Month: November 2012

Intimate danger

Four County Players stages the amateur world premiere of Woman in a Tiled Room by local playwright Shawn B. Hirabayashi. The two-act, two-character dramatic thriller takes place in an abandoned bathhouse in New York City and plays out the intense and increasingly bizarre relationship between Piers and her recently acquired man-friend Mart. It’s an intimate show well-suited for the cloistered environs of the Cellar space, inspired in part by the paintings of French modernist Pierre Bonnard.

Friday 11/2 through 11/18. $12, 8pm. Four County Players, 5256 Governor Barbour St., Barboursville. (540) 832-5355.

Strong showing

Longtime attendees may notice that this year’s Virginia Film Festival does not have the star power of recent years, but the content looks as strong as ever, with a line-up that includes several notable, well-established filmmakers, and a number of films that will be of particular interest to locals.

One of the most exciting is Ross McElwee. Best known for his beloved film Sherman’s March, the autobiographical 1986 documentary that depicts McElwee’s journey through the American south, camera in hand, tracing the route of William Tecumseh Sherman’s notorious military campaign. Matters are complicated when McElwee’s girlfriend dumps him on the eve of his departure, and the film’s real topic becomes his search for a new partner on his travels.

McElwee is a one-man crew, 16mm camera in hand, filming and conversing with a variety of Southern women, whose relationship to McElwee is, somewhat respectfully, never made fully clear. Many more people now have access to a handheld cameras than they did in 1986, but few of them show as much care and consideration for their subjects as McElwee. He is as thoughtful, considerate, and talented as filmmakers come; his dry humor and keen observational skills are often counterbalanced against the wild personalities he encounters, and his willingness to follow and fully incorporate many tangents and distractions in his work is exemplary. Sherman’s March is a touching, inspiring, and hilarious classic of independent cinema.

McElwee has had a strong career since the ’80s, and in addition to Sherman’s March, he will present two shorter works: 1984’s Backyard, and his newest, Photographic Memory, which deals with McElwee’s relationship with his son. In an effort to bridge the generation gap, he revisits footage of his son from throughout his lifetime, as well as footage that he shot of himself at the same age (it helps that McElwee apparently films everything).

The local take

One of the strongest aspects of the film festival in recent years is the focus on local productions and contemporary documentaries. Music lovers will have a lot to listen for this weekend. Hardcore Norfolk: a Story of Rock-n-Roll Survival tells the tale of two Norfolk-based labels, LaGrande and Shiptown. “Hardcore” in this case refers not to the punk sub-genre, but to the ardency of the music’s fans, who have kept Virginia rock ‘n’ roll (including Gene Vincent and Gary U.S. Bonds) alive over the years.

Something in the Water takes a look at Charlottesville itself. Marc Adams (director of last year’s Alchemy of an American Artist, the documentary about infamous local personality Christian Breeden) here turns his camera towards Charlottesville music in general, capturing interviews with and live footage of a range of legendary locals, including Bella Morte, The Hogwaller Ramblers, The Hackensaw Boys, Devon Sproule and Paul Curreri, John D’earth, and Corey Harris.

Charlottesville director Eric Hurt makes his feature debut with House Hunting, a psychological horror-drama about two families trapped in a nightmarish real estate open-house. The plot seems reminiscent of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 classic The Exterminating Angel. Hurt’s film is a local production starring Marc Singer (of Beastmaster fame) and prolific character actor Art Lafleur, both of whom will be on hand to discuss the film with Singer.

Some less celebratory documentaries take a tough look at Virginia’s often-difficult history: Slavery By Another Name addresses the years following the Civil War, in which many former slaves lived and worked in harsh conditions that continued long after the Emancipation Proclamation. The film features interviews with living descendents of those slaves, as well as historians and scholars, including Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Blackmon of The Miller Center, who will discuss the film at the screening.

And while the topic of grave-robbing might make most of us think of old monster movies, Until the Well Runs Dry deals with the horrifying details of the actual historical practice. From the 1800s up through the early 20th century, Richmond’s African-American cemeteries were regularly raided for corpses that were used for dissections and anatomical studies at the Medical College of Virginia.

Two more documentaries deal with more recent issues of national importance by focusing on local subjects: Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare heavily features the UVA Department of Emergency Medicine, while It’s Only (a) Natural is a personal investigation of the concept of beauty—specifically, black women’s hair—by Richmond model and filmmaker Yolanda Lee.

The hype

One of the Festival’s most anticipated events is The Man With the Iron Fists, the directorial debut of The RZA, the musical mastermind behind Wu-Tang Clan. Robert Diggs has dabbled in soundtrack work and acting roles in films by Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino, but this will be his first feature behind the camera. RZA’s career has been wildly inconsistent—he’s produced some of the best rap albums of all time, as well as an avalanche of lesser, forgotten releases—but if we’ve learned anything since Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), it’s that the man knows his way around a kung fu flick.

Have your say. Drop a line to mailbag@c-ville.com, send a letter to 308 E. Main St., or post a comment at c-ville.com.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley drove nearly 50,000 miles up and down the East Coast with his family, searching for a place to put down roots. The Argentine-born filmmaker settled on Charlottesville for a variety of reasons—the University, the proximity to mountain and ocean, and the public schools.

“There was a series of factors but the most important was the education of our children, which had to be public because I believe in public education,” Montes-Bradley said.

Montes-Bradley’s films focus on literary figures and political themes. A documentary on the author Jorge Luis Borges first brought him to UVA in 1999 for a talk, and a work on samba and African influence in Brazil delves into the larger issues of race and economic inequality.

His latest work, Julian Bond, is a bio-sketch of “the civil rights movement seen through the eyes of the protagonist.” The film’s subject, Julian Bond, professor emeritus of history at UVA, was a student leader during the civil rights struggle who, as spokesperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, drove from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington.

“My job was to give Coca-Colas to the movie stars,” Bond said of his work on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day.

Bond went on to become the first president of Southern Poverty Law Center, the chairman of the NAACP, and a respected Georgia legislator for 20 years. As a figure who’d lived through a period of our country’s history that is already oversimplified and mythologized, Bond offers a point blank view of the proceedings as well as the assured panoramic voice of someone satisfied with the part he played.

But the film’s gems are the off-guard moments when he explains to Montes-Bradley behind the camera how our country used to work, like his first awareness of Jim Crow as a child.

“I knew this was a condition. I couldn’t understand who made it happen, who was in charge of it, what it really meant, but I knew there was a difference between myself and the other people I saw whose skin was not the same color,” Bond says.

Part of the documentary is filmed in Bond’s UVA classroom, as he teaches a new generation about the civil rights movement. That narrative is juxtaposed with a history montage that tells his origin story, a nearly archetypal tale. His great-grandmother was given as a wedding present to a white mistress and bore a child, James, by her planter husband. James, Julian’s grandfather, walked from Georgia to Berea College in Kentucky during Reconstruction with his school tuition, a cow, in tow.

Julian Bond grew up as part of a segregated black elite. His father, a college president, was friends with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, and Langston Hughes was a mentor who encouraged him as a young writer.

Montes-Bradley is fascinated by Bond as a person and also as a living window on history.

“I can’t seem to bring myself to isolate that period, which is what textbooks do in order to make life easier for everyone. History is one, indivisible and extremely complex,” Montes-Bradley said. “Understanding Selma and the March on Washington helps me better understand the massacre of Tlatelolco, the student movements in Paris and Berlin, and my own frustrations with the Argentine experience. I owe that much, and perhaps more, to the perspectives and generosity of Mr. Bond.”

According to Montes-Bradley, the film already has a worldwide distribution deal through Alexander Street Press. It also has a Kickstarter page and a Facebook presence with nearly 5,000 fans. All of that to hammer home a message that the work of integrating our racially stratified society is not at all over.

“Our schools which were supposedly integrated by the Supreme Court decision of 1954 are now almost as segregated today as they were then,” Bond says in the film’s final moments.