine Mackerras

Cast: Emilie Pipponier, Martin Swabey, Chloé Boreham

Print courtesy: Visit Films

This understated, always surprising French film was the winner of the Grand Prize at the SXSW Film Festival this year. From director/writer Josephine Mackerras, it’s a film with a sensational subject that never goes where you think it will, and never lets its lurid aspects take over a very human, very female-centered focus. After discovering that her husband’s secret addiction to escorts has left their family penniless and her marriage apparently over, Alice finds herself drawn into the world of high-end prostitution as a means of caring for herself and her child. Those are just two of Alice’s many surprises.

American Factory

USA—2019—DCP—113 Minutes

In English Directors: Julia Reichert, Steven Bognar

Producers: Julia Reichert, Steven Bognar, Jeff Reichert, Julie Parker Benello

Print courtesy: Netflix

In post-industrial contemporary Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America. Using short, engaging, telling scenes to tell a huge story in very human, modest ways, brilliant longtime documentary whizzes Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar (who have been doing this since the ’70s with great, politically-committed documentaries like Seeing Red and Union Maids) have made not only their greatest film but one that in the most non-sensational, un-Trumpian manner nails where we find ourselves today.

Aquarela

UK/Germany/Denmark/USA—2019—DCP—89 Minutes

In English and in Russian and Spanish with English subtitles

Director: Viktor Kossakovsky

Writers: Viktor Kossakovsky, Aimara Reques

Producers: Aimara Reques. Heino Deckert, Sigrid Dyekjaer

Print courtesy: Sony Pictures Classics

An experiential film not unlike, say, Koyaanisqatsi, but for a different time, Aquarela seems a force of nature itself. Water is the main protagonist, seen in all its great and terrible beauty. Mountains of ice move and break apart as if they had a life of their own. Director Viktor Kossakovsky’s film travels the world, from the precarious frozen waters of Russia’s Lake Baikal, to Miami in the throes of Hurricane Irma, to Venezuela’s mighty Angel Falls, in order to paint a portrait of this fluid life force in all its glorious forms. Fragile humans experience life and death, joy and despair in the face of its power. There is certainly an environmental message here, though nothing is overtly stated in the midst of the element’s awesome power.

East Coast premiere! Director Oliver Krimpas and Screenwriter

Jonathan Kiefer introduce: Around the Sun

UK—2019—DCP— 98 Minutes

In English Director: Oliver Krimpas

Screenplay: Jonathan Kiefer

Producers: Oliver Krimpas, Jonathan Kiefer

Cast: Cara Theobold, Gethin Anthony

Print courtesy: Jonathan Kiefer, Oliver Krimpas

“Sort of a British, female-driven Before Sunrise crossed with an episode of Cosmos?” is how screenwriter/producer Jonathan Kiefer once tried describing Around the Sun. As good as anything else, at least, which is to say that this genuinely low-budget yet sumptuous indie is really not like much of anything else but itself. Bernard (Gethin Anthony, of Game of Thrones), a film location scout, tours a repossessed and crumbling French château. Over the course of an afternoon, he falls for both the place and its owner’s flirtatious representative, Maggie (Cara Theobold, of Downton Abbey), who recounts the story of an influential popular-science book written and set there. But is their present-tense connection for real, or just a projection of the book’s 17th-century characters? A pleasure for lovers of talk, life, love, châteaux, and/or summer. That’s everyone, right?

You Know It

USA—2019—DCP— 98 Minutes

In English

Director: Hannah Pearl Utt

Screenplay: Hannah Pearl Utt, Jen Tullock

Producers: Mallory Schwartz, Josh Hetzler, James Brown

Cast: Hannah Pearl Utt, Jen Tullock, Judith Light, Mandy Patinkin, Mike Colter, Alec Baldwin, Ben Becher

Print courtesy: 1091

Director, star, and co-writer of Before You Know It, Hannah Pearl Utt comes to MIFF to introduce her terrific new film. “Before You Know It is the story of a family that lives above a small community theater that they own in New York City. It’s a comedic drama about a clan of creatives: patriarch and has-been playwright Mel (Mandy Patinkin); his oldest daughter, Jackie (Jen Tullock, whose comedic performance shines), a quirky actress stuck in adolescence and single mother of a 12 year-old named Dodge; and Jackie’s sister, Rachel (Utt), the only real grown-up in the family, who holds the family and the theater together and has just a few control issues.Their lives and livelihood revolve around the theater and putting on its mediocre plays, and when Mel’s death reveals the mother they thought was dead is actually alive, Rachel and Jackie are forced out of their comfort zone and onto their own belated coming-of-age journeys in their 30s. Part of the reason Before You Know It is so entertaining is that it feels very familiar, yet the specificity of the world of the family established here elevates the film into something we haven’t seen before. It’s a drama that takes up serious subjects like death and abandonment but is also very funny, not because of punchlines but because of candor”—Beandrea July, Hollywood Reporter.

World premiere! Maine made!

Brian Zemrak and Derek Zemrak introduce: Bongee Bear and

the Kingdom of Rhythm

USA—2019—DCP—82 Minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Brian Zemrak

Producers: Derek Zemrak, Leonard Pirkle, Matt Kierscht

Cast: Rob Paulsen, Dom DeLuise, Ruth Buzzi, June Lockhart, Debi Derryberry, Julian Sands

Print courtesy: Derek Zermrak

Winslow, Maine-based Brian Zemrak and his California-based brother Derek have been at work on this charming animated family film musical for a decade and a half—and here it is at last! In a land known as The Kingdom of Rhythm, a young orphan bear, Bongee (voiced by Emmy winner Rob Paulsen), becomes the life-long friend of the young Princess Katrina (voiced by Debi Derryberry) and vows to protect her with his life. When the evil witch Bandrilla (voiced by Golden Globe winner and multi Emmy nominee Ruth Buzzi) casts a spell on the people of the kingdom, Bongee sets out, with the aid of his wacky friend Myrin (voiced by Golden Globe and two-time Emmy nominee the late Dom DeLuise) and the wise owl Mindy (voiced by two-time Emmy nominee June Lockhart), to break the spell and return singing and dancing to the land while Bandrilla and her henchmen, Barnabas and Ivan, do all they can to stop them. Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm is a tender, fun-filled musical romp in the tradition of classic fairytales.

[Censored]

Australia—2018—DCP— 66 Minutes

In English Director: Sari Braithwaite

Producer: Chloé Brugalé

Music: Munro Melano and the End

Narrated by: Sari Braithwaite

Print courtesy: Icarus Films

Deep in the vaults of the Australian National Archives lie thousands upon thousands of celluloid scraps: scenes that were cut by government censors from films imported into the country between the years of 1958–1971. Peppered through this collection are banned scenes from some of the most influential directors in history, including Godard, Polanski, Bergman, Varda, and Fellini. Censorship extended to hundreds of forgotten films—from avant-garde and documentary films to Hollywood B-movies. When Sari Braithwaite, who narrates this film, gained unprecedented access to this mysterious collection, she thought she could create a work to liberate this censored archive, to honor these displaced frames, and condemn censorship. After years of bearing witness to these fragments of film, this archive became challenging and unnerving. It felt almost impossible to celebrate or reconcile. [Censored] is a work stitched entirely from these never-before-seen artifacts of censorship: it is the story of how one filmmaker confronted an archive in order to reckon with film, censorship, and the power of the gaze. Featuring an acclaimed soundtrack by Munro Melano and the End, [Censored] is an entertaining and provocative polemic, challenging audiences with questions that defy easy answers.

Change the Subject

USA—2019—Digital Projection—55 Minutes

In English

Directors: Sawyer Broadley, Jill Barron

Producers: Melissa Padilla, Óscar Rubén Cornejo Cásares

Print courtesy: Sawyer Broadley

In the Dartmouth College library one day, a student doing research discovers that information on the topic of undocumented U.S. immigrants is filed under the subject “Illegal Aliens.” Realizing that that term is a political and xenophobic one, she asks the college librarian if that could be changed—only to find out that the term originated not at Dartmouth but in the Library of Congress. Thus begins a literal and otherwise journey to try to overturn a seemingly small but tellingly large part of how loaded and racist terminology affects even “objective” language and categorization in our culture. In this remarkably tightly made documentary, the students and their faculty allies’ quest to change the “subject” becomes a quest to change the country.

to be shown with:

Within You Without You

USA—2018—Digital Projection—5 Minutes

Director: Judy Irving

Producer: Bruce Kaphan

Music: Mark Bittner, Beth Lyons

Print courtesy: Judy Irving

From the director and subject of MIFF Audience Award Winner and Indie theatrical phenomenon The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill comes this delightful, American folk/mountain version of George Harrison’s classic song, with Parrots star Mark Bittner and his sister Beth Lyons singing. The movie was filmed on and near Telegraph Hill, San Francisco.

Divino Amor (Divine Love)

Brazil/Uruguay/Denmark/Norway/Chile—2019—DCP—101 Minutes

In Portuguese with English subtitles

Director: Gabriel Mascaro

Screenplay: Gabriel Macaro, Rachel Daisy Ellis, Esdras Bezerra, Lucas Paraizo

Producer: Rachel Daisy Ellis

Cast: Dira Paes, Julio Machado

Print courtesy: Memento Films

Divino Amor (Divine Love) is set eight years from now. Brazil has become a fully Evangelical nation in all but name, as if the newly elected, right-wing and “pro-family” president, Jair Messias Bolsonaro—note that middle name!— had had his way with the nation for the two four-year mandates to which he could theoretically be elected. There’s plenty of sex in the film and in the country, but in this neon-colored, semi-futuristic Brazil, coitus has become perverted and unnatural; it may be sensual to watch, but its goals are anything but sexy. Joana is a woman hitting early middle age who still longs for a baby. Despite a lot of lovemaking with Danilo, her other half, they still haven’t managed to conceive. Danilo even regularly hangs himself upside down in front of an infrared lamp naked using a special fertility contraption. They haven’t had any luck so far, which makes Joana wonder why God is ignoring her prayers. Joana works for the state as a registry office clerk and as such comes into contact with a lot of people who want to divorce. She takes it upon herself, as a good Christian woman, to try and mend the couples instead of registering the end of their sacred union. She does this by suggesting they come and visit Divine Love, a cultish self-help group that Joana and Danilo are involved with and that has helped them in the past work through their own issues. In rising young phenom director Gabriel Mascaro’s (Neon Bull) bold new film, this is just the start.

Have You Seen My Movie?

USA—2018—DCP—124 Minutes

In English

Director: Producer: Paul Anton Smith

Print courtesy: Paul Anton Smith

Told entirely with found footage, Have You Seen My Movie? is a love letter to the magic and power of cinematic experiences as shared by strangers in the dark. From the audience members’ rush to get seats to the cool command of the projectionist in the booth, director/editor Paul Anton Smith tells the story of movie-going by turning the camera back on the audience. Smith uses iconic and obscure scenes from over a thousand movies of every genre, spanning eighty years of cinema, to hold up a mirror to all of the romance, mystery, and mayhem of our collective imaginations. You will be sitting in the dark of the theater, experiencing yourself experiencing what you’ve experienced all the other times you’ve sat in the dark doing the same thing, compressed into one thrilling two hours!

Hier (Yesterday)

Hungary/France/Netherlands/Morocco—2018—DCP—119 Minutes

In English and in French and Arabic with English subtitles

Director: Bálint Kenyeres

Screenplay: Bálint Kenyeres, Tamás Beregi, András Forgách, Éva Zabezsinszkij, Matthieu Taponier

Producers: Andrea Taschler, Jamila Wenske

Cast: Vlad Ivanov, Féodor Atkine, Jo Prestia

Print courtesy: Hungarian National Film Fund

“In this paradoxical psychological thriller, Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov (Toni Erdmann Sunset) plays Victor Ganz, an architect/builder who fetches up in North Africa on a business trip that will lead him into a place of unreliable memories and exotic characters. Slowly he plunges into a labyrinthine world where present and past collide, as the future gradually closes in on him—or so it would initially seem. Hier is a strange and beguiling thriller with a tense undertow that makes it watchable and compelling. Shooting in Super 16, director Bálint Kenyeres achieves just the right grainy ’90s feel without it being a retro affair. The characters Victor meets in his alien surroundings prove to be increasingly more solid and reliable than he is.”—Meredith Taylor, Filmuforia. Reminiscent of Antonioni’s great The Passenger with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, Hier is a memorable journey for the viewer as well.

Sponsored by Barbara Allen and Lenny Reich

His Master’s Voice

Hungary/Canada—2018—DCP—108 Minutes

In English and in Hungarian with English subtitles

Director: György Pálfi

Screenplay: György Pálfi, Zsófia Ruttkay, Gergő V. Nagy, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem

Producers: Ferenc Pusztai, Michael A. Dobbin, Charles V. Bender, Émilie Blézat

Cast: Csaba Polgár, Eric Peterson, Diána Kiss, Angelo Tarouchas, Ádám Fekete, Ildikó Bánsági

Print courtesy: Hungarian National Film Fund

A man travels from Hungary to track down his long-lost father and ends up discovering much more, including, but not limited to, the secrets of the universe, in His Master’s Voice an out-of-this-world film from the director of the wordless wonder Hukkle, György Pálfi, based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem (Solaris). The film begins as Peter and girlfriend Dora visit New York City from Hungary. The trip is ostensibly part of Dora’s work, but Peter has another agenda—learning more about his father, who disappeared suddenly in the 1970s, heading to the US when Hungary was still behind the Iron Curtain. Peter and his brother Zsolt have discovered that their scientist father may have gone on to take part in a secret US government research project involving gamma rays, which resulted in the deaths of three people. Eventually, it’s revealed that the original purpose of the research was not to build a weapon, but to try to respond to a communique from outer space, or what Hogarth dubs “the voice of God.” Meanwhile, in a parallel story that plays out in the far-flung future, an earth spaceship has reached an alien home world, and is attempting to establish contact. Ostensibly, the aliens are the origin of the “voice of God” message—or are they? And doesn’t one of the ship’s crew members look a lot like Peter?

Hjärtat (The Heart)

Sweden—2018—DCP—99 Minutes

In Swedish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Fanni Metelius

Producers: Rebecka Lafrenz, Mimmi Spång

Cast: Fanni Metelius, Ahmed Berhan

Print courtesy: m-appeal

“‘The heart wants what it wants, but does not get’—this is the premise of Swedish actress-director Fanni Metelius’s debut Hjärtat (The Heart), about young photographer Mika and her musician boyfriend, Tesfay, who are madly in love, yet cannot seem to make their relationship work. Set in Sweden, The Heart chronicles the progressive development of the romantic relationship between Mika (Metelius herself) and Tesfay (Ahmed Berhan): from hanging out together as classmates in art school, to casual dating, to moving in together in Stockholm and the subsequent giddy honeymoon phase. The cracks begin to emerge when Tesfay spends more time playing video games on a couch than he does talking to his girlfriend, and Mika begins missing the spontaneity she experienced in singlehood.... There isn’t anything explosively wrong with their relationship, and both Mika and Tesfay are decent, sensitive, and relatable people by nature. That the impending fall-out unfolds so imperceptibly yet realistically midway, with no clear victim in sight, works well rather than playing a needless game of who’s to blame. There is no denying the comfortable onscreen chemistry between Metelius and Berhan, who convincingly play each other’s first loves. Their moments of intimacy are raw and febrile, captured by the camera in silent, obtrusive close-ups of bodies colliding and heavy breathing. The Heart is sure to resonate with millennials all too familiar with the vicissitudes of love and heartbreak—the film was fittingly released in Sweden on Valentine’s Day”—Paige Lim, Screenanarchy

In Fabric

UK—2019—DCP—118 Minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Peter Strickland

Producer: Andrew Starke

Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Fatma Mohamed, Hayley Squires

Print courtesy: A24 Films

“Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio) fashions a slyly hilarious Italian horror homage about a demonic frock and the even more sinister forces that compel us to shop”—Peter DeBruge, Hollywood Reporter. A lonely woman (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, best known for Secrets and Lies), recently separated from her husband, visits a bewitching London department store in search of a dress that will transform her life. She’s fitted with a perfectly flattering, artery-red gown—which, in time, will come to unleash a malevolent curse and unstoppable evil, threatening everyone who comes into its path. “As his movie deepens—from the lonely desperation of finding a new dress for a big date, to job anxieties, fears of emasculation, and, in several unforgettable scenes, the lulling spell of shop talk—Strickland crams his film with more anti-consumerist curves than its waist size would indicate. Try it on, but carefully. It leaves a mark”—Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

World premiere! Shot

in Maine!

Debra Cooke introduces: In the Moon’s Shadow

USA—2019—Digital Projection—77 Minutes

In English

Director: Alvin Case

Screenplay: Edward Case

Producers: Debra Cooke, Elissa Piszel, Thomas Kesolits

Music: Lady Lamb

Cast: Debra Cooke, Elissa Piszel, Jules Hartley

Print courtesy: Alvin Case

Shot in greater part in the Belgrade Lakes region of Central Maine, with the rest in the quite contrasting Sand Hills of Nebraska, In the Moon’s Shadow uses the Solar Eclipse of 2017 to climax a story that focuses on seeing the familiar differently, as we do during an eclipse. Maine’s own Debra Cooke and Elissa Piszel play long-estranged sisters displaced by time and place who reconnect at a moment when their lives feel out of control. Produced at break-neck speed over five and a half summer days to take advantage of the absolutely stunning eclipse footage, In the Moon’s Shadow is true independent filmmaking, featuring a strong soundtrack composed for the film by Lady Lamb.

by Kate O’Halloran, Red Sky Consulting

U.S. premiere! Insulaire (Islander)

Switzerland/Chile—2018—DCP—92 Minutes

In Spanish and French with English subtitles

Director, Producer: Stéphane Goël

Screenplay: Stéphane Goël, Antoine Jaccoud

With the voices of: Mathieu Amalric, Pedro Lenz

Print courtesy: Sweet Spot Docs

Robinson Crusoe is a small island, hundreds of kilometers west of the Chilean coast, where in 1704 the Scottish sailor Alexandre Selkirk lived the incredible experience that inspired Daniel Defoe’s novel that gave the island its name. In 1877, the island became the property of a young Swiss aristocrat, Alfred von Rodt, a confirmed optimist, tireless explorer and indisputable rebel who launched multiple projects in hopes of developing the resources of his piece of rock. Islander dives us into today’s Robinson Crusoe. Its inhabitants are neither Chilean nor Swiss, but they are strongly attached to their identity and reject everything coming from the outside: animals, plants, and people. This is a film about a kind of utopia, a dream-like life based on the “purity” of its inhabitants and environment. Is it a bastion from the rest of the world? Or a prime example of the xenophobia, fear, and anger that currently seems to be gripping society?

Jay Myself

USA—2018—DCP— 79 Minutes

In English Director: Stephen Wilkes

Screenplay: Josh Alexander

Producers: Emma Tammi, Henry Jacobson

With: Jay Maisel

Print courtesy: Oscilloscope Films

Jay Myself brings us into the monumental move of renowned photographer and artist Jay Maisel, who, in February 2015, after 48 years, begrudgingly sold his home; the 35,000 square foot, 100-year-old landmark building in Manhattan’s Bowery known simply as “The Bank.” Stephen Wilkes, also an artist and photographer, as well as Maisel’s protege, takes a look at his life through an intimate lens, showing Maisel’s remarkable journey as an artist, mentor, and human; a man grappling with time, life, change, and the end of an era in New York City. The remarkable photographs he’s taken and that we glimpse here are, of course, stopped moments in time, stopped moments that perhaps, like The Bank, Maisel would like to hang on to.

Karde

ş

ler (Brothers)

Turkey/Germany/Bulgaria—2018—DCP—103 Minutes

In Turkish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Ömür Atay

Producer: Funda Ödemiş

Cast: Yiğit Ege Yazar, Caner Şahin, Gözde Mutluer, Cem Zeynel Kılıç Print courtesy: ArtHood Entertainment

What a brooding, tense, yet controlled film Brothers is. We are plunged into the world of Yusuf, at age 20, about to get out of the prison he’s been in since he was a mere 16. Yusuf has been wrongly imprisoned; the blame for that is not on the authorities, but on his own family, who set him up to be arrested for the crime. Now, his older brother Ramazan, who was, we come to understand, much more culpable than Yusuf, has come to take him to a family not exactly eagerly waiting to see him. An amazing performance by Yiğit Ege Yazar as Yusuf, embodying the character’s innocence and guilt, is at the center of this fine Turkish film.

East Coast premiere! Los Tiburones (The Sharks)

Uruguay/Argentina/Spain—2019—DCP—80 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Lucía Garibaldi

Producers: Isabel Garcia, Pancho Magnou

Cast: Antonella Aquistapache, Fabián Arenillas, Romina Betancur Print courtesy: Visit Films

Jaws-like music sounds for a few seconds as the opening title to Los Tiburones (The Sharks) appears on screen in Lucía Garibaldi’s feature film directing debut. And yes, an aquatic shark is glimpsed again before the end of the film. The title and music, like much else in this wonderful, deliberately contained film, are curveballs in this charmingly underplayed, completely honest, darkly humorous anti-coming-of-age movie from Uruguay. Fifteen-year-old Rosina could care less about the shark sightings everyone in her tiny beachside town is abuzz about. Or about much of anything else. Except maybe her slightly older co-worker. Or maybe she just hates him. Hard for us to tell. Or him. Or her…

Midnight Family

Mexico—2019—DCP—91 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Luke Lorentzen

Producer: Kellen Quinn

Print courtesy: 1091

“In Mexico City, fewer than 45 public ambulances serve a population of 9 million. Luke Lorentzen’s documentary takes up residence alongside the Ochoa family, who earn a living—just barely—by operating one of the metropolis’ numerous privately owned ambulances, ferrying the injured to hospitals in hopes of being monetarily rewarded for their efforts. Portraits of institutional dysfunction don’t come much more urgent. Though medically unstable Fer is the nominal head of the Ochoa household, it’s his mature 17-year-old son Juan who—despite his youthful complexion (replete with braces) and habit of hugging a giant stuffed animal during interviews—is the clan’s real father figure. Theirs is a tenuous existence in which each night is spent hanging out in the ambulance waiting for a call. When emergency notifications arrive, they ignite harrowing races through Mexico City’s bustling streets, as the Ochoas try to beat rival EMT outfits to the scene and, then, to quickly strap the wounded into stretchers and load them into the back of their van. The film achieves a powerful measure of suspense that’s intricately tied up in its despairing sociological depiction of a system that’s come apart at the seams”—Nick

Schager, Variety

Mike Wallace is Here

USA—2019—DCP—96 Minutes

In English

Director: Avi Belkin

Producers: Avi Belkin, Rafael Marmor, Peggy Drexler, Chris Leggett

With: Mike Wallace

Print courtesy: Magnolia Pictures

You could say that Mike Wallace invented the hard-nosed, take-no-prisoner style of TV news investigator/interviewer that’s practically de rigeur now. But Wallace was not ideological—though he did seem to be genuinely angry at times. And why not? There was a lot genuinely wrong, and Wallace seemed to find it all. A fascinating exposé of 60 Minutes’ fearsome newsman whose no-holds-barred journalistic style redefined what America has come to expect from news broadcasters, Mike Wallace is Here is a riveting account of a man, a profession, a medium, and an era.

Pupille (In Safe Hands)

France/Belgium—2018-DCP—107 Minutes

In French with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Jeanne Herry

Producers: Vincent Mazel, Alain Attal, Hugo Sélignac

Cast: Élodie Bouchez, Sandrine Kimberlain, Gilles Lelouche, Olivia Côte, Miou-Miou

Print courtesy: Distrib Films

Nominated for no less than seven César Awards (France’s Oscar equivalent) including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (two nominations), Best Actor, and Best Screenplay, director/screenwriter Jeanne Herry’s compassionate, closely observed, beautifully acted, and ultimately moving and uplifting film follows the adoption of one child from his young mother’s conscious decision to have the child but give it up for adoption at birth, to its new, perhaps surprising, loving home months afterwards, via France’s extremely conscientious social agencies. Along the way are some of the finest performances of recent years, by such greats as Élodie Bouchez (Wild Reeds), Sandrine Kimberlain (Alias Betty) and Miou-Miou (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000), Herry’s mother! A film that will really stick with you.

Sponsored by Jeff Matranga and Jeri Wilson

Teoria do Ímpeto (Theory of Impetus)

Brazil—2019—Digital Projection—87 Minutes

In Portuguese with English subtitles

Directors, Screenplay: Marcelo Faria, Rafael Moura

Cast: Clara Matos, Gustavo Haeser, Pablo Magalhães

Print courtesy: Lanterna Magica

This magically shot film from Brazil makes us fear for two young people, facing the terror of finding their own path in the world. In the face of the menacing Pedro’s paternalistic overprotection, the young Diana sees a student exchange program in another country as the chance to find her independence. Unbeknownst to her father, Diana and her brother Adriano plan to leave home and start a new life–in Brazil or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter. Theory of Impetus does not go where you think and fear it will—because it’s sensitive and honest, and therefore far more surprising than any genre movie that can’t shock you with the expected unexpected.

Tuesday, July 16, 3:30 p.m., WOH

Saturday, July 20, 3:30 p.m., RR1

Monday, July 15, 6:15 p.m., RR2

Sunday, July 21, 12:30 p.m., RR1

Monday, July 15, 9:30 p.m., RR1

Sunday, July 21, 12:00 p.m., RR3

New Features 48 Presenting Sponsors

Vita & Virginia

Ireland—2019—DCP—110 Minutes

In English

Director: Chanya Button

Screenplay: Eileen Atkins, Chanya Button, based on the letters of Virginia Woolf and Victoria Sackville-West

Producers: Katie Holly, Evangelo Kioussis

Cast: Gemma Atherton, Elizabeth Debicki, Rupert Perry-Jones, Isabella Rossellini

Print courtesy: IFC Films

Set amidst the bohemian high society of 1920s England, Vita & Virginia tells the scintillating true story of a literary love affair that fueled the imagination of one of the 20th Century’s most celebrated writers. Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) is the brash and aristocratic wife of a diplomat, who, refusing to be constrained by her marriage, defiantly courts scandal through her affairs with women. When she meets the brilliant but troubled Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki), she is immediately attracted to the famed novelist’s eccentric genius and enigmatic allure. So begins an intense, passionate relationship marked by all-consuming desire, intellectual gamesmanship, and destructive jealousy that will leave both women profoundly transformed and inspire the writing of one of Woolf’s greatest works. Chanya Button’s contemporary-influenced version of this little-known true story is stylish, intense, and fascinating.

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

USA—2018—DCP— 95 Minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Rob Garver

Producers: Glen Zipper, Rob Garver

Vocal Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker

Print courtesy: Cinetic Media

If you really loved movies in the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, you loved Pauline Kael. Or hated her. Or veered from one to the other, as she sometimes did about directors in her passionate reviews. She was, though writing only half the year for a magazine of great influence but relatively low mass circulation (The New Yorker), the most influential movie critic in the world. She singlehandedly resurrected Bonnie and Clyde from the slag heap of critical scorn and box office failure, and championed the edgy, powerful, charged cinema of Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci (see her astonishingly swooning rave for his Last Tango in Paris, screening at this year’s MIFF), Brian DePalma, and Martin Scorsese. Agree with her or disagree, you had to acknowledge that she was one hell of a writer, and that she laid it all on the table every time she wrote. Clips and archival footage are seamlessly mixed in with interviews with the likes of everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Quentin Tarantino, and footage from the time of everyone from Norman Mailer to Johnny Carson (on whose show Kael appeared). Rob Garver’s thrilling documentary is a gourmet feast for anyone who loves movies, the era, the work of a powerful woman, and/or a time when the cinema could seem the most important thing in the world.

Sponsored by Lunder Institute for American Art

Sunday, July 14, 3:30 p.m., RR1

Wednesday, July 17, 6:30 p.m., WOH

Saturday, July 13, 3:15 p.m., RR2

Thursday, July 18, 9:00 p.m., RR3

New Features 49 Presenting Sponsors

Icarus Stops for Breakfast

USA—2019—DCP—13 Minutes

In English

Director: Abigail Zealey Bess

Producer: Abigail Zealey Bess, Holli Harms, Warren Etheredge

Screenplay: Holli Harms

Cast: Molly Carden, Bobby Moreno, Catherine Curtin, Denny Dale Bess

Two mismatched lovers visit a diner caught in a time warp.

Hiding in Daylight

USA—2018—DCP—15 Minutes

In English

Director: Cheryl Allison

Producer: Carina Rush, Gregory G. Allen, Cheryl Allison

Screenplay: Gregory G. Allen

Cast: Judy McLane, Julee Cerda, Jim Newman, Gary Hilborn

In the near future, two gay couples navigate the law against their unions.

It’s a Mess

USA—2018—DCP—30 Minutes

In English

Director: Frank Prinzi

Producer: Frank Prinzi, Owen Rosenblum, Nat Prinzi, Chris Yoon

Screenplay: Frank Prinzi, W.W. Wilson III

Cast: Vincent D’Onofrio, Lucia Prinzi, Eva Prinzi

Two young sisters with a secret, receive solace from a homeless man in NYC.

Presence of the Past

USA/Iceland—2019—DCP—13 Minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Milton Guillen

Producer: Julia Sagaser

Cast: Ava Langford, Matthew Morrison

A couple evokes futuristic triste in this visual stunner.

Saturday, July 13, 6:15 p.m., RR2

Friday, July 19, 9:00 p.m., RR3

Whiteout

USA—2018—DCP—11 Minutes

In English

Director: Lance Edmands

Producer: Craig Butta, Kyle Martin

Screenplay: Lance Edmands, Sarah Tihany

Cast: Sarah Tihany, David Call, Patrick M. Walsh Jr.

A couple driving at night encounters a man in the middle of the road.

The Reveal, Iran

Iran—2017—DCP—15 Minutes

In Persian with English subtitles

Director: Ehsan Mokhtari

Producer: Behnam Abedi, Hamed Hosseini Sangari, Iranian Youth Cinema Society

Screenplay: Ehsan Mokhtari, Hamed Hosseini Sangari

Cast: Navid Noori, Pejman Yavari

Two brothers learn the hard way not to rely on family.

La Bruja de Fósforo Paseante, Mexico

Mexico—2018—DCP—16 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Sofia Carillo

Producer: Armando Padilla

Cast: Susana Romo, Michelle Betancourt, Marisol Padilla Sánchez

In this period Western, a woman and her witchy mother-in-law go at it.

Todo se calma, Argentina

Argentina—2018—DCP—15 Minutes

In Spanish with English subtitles

Director, Producer, Screenplay: Virginia Scaro

Cinematographer: Roman Kasseroller

Cast: Rhea Volij

In the confines of her apartment, a woman winsomely evades her sanity.

Quiet, Slovenia

Slovenia—2018—DCP—15 Minutes

In Slovenian with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Barbara Zemljič

Producer: Zoran Dževerdanović

Cast: Tisa Skabar, Silva Cusin, Jana Zupancic, Dare Valic

While dealing with a young student, a woman revisits her own childhood trauma.

Sunday, July 14, 12:15 p.m., RR2

Thursday, July 18, 9:30 p.m., RR1

The Menarche, Taiwan

Taiwan—2019—DCP—18 Minutes

In Chinese with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: I-hui Lee

Producer: Ray Wen, Chuxin Ho

Cast: Bai Xiao Ying, Hsieh Bao Hsien

The onset of menstruation incites two friends’ athletic competitiveness.

Nashedonia

USA—2017—DCP—4 Minutes

In Esperanto with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Will Berry

Producer: Tanner Britton

Cast: Daniel Chioco, Cynthia E. Wilde, Jess Warman

An Esperanto speaker tries to make it in Nashville.

Three/Four

USA—2019—DCP—9 Minutes

In English

Director, Producer, Screenplay: Gordon LePage

Claymation tale of a girl waltzing between worlds at a museum gala.

Night of the Fluffet

USA—2018—DCP—8 Minutes

In English with English subtitles

Director: Raymond Wallace

Producer: Raymond Wallace, Stuart Parks II

Screenplay: Stuart Parks II

Cast: Stuart Parks II, Kelsey Elizabeth Thompson, Bert Plante, Mary Lou Plante, Raegan Brindley

A household is invaded by a cartoon puppet.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

United States—2019—DCP—15 Minutes

In English

Director, Producer, Screenplay: Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Cast: Ariela Kuh

Voiceover: Daryl Hannah

Yes, they can be heard, and the sound will thrill you!

Monday, July 15, 6:30 p.m., RR1

Wednesday, July 17, 3:30 p.m., RR1

Saturday, July 20, 3:30 p.m., WOH

The Grey Zone

USA/Canada—2018—DCP—16 Minutes

Director, Writer: Brian Gersten

Producer: Brian Gersten, Monica Berra

Cast: Steve Kelly, Seetha Lowe

Documentary exploring the land dispute over Machias Seal Island between the US & Canada.

About John

USA—2019—DCP—12 Minutes

In English

Director, Writer: Lauren Shaw

With: John Willey

Get to know the poet, woodworker and Belgrade Lakes resident John Willey.

52 Presenting Sponsors

Maine Shorts

Deciduous Impotence

United States—2018—DCP—5 Minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Martha Campbell

Cinematographer: P. Burton Campbell

A man rakes the forest floor in this stop motion film.

Friendpage

USA—2019—DCP—22 Minutes

In English

Director: Ryan Hart

Producer: Ryan Hart, Sam Knutsen, Wills Waites, Brian Whitney

Screenplay: Sam Knutsen

Cast: Brian Whitney, Ryan Hart, Wills Waites, Daiva Bhandari, Trevor Fergeau

A man changes vocations from surveillance to standup comedy.

53

Maine Shorts

Uncommon Visions Shorts

Hers is a Lush Situation

USA—2018—DCP—19 Minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Samuel Valenti

Producer: Tony De Francisco, Justin Molinari

Cast: Daniela Montalvo, Eric Riley

An estranged couple attempts to make sense of what’s happened to their relationship.

Alma

Bandita

Brazil—2018—DCP—15 Minutes

In Portuguese with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Marco Antonio Pereira

Producer: Ariane Rocha

Cast: Rafael Iago

There is a novel way to make it in this tale from Brazil.

Don’t Save

USA—2018—DCP—1 Minute

Director: Davey Rocco

When saving photos, is your computer’s memory more important than yours?

The Dressing

USA—2018—DCP—14 Minutes

Director, Screenplay: Patrick Moser

Cast: Jackson Moser

A cardboard monster looks for purpose in life.

Tuesday, July 16, 6:15 p.m., RR2

Wednesday, July 17, 9:00 p.m., RR3

The Sacred Union

Mongolia/USA—2018—DCP—17 Minutes

Director: Tom Snelgrove

Cast: Manaljav Altanchimeg

A “man” treks slo-mo through the breathtaking wilds of Mongolia.

Eidolon

UK—2018—DCP—10 Minutes

In English

Director, Producer, Screenplay: Louise Milne

The new film from MIFF faves Louise Milne and Seán Martin, memories of a gypsy encampment initiate this interwoven trio of mournfully haunting narratives.

54 Presenting

Festival Staff

Mike Perreault, Festival Director

Ken Eisen, Programming Director

Alan Sanborn, Technical Director

Jessica Shoudy, Assistant Director, MIFFONEDGE Vol. 7 Curator

Karen Young, Shorts Programmer

Nate Towne, Marketing Director

Austin Frederick, Operations Specialist

Lisa Lessard, Guest Services Coordinator

Arleen King-Lovelace, Guest Services Coordinator

Phoebe Parker, Transportation Coordinator

J-Sun Bailey, Technical Coordinator

Deni Merrill, Office Coordinator

Byron Greatorex, Print Shipping Coordinator

Bria Watson, Associate Programmer, Social Media Coordinator

Jak Peters, Associate Programmer

Nancy Bixler, Associate Programmer

Julia Sidelinger, Volunteer Coordinator

Marie Sugden, Special Event Coordinator, Guest Bag Coordinator

Tamara Casoria, Marketing Coordinator

Elektra Greatorex, Rink Hostess

Aaron Canter, Intern, Box Office

Tom Crisp, Intern, Box Office

Daniel Ellison, Intern, Box Office

Dora Wang, Intern, Box Office

Jimmy Marrone, Box Office

Festival Venue Managers

J-sun Bailey, Railroad Square Cinema Venue Manager

Zachary-Allen Wallace, Railroad Square Cinema Assistant Venue Manager

Adelia Scheck, Waterville Opera House Venue Manager

Dora Wang, Waterville Opera House Assistant Venue Manager

Festival Projectionists and Technical Crew

Rick Harmon

Jak Peters

J-sun Bailey

Logan Rollins

Gage Johnson

Alan Sanborn

Additional Festival Support

Graphic Design: Lisa Oakes, Lavender Designs

Festival Branding: Illustration by Shawn Brewer, Photograph by Paul Cyr

T-Shirt Printing: Outbound Press

Web Support: Aaron Shoudy

MIFF 2019 Trailer: Jak Peters

Photography: John Meader, Niko Hample, Lucas Pelotte

42nd Maine Student Film and Video Festival Judges

Dave Boardman, Emcee

Austin Frederick, Judge

Aaron Canter, Judge

Dora Wang, Judge

Daniel Ellison, Judge

Railroad Square Cinema Staff

Nancy Bixler

Jill Lawrence

Deni Merrill

Ray Pelkey

Jak Peters

Alan Sanborn

Adelia Scheck

Zachary-Allen Wallace

Bria Watson

Waterville Opera House Staff

Tamsen Brooke Warner, Executive Director

Michelle Sweet, Assistant Executive Director

Tony Gerow, Technical Director

Erik Thomas, Program Manager

Emilienne Ouellette, Box Office Manager

James Kuzio, Theater Technician

Ben David Richmond, Venue Technician

Mel Chapman, Box Office Assistant

Dory Ames, Custodian

Fred Jobber, Ticket Taker

Waterville Creates! Staff

Yvonne Brown, Clay Manager

Tamara Casoria, Marketing Coordinator

Shannon Haines, President + CEO

Patricia King, Vice President

Phoebe Sanborn, Administrative Assistant

Serena Sanborn, Education + Outreach Coordinator

Bethany Savage, Development Director

Marie Sugden, Coordinator of Special Projects

Nate Towne, Marketing Director

Waterville Creates! Board of Directors

Jim LaLiberty, Chair

Larry Sterrs, Immediate Past Chair

Elizabeth Finch, Vice Chair

Sno Barry, Treasurer

Lori Roming, Secretary

Brian Clark

Don Cragen

John Dalton

Buffy Higgins

Tammy Rabideau

Deb Susi

62 Presenting Sponsors

Mid-Life Achievement Award Honoree Hilary Brougher, Actor: Director, Screenplay: South Mountain, The Sticky Fingers of Time, Stephanie Daley

Elisabeth Tova Bailey, Director, Producer, Screenplay: “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating”

Caleb Baker: “Portraits of Chiquinho”

Jill Baron, Director: Change the Subject

Ben Becher, Actor: Before You Know It

Monica Berra, Producer: “The Grey Zone”

Will Berry, Director, Screenplay: “Nashedonia”

Denny Bess, Actor: “Icarus Stops for Breakfast”

Susan Bickford: “stillness(18)”

Sawyer Broadley, Director: Change the Subject

Jay Cocks: After Hours, Medium Cool

Debra Cooke, Producer, Actor: In the Moon’s Shadow

Lance Edmands, Director, Screenplay: “Whiteout”

Brian Gersten, Director, Writer: “The Grey Zone”

Narcissa Gold: “My Body is Your Body is Everybody is Nobody: Consent, Intent, & Boundaries”

Milton Guillen, Director, Screenplay: “Presence of the Past”

Holli Harms, Producer, Screenplay: “Icarus Stops for Breakfast”

Audrey Harrer: “Lavender”

Ryan Hart, Director, Producer, Actor: “Friendpage”

Drew Houpt, Producer: Blow the Man Down

Pete Jacobson, Cello: The Gathering

Mike Kaplan: Sunny Side Up

Hüseyin Karabey, Director, Screenplay, Producer: Içerdikiler (Insiders)

Roman Kasseroller, Cinematographer: “Todo se calma (Everything Calms Down),” Los Miembros de la Familia (Family Members)

Jonathan Kiefer, Producer, Screenplay: Around the Sun

Samuel Knutsen, Producer, Screenplay: “Friendpage”

Oliver Krimpas, Director, Producer: Around the Sun

Ava Langford, Actor: “Presence of the Past”

Marie Losier, Director, Writer: Cassandro, the Exotico!

Heather Lyon: “Longing for Other Worlds”

Louise Milne, Director, Producer, Screenplay: “Eidolon”

Tom Paige, Director, Producer: The Gathering

Hannah Pearl Utt, Director, Screenplay: Before You Know It

Julie Poitras Santos: “Walking Backwards (Birger’s Walk)”

Virginia Scaro, Director, Producer, Screenplay: “Todo se calma (Everything Calms Down)”

Jose Scaro, Actor: “Todo se calma (Everything Calms Down)”

Alex Scharfman, Producer: Blow the Man Down

Jesse Sharps, Woodwinds: The Gathering

Lauren Shaw, Director: “About John”

Gizem Erman Soysaldi, Actor: Içerdikiler (Insiders)

Hannah Pearl Utt, Director, Screenwriter, Actor: Before You Know It

Sam Valenti, Director: “Hers is a Lush Situation”

Bobby West, Piano: The Gathering

John Willey: “About John”

Abigail Zealey Bess, Director, Producer: “Icarus Stops for Breakfast”

Derek Zemrak, Producer: Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm

Brian Zemrak, Director, Screenplay: Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm

PLEASE NOTE: Guests may not be present at all screenings of their films. All guests are subject to change. Unscheduled guest appearances are also possible.

63 Presenting Sponsors Festival Guests

64 Presenting Sponsors Index About John 52 After Hours 8 Ága 40 Ahle Ab (Waterfolks) 17 Alice 40 Alma Bandita 54 American Factory 40 Aquarela 41 Around the Sun 41 Baad (The Wind) 17 Before You Know It 41 Bertolucci, Bernardo 16 Bloom, Verna 8 Blow the Man Down 13 Blue Velvet 26 Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm 42 Brougher, Hilary 6–7 Cassandro, the Exotico! 42 [Censored] 42 Cetáceos 18 Change the Subject 43 Chronicle of the Years of Fire 26 The Cranes are Flying 26 Deciduous Impotence 53 Detour 27 Divino Amor (Divine Love) 43 Don’t Save 54 The Dreamers 16 The Dressing 54 Eidolon 54 Enamorada (Enamored) 27 Familia Submergida (A Family Submerged) 18 The Fate of Lee Khan 27 Festival Guests 63 Festival Staff 62 Friendpage 53 The Gathering: Roots and Branches of Los Angeles Jazz 14 The Grey Zone 52 Have You Seen My Movie? 44 Hers is a Lush Situation 54 Hiding in Daylight 50 Hier (Yesterday) 44 His Master’s Voice 44 Hjärtat (The Heart) 45 Icarus Stops for Breakfast 50 Içerdikiler (Insiders) 45 In Fabric 45 In the Moon’s Shadow 46 Insulaire (Islander) 46 International Shorts 51 It’s a Mess 50 It’s Rough Out There! Shorts 50 Jay Myself 46 Kardeşler (Brothers) 47 La Bruja de Fósforo Paseante 51 La Flor (The Flower) 19 La Omisión (The Omission) 19 Last Tango in Paris 16 Los Miembros de la Familia (Family Members) 19 Los Tiburones (The Sharks) 47 Luce 15 Maine Shorts 52–53 Medium Cool 8 The Menarche 51 Midnight Family 47 MIFF-at-a-Glance Schedule 32–33 MIFFONEDGE 30–31 Mike Wallace is Here 48 Nashedonia 52 New Argentine Cinema 18–19 New Features 40–49 Night of the Fluffet 52 One More Spring 28 The Passion of Joan of Arc 28 Presence of the Past 50 Pupille (In Safe Hands) 48 Quiet 51 Re-Discovery 26–29 The Reveal 51 The Sacred Union 54 Shorts Programs 50–54 The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating 52 South Mountain 6 Special Events 22–23 Stephanie Daley 6 The Sticky Fingers of Time 7 Sunny Side Up 28 Teoria do Ímpeto (Theory of Impetus) 48 Three/Four 52 Todo se Calma 51 Uncommon Visions Shorts 54 Vita & Virginia 49 What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael 49 Whiteout 50 Winchester ‘73 29 Wind, Water, and Music: Ethnographic Iran 17 Wings of Desire 29 Within You Without You 43

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Articles inside

22nd Maine International Film Festival Program Guide

Ticket Information

Individual Tickets $10–15

Festival Venues

Railroad Square Cinema

Parking & Transportation

Table of Contents

Contact Us

General Information

Maine International Film Festival

Festival Sponsors

Presenting Sponsors

Day Sponsors

Friends of the Festival

Film Sponsors

Hospitality Sponsors

Mid-Life Achievement Award Honoree: Hilary Brougher

Mid-Life Achievement Award Honoree: Hilary Brougher

South Mountain

USA—2019—DCP—82 Minutes

Stephanie Daley

The Sticky Fingers of Time

USA—1997—Digital Projection—82 Minutes

Jay Cocks Introduces: A Tribute to Verna Bloom

Jay Cocks Introduces A Tribute to Verna Bloom

35mm print! After Hours

35mm print! Medium Cool

New England premiere! Blow the Man Down

The Gathering: Roots and Branches of Los Angeles Jazz

Presented by Camden National Bank

Luce USA—2019—DCP—109 Minutes

Bertolucci

A Tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci

Rare 35mm print! The Dreamers

Sponsored by Julie Miller-Soros

Last Tango in Paris

Italy/France—1972—DCP—126 Minutes

Wind, Water, and Music: Ethnographic Iran

International premiere! Baad (The Wind)

New Argentine Cinema

North American premiere! Cetáceos

New England premiere! Familia Submergida (A Family Submerged)

Film Anarchy

New England premiere! La Flor (The Flower)

U.S. premiere! La Omisión (The Omission)

(Family Members)

Special Events

Parties & Receptions

Free Community Workshops at MIFF

MIFFONEDGE Performances

Rare 35mm print! Blue Velvet

New digital restoration! Chronicle of the Years of Fire

New digital restoration! The Cranes are Flying

Newly restored 35mm print!

Newly restored 35mm print! Enamorada (Enamored)

New digital restoration! The Fate of Lee Khan

New digital restoration! One More Spring

Passion of Joan of Arc

Side Up

New 4K digital restoration! Winchester ’73

New 4K digital restoration! Wings of Desire

Minutes

Minutes

miffonedge vol 7

Audrey Harrer Lavender

Susan Bickford (stillness)18

Narcissa Gold

Portraits of Chiquinho

Heather Lyon Longing for Other Worlds

Walking Backwards (Birger’s Walk)

miffonedge vol 7

MIFF-at-a-Glance Schedule

VENUES

Ága

American Factory

Aquarela

UK/Germany/Denmark/USA—2019—DCP—89 Minutes

East Coast premiere! Director Oliver Krimpas and Screenwriter

You Know It

World premiere! Maine made!