From his first film, Baby It’s You, directed by John Sayles, to his recent role as Dr. Martin “Papa” Brenner in Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and a star turn in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Matthew Modine’s accomplishments in film, television, and on stage define the range of his talent. In addition to Sayles, the Golden Globe Award-winning actor has also worked with directors Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Spike Lee, and Jonathan Demme, to name a few. He’s been directing since the ’90s, and is the co-founder of the production company Cinco Dedos Peliculas. At the Virginia Film Festival, Modine will participate in discussions following the screening of 1984’s Birdy, and the documentary I Hope This Helps!. He answered a few questions for us by email ahead of his appearances.—TK
C-VILLE Weekly: What attracted you to produce the documentary I Hope This Helps!?
Matthew Modine: My producing partner at Cinco Dedos Peliculas, Adam Rackoff, knows that I am curious about consciousness. What is it? When did we become conscious of our consciousness? When did humans become self-aware of our existence?
These are impossible questions to answer and a fascinating subject to delve through. I believe human consciousness has slowly evolved over millions of years. By contrast, artificial intelligence is pretty much brand new, and something that is evolving way, way, way too fast. If we get this wrong—if we don’t have guardrails in place—we will not be able to put this horse back in the barn.
If you have concerns about the consolidation of power, the distribution of news and current events, ‘deepfakes,’ the freedom of movement, you should watch this movement closely.
There’s no way to know what countries the U.S. is continually suspicious of—aren’t already way ahead of the west in this space. “Artificial General Intelligence” is already happening. For sure. This means AI is now able to improve itself—with no human intervention. That should concern all of us. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to sound the bell of caution. I Hope This Helps! humorously illustrates where we are, and where this AI shop is headed.
You’ve worked with an impressive list of directors. Who stands out?
Many of the directors I’ve had the pleasure of working with are still living. So I wouldn’t want to pick favorites. Suffice it to say, I’ve learned something useful from each of them.
What role has had the most personal effect on you?
Maybe Louden Swain, from Vision Quest. It’s a coming-of-age story about a high-school wrestler. I learned from the experience how important it is to maintain focus and that whatever it is we hope to accomplish demands effort and self-determination. Some folks are gifted with natural genius and athletic abilities. But even those who are blessed have to put in the effort to master a craft.
How did you prepare to play Dr. Martin Brenner in “Stranger Things”?
First off, I do not enjoy playing “bad” guys. I get no pleasure from it. The Duffer Brothers, Ross and Matt, wrote terrific scripts and gave me space to create a person that is a conundrum. Someone the audience would be confused by. His look, clothing, hair, speech pattern, that was good fun to pull together with the show’s creative team.
In 1985, New York magazine noted that you and Matthew Broderick were fine actors, but not part of the Brat Pack. Did the Brat Pack label have any effect on your roles or social engagements at the time?
Matthew and I, simply by living in NYC, would have been 3,000 miles away from that silliness. Matthew is a very talented and disciplined theater actor. If he was going out in those days, I’d bet it was with legends from the theater world. I was busy going from film project to film project, two years in England with Stanley Kubrick, during the height of the Brat Pack era. There wasn’t any time in our lives for being in a club.
You are known for your work as an environmental activist. What is your current focus?
Being an environmentalist isn’t a hobby. It’s a demanding commitment to protecting the entirety of nature. The world is like a spider’s web and what we do to a single thread has an impact upon the entire web.
An oil tanker sinking doesn’t just affect the place it sunk and spilled its millions of gallons. The repercussions are far-reaching. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima is an example of how a nuclear explosion in a considerably small location can affect the entire Pacific Ocean and all the creatures within it.
So my focus is global. We have searched the universe looking for “Goldilocks” planets—places that resemble our home—and so far found none. This should magnify our responsibility to protecting all life on the earth and the soil, air, and water, and demanding peaceful resolution through diplomacy to or momentary differences.
What was your reaction when you discovered that the Trump campaign used clips of you from the movie Full Metal Jacket in an online post?
I think my statement on the subject covers how I felt.
[In his statement published in Entertainment Weekly, Modine said, “… Trump has twisted and profoundly distorted Kubrick’s powerful anti-war film into a perverse, homophobic, and manipulative tool of propaganda.”]
With such an accomplished career, what would you change?
We cannot change the past. So it’s a total waste of time to live in regret. I’m here. I’m here now. Believe it or not, 99 percent of life is trying to accomplish something so that we are appreciated, maybe even loved, for what we happily give to others. That means for me, joyfully and gleefully doing for others.
ByLisa Provence, Kristie Smeltzer, and CM Turner Images courtesy VFF
Mapping the movement
Georgia O’Keeffe: the Brightness of Light
November 3 | Culbreth Theatre With discussion
Academy and Emmy Award-winning independent filmmaker Paul Wagner has directed many amazing documentaries that shed light on subjects in American culture. His new film, Georgia O’Keeffe: the Brightness of Light, will screen at this year’s VAFF with a panel discussion, followed by a post-screening reception with the filmmakers at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA.
Completed over two years during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, the film was shot in nearly every location in the United States where the “mother of American modernism” lived and worked. Through diligent efforts in researching and interviewing, Wagner and his team, including Ellen Casey Wagner, uncovered rare instances of the artist in archival film footage that bring O’Keeffe to life for a new generation of fine-art enthusiasts.
One of the most significant artists of the 20th century, O’Keeffe is known for her contributions to the Modernist movement, including her radical depictions of flowers and scenes set in the American Southwest. However, it’s O’Keeffe’s connections to Charlottesville that Wagner believes will leave the largest impact on local audiences.
In 2018, The Fralin mounted the exhibition “Unexpected O’Keeffe: The Virginia Watercolors and Later Paintings,” covering the five summers the artist spent in Charlottesville between 1912 and 1916. “Not only was this of interest as a largely unknown local story, it turned out that her time in Charlottesville attending and teaching at UVA marked a very important moment in her development as an artist,” Wagner says. “It was here at UVA that she discovered the theories of Arthur Wesley Dow that liberated her approach to art from the strictures of 19th-century European realism.”
Wagner was drawn to O’Keeffe as a subject because of the local connection, but also because of the enormous amount of information now available about the artist. Since director Perry Miller Adato released his 1977 documentary Georgia O’Keeffe, countless articles, exhibitions, and books have been produced covering her oeuvre and contributions to culture. “For these reasons,” Wagner says, “we now have a completely different, and deeper, understanding of who O’Keeffe was as an artist, as a woman, and as an American.”—CMT
Mother’s moon
Nightbitch
November 2 | The Paramount Theater With discussion
Screenwriter and director Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, adapted from Rachel Yoder’s 2021 debut novel of the same name, chronicles the days of Mother (Amy Adams), a professional artist who pauses her career to be a stay-at-home toddler mom in the ‘burbs while Husband (Scoot McNairy) travels frequently for work. Mother also happens to be turning into a dog.
Billed as a blend of comedy and horror, the film uses magical realism to take the transformations of a mother’s experience a step further than what most—if word on the street is to be believed—go through. However, the extended metaphor at Nightbitch’s heart seems apt. While not a mother myself, a year-long stint as a nanny to three boys under 6 had me eating scraps off others’ plates, sniffing butts, and occasionally barking at the moon. But here’s the thing: I could clock out—something Mother seems desperate to have the chance to do in Nightbitch’s trailer as she aggressively washes a cat’s bum in the tub, bemoaning, “Nobody in this family can clean their own butts!”
In Nightbitch, the audience sees a woman grappling with the messy aspects of parenting, which differ from the joys of motherhood—if greeting cards are to be believed. The film relies on voiceover (as novel adaptations are wont do) and alternate versions of moments (fantasy vs. reality) to show the tension between Mother’s interior and exterior selves. But her transformation doesn’t seem to be all bad, with moments of authenticity ensuing as Mother embraces her new, more feral, self. Early reviews laud six-time Academy Award-nominee Adams’ performance, praising her bone-deep commitment to the role. That feedback bodes well for the film, because the audience’s belief in Mother’s transformation hinges on Adams as the foundation they’ve built this tail, I mean tale, upon.—KS
Surviving the system
Juvenile: Five Stories
November 2 | Violet Crown 5
Three million young people are arrested every year, says Juvenile: Five Stories director Joann Self Selvidge. “Not all of them end up incarcerated, but all of them end up entangled in these systems that weigh them down, and keep them from realizing their potential.”
Selvidge didn’t start out to be an award-winning documentary filmmaker. The UC Berkeley comparative literature major just liked to tell stories.
Returning to her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, she found plenty of stories to tell, starting with WLOK, the first Black-owned and -operated radio station in Memphis. “I had been doing oral histories,” she says, and she realized the WLOK story would “make an amazing documentary.”
Inspiration for Juvenile: Five Stories came from a public defender friend who was working on a jail diversion program for people with serious mental health issues. Selvidge was drawn to those stories. “I had personal experience with mental health institutionalization when I was in high school,” she says. And she wanted to explore how young people get access to care and “navigate these systems set up to criminalize them.”
Forming the relationships to make the film took years. “Things have changed dramatically in the world of documentary filmmaking,” she notes. There were always ethical practices, especially when dealing with minors. “Now there are equity practices to give [the young people] more agency in how their story was told.”
Through a Twitter callout to her connections with youth justice leaders across the country, Selvidge and her co-director Sarah Fleming found Romeo, Ariel, Michael, Shimaine, and Ja’Vaune. They came from different parts of the country and they all had different paths into the system: violence, sexual abuse, home instability, mental illness, substance abuse.
Finding Michael, the only white kid of the five, was the most difficult because “wealth and whiteness keep you out of the system,” says Selvidge.
The five were between 18 and 23 when they told her their stories. She hired young actors to tell their backstories in impressionistic, cinematic sequences. “We were dealing with histories of extreme trauma,” she explains. “We had to make decisions about how we’re going to portray that … We were very intentional for this film not to be, like, trauma porn.”
The five young people whose stories Selvidge documented seem to be doing amazingly well. “They’re all strong because they survived,” she says.
Two of them—Shimaine Holley, founder of Change Is Inevitable, and Romeo Gonzalez, a re-entry specialist and mentor—will appear with Selvidge at the November 2 Violet Crown screening.
“If there’s one thing I learned over and over and over again,” says Selvidge, “the best way for systems to reduce their harm and to change their policies and practices is when young people are given the power and resources to be in positions where they’re heard and can hold groups accountable. That’s when things start to change.”—LP
Thriller with a side of horror trivia
Catch a Killer
October 30 | Violet Crown 3
Writer and director Teddy Grennan doesn’t like blood. While living in Los Angeles, he wrote an animated feature called Holy Cow, about a bull who realizes his future is on the grill and with the help of a caterpillar, attempts to escape to India. The film, full of goodwill and karma, didn’t get made and the experience was frustrating, says Grennan.
His breakthrough realization: “Violence translates into every language.” And that the appetite for horror is insatiable.
After “boohooing into my drink, I wanted to move into bloody thrillers,” says Grennan. He shot Ravage in Virginia with Bruce Dern, and says the movie has done well financially.
“I knew going into this if I was doing a lo-fi film, it was not going to be about my first break-up or my mom or my dad,” he explains. “I was going to make it about blood and guts, and I knew I could get people’s money I’ve known for years and make enough to pay it back.”
In the opening montage, the addresses of crime scenes seem vaguely familiar: Elm Street. Amityville Circle. Christine Street. Not surprisingly, the movie’s wannabe detective and horror buff Otto soon begins to connect the dots on the trail of a serial murderer.
Catch a Killer, Grennan’s fourth film, is also a story of “star-crossed lovers,” he suggests. Winsome actors Sam Brooks and Tu Morrow play Otto and his pregnant girlfriend, Lex, as they set up house and try to figure out what’s next in the grisly tableau of murders.
Viewers will recognize a couple of notable Charlottesville locations, but the setting is an anonymous city. And as a bonus for horror fans, can you spot Joshua Leonard from The Blair Witch Project?
Twelve years ago Grennan and his wife moved to Somerset in Orange County, next door to the scene of the notorious alleged 2001 poisoning of Ham Somerville by his wife, known as Black Widow, at Mt. Athos.
He’s made four movies in Virginia, including Wicked Games, but his fifth film will be shot in Kentucky, because he had a tough time rounding up a film crew here. “This was a bear,” he says. “After COVID, the crews went away,” at least from central Virginia.
He describes his next effort, The Growing Season, as Witness meets The Blind Eye, with a good dose of Training Day.
Catch a Killer has already garnered accolades: the audience award for Spotlight Feature at the Nashville Film Festival, and Best Thriller Feature at the Atlanta Horror Film Festival.
“I knew it would be good business—if I didn’t botch it—doing thrillers,” he says. And one of these days, maybe he’ll get to make that lo-fi movie about his first girlfriend in Vermont.—LP
Visual concepts
Designing the Production featuring Kalina Ivanov and David Crank
November 2 | Irving Theater in the CODE Building
Production design is an integral aspect of filmmaking that largely defines the look and feel of the world on screen. Working closely with directors and cinematographers, production designers are responsible for developing the aesthetics of sets, locations, props, costumes, and more that allow viewers to immerse themselves in cinematic stories. This work is essential in communicating mood and driving narratives and character arcs established in a film’s script.
Tyler Coates, an editor at The Hollywood Reporter, moderates a panel featuring 2024 VAFF Craft Award-winner Kalina Ivanov (“The Penguin,” “Lovecraft Country,” The Boys in the Boat) and Richmond-based Academy Award-nominated production designer David Crank (Knives Out, The Master, Inherent Vice). The panel will discuss the development of visual concepts, scouting and choosing locations, the manufacturing of physical sets, historical research, and defining the aesthetic environments for film and television productions.
Crank has worked behind the scenes in the entertainment industry for more than 30 years, coming to film and television sets after designing scenery for theater productions from high school through his graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University. As a former studio art student, Crank says the skills needed for drawing and painting are the same as those needed for production design, with the two disciplines constantly influencing each other within his practice, “either in intent or in skills.”
Designing for directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Paul Greengrass, Rian Johnson, and Terrence Malick, Crank is drawn to working with filmmakers who write their own material, and are thus primarily concerned with storytelling. “That is where the meat of the script is,” Crank says, “and as a designer, good storytelling is what gives you the most room for imagination and creating.”
Crank has also worked with two Academy Award-nominated production designers with Charlottesville connections: Jack Fisk (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Revenant, There Will be Blood) and Ruth De Jong (Oppenheimer, Nope, “Yellowstone”). “I think we three have a very similar way of hands-on working and certainly the same sense of humor,” says Crank. “We each have continued on successfully with our own styles without each other, but that is hugely due to Jack’s influence and guidance.”
Living in Virginia has afforded the production designer a unique experience that’s shaped his life as much as his career. “It’s given me a life full of friends who mostly aren’t in the same industry as me, which makes for very interesting dinner conversations,” Crank says. “I think it has also contributed to a certain outsider mentality, which for me is fine.”—CMT
Overseeing the programming of more than 120 films and nearly 100 guests as artistic director of the Virginia Film Festival, Ilya Tovbis knows how to curate a celebration of cinema. He’s worked with the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and the Mill Valley Film Festival (organized by the California Film Institute), among other accomplishments. Tovbis spent 10 years as the artistic and managing director of JxJ: The Washington Jewish Film and Music Festivals in Washington, D.C., and served as a guest programmer for the VAFF beginning in 2019, curating selections of Jewish, Israeli, and other international films before joining the festival full time in 2022. Prior to the opening of the 37th annual VAFF, we put the film aficionado in the HotSeat.
Name: Ilya Tovbis
Age: I have to count the rings … will get back to you.
Pronouns: He/him/his
Hometown: Odessa, Ukraine (born) / New York, New York (raised) / Charlottesville (current)
Job(s): Artistic director, Virginia Film Festival
What’s something about your job that people would be surprised to learn? Taste and film knowledge are important, but are only a small fraction of the actual job.
What is acting/performing to you? Acting is about lending real human dimension to the role as written on the page. Giving parts of yourself—warts and all—to the character.
Why is supporting the arts important? Especially in our ever-more polarized society, I believe the arts are our best, most honest, and most direct way of connecting to, and understanding, those different from ourselves.
Favorite city to work in: I go to Toronto every year for the film festival there. Incredible city.
Favorite venue to watch movies in: Walter Reade Theater (Lincoln Center, New York City)
Favorite movie and/or show:His Girl Friday
Favorite musician/musical group: Leonard Cohen
Favorite book:The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
What are you currently watching? TV-wise: “Veep,” “Shrinking,” “Disclaimer,” “The Penguin”
What are you currently listening to? Karol G, DakhaBrakha, Nina Simone
Go-to karaoke song: “Total Eclipse of the Heart”
Best advice you ever got: Embrace your quirks.
Proudest accomplishment: Starting defender on my unscored-upon seventh-grade soccer team. More recently, helping to bring Ava DuVernay to Charlottesville for the U.S. premiere of her knockout film Origins.
Celebrity crush: Aubrey Plaza
Who’d play you in a movie? Neil Patrick Harris
Who is your hero? Victor Jara
Best part of living here: Nature, MarieBette, and UVA basketball
Worst part of living here: Not enough stand-up comedy.
Favorite Charlottesville restaurant: Guajiros
Favorite Charlottesville venue: The Paramount
Favorite Charlottesville landmark/attraction: Blue Ridge Mountains
Bodo’s order: Everything egg bagel with horseradish and muenster cheese.
Describe a perfect day: Walk by the Rivanna River with my wife Jennie-Maire and our dog, Luna, bowling, and then a movie at Violet Crown.
If you could be reincarnated as a person or thing, what would you be? A common swift (live months at a time in the air without landing) or Vince Carter (see: common swift).
If you had three wishes, what would you wish for? Six more wishes
Most embarrassing moment: Hand-making a teddy bear for a high-school valentine, who dumped me the next day.
Best Halloween costume you’ve worn: Paper shredder or toothbrush
Do you have any pets? Only the cutest puppy in Charlottesville, Luna Rellanova Tovbis.
Subject that causes you to rant: Capitalism
Best journey you ever went on: Traveling around Taiwan, especially the Alishan forest.
Next journey: Austin, Texas
Most used app on your phone: Outlook
Favorite curse word? Or favorite word: Aestival
Hottest take/most unpopular opinion:John Wick is high-end cinema.
"Anora" is the opening-night movie at this year's Virginia Film Festival.
By Justin Humphreys and Tami Keaveny Images courtesy VFF
This year the Virginia Film Festival coincides with Halloween, and along with some great horror movies, the five-day program offers the escape of comedy, journeys to the unknown, classic stories retold, cautionary technology tales, and documented accounts of war, redemption, and environmental peril, plus invaluable on-stage discussions.
After exiting your seat, you can offer your opinion by casting a vote at a kiosk to rate the film you’ve seen (the people and projects on the following pages get our vote). And when the festival goes dark, you’ll leave the theater with roughly 36 hours before voting begins in the most consequential election of our time. So watch, listen, and vote, vote, vote—especially on November 5!—TK
Watch list
Memoir of a Snail (with discussion)
October 31 | Culbreth Theater Memoir of a Snail, the newest film from Australian writer-director-animator Adam Elliot, promises to be as challenging, deeply human, and character-driven as Elliot’s touching Mary and Max (2009). Filmed meticulously in labor-intensive stop-motion animation, Memoir of a Snail follows a twin brother and sister on their thorny path through childhood into adult life. Elliot’s adult-themed animation is full of pathos and wry humor, and is not recommended for small children. Listen for voice performances by outstanding talents like Dominique Pinon and Nick Cave.—JH
The Glassworker
November 2 | Violet Crown 1 & 2 Director-animator-composer Usman Riaz’s The Glassworker is not only his first feature, but also Pakistan’s first full-length, hand-drawn animated film. The influence of master animator Hayao Miyazaki is vividly apparent in The Glassworker’s overall style and design—there are few better living animators to draw inspiration from. This anti-war allegory is a reminder of the respect mature animation receives outside of the United States, and with hand-drawn animation being under-represented worldwide, let’s hope The Glassworker gets a broad American release.—JH
Amadeus
November 1 | Violet Crown 3 In 1984, director Milos Forman lavishly brought Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus to the screen, and it caused a sensation with audiences and at the Oscars. It tells the largely fictionalized story of a rivalry between the manic but prodigiously brilliant Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Salieri (F. Murray Abraham). The two leads give arguably the signature performances of their careers, and are backed by an excellent supporting cast including a young Cynthia Nixon, Simon Callow, and the late Vincent Schiavelli. Among the film’s many other virtues is the extraordinary old-age makeup by the incomparable Dick Smith.—JH
Luther: Never Too Much(with discussion)
November 1 | Culbreth Theater Dawn Porter’s documentary Luther: Never Too Much chronicles the life of R&B legend Luther Vandross. The film’s title is derived from the eponymous track of Vandross’ first solo album—the first of 11 Vandross records to go platinum. Porter traces the late “Velvet Voice’s” career, from his beginnings as a backup singer for David Bowie, Chaka Khan, and Chic, to his own highly influential and successful career. Among many other topics, she explores why he was so private about his homosexuality, and the criticism he endured for gaining weight. The rich retrospective reveals how the popular image of public figures is often deeply skewed.—JH
Saturday Night(with discussion)
November 2 | Violet Crown 5 The Not Ready for Prime Time Players broke into the cultural zeitgeist when “NBC’s Saturday Night” premiered on October 11, 1975, with George Carlin as the host, and musical guests Billy Preston and Janis Ian. Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night dramatizes the backstage chaos, personality clashes, and wild antics that led up to the moment when Chevy Chase looked into the camera and shouted, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” for the very first time. Jon Batiste is behind the film’s music, Matt Wood stars as John Belushi, Dylan O’Brien is Dan Aykroyd, and Emmy Award-winner Lamorne Morris who plays Garrett Morris (no relation) will be on stage for a post-screening discussion.—TK
And just like that, the Virginia Film Festival is a wrap. The five-day fest was full of memorable on- and off-screen moments, from Jon Batiste’s piano serenade, to the U.S. premiere of award-winning filmmaker Ava Duvernay’s Origin. A biographical drama inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the film follows Wilkerson’s research around the globe, and chronicles her inspirations for writing the book, including the events in Charlottesville on August 11–12, 2017. DuVernay, who spent the day in the city ahead of Origin’s evening premiere, hosted a private screening and conversation with local community members who were directly affected by the deadly weekend before heading to The Paramount Theater, where she received the VAFF Visionary Award. “It seems to me that there’s no better place in this country to bring this film,” said DuVernay.
Maestro. All images courtesy the Virginia Film Festival.
The Holdovers
The Holdovers.
Director Alexander Payne is a devoted cinephile who loves the style of intimate, wryly funny, character-driven films that were plentiful 50 years ago but are now nearly extinct. Payne’s films honor this bygone era of storytelling in welcome ways, including his newest work, The Holdovers. Set in 1970, the reliable Paul Giamatti stars as a miserable New England boarding school teacher who forges unlikely bonds with a student (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s chief cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) while they’re stuck together over Christmas break. Based on extensive positive buzz, The Holdovers looks very promising. (October 28, The Paramount Theater)
Immediate Family
Immediate Family.
Denny Tedesco’s excellent 2008 documentary The Wrecking Crew shone a spotlight on some of the 1960s pop music industry’s greatest unsung session musicians. In Immediate Family, Tedesco continues his coverage of extraordinary studio players into the 1970s singer-songwriter movement. Tedesco’s interviewees include these backing musicians, professionally nicknamed “The Immediate Family,” and many of the musical superstars whose sound they contributed (largely anonymously) to, like Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, Carole King, James Taylor, and Linda Ronstadt. (October 27, Violet Crown 3)
Maestro
Director and star Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro explores composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein’s (Cooper) complex relationship with his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Bernstein’s extraordinary career and his romantic life are definitely rich material to work with, and the initial consensus is that Cooper has noticeably matured as a director since his acclaimed A Star is Born. (October 25, The Paramount Theater)
Robot Dreams
Robot Dreams.
Spanish animator Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams, based on Sara Varon’s graphic novel, looks to be the kind of thoughtful, challenging animated feature that rarely gets made or released in America anymore. Sadly, ambitious productions like this usually get ground under by big studios’ animated spectacles. Grab your chance to see this film about a lonely anthropomorphic dog and his robot companion in 1980s New York while you can. (October 28, Violet Crown 1 & 2)
They Shot the Piano Player
They Shot the Piano Player.
Directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal filmed They Shot the Piano Player in stylized “limited” animation built on Trueba’s research into the 1976 disappearance of bossa nova pianist Francisco Tenório, Jr. Jeff Goldblum voices Trueba’s on-screen stand-in, a fictional reporter seeking closure to this gifted musician’s story. Audio from actual interviews with Tenório’s family and peers are interwoven in animated form throughout this visually and musically vibrant film. (October 27, Violet Crown 6 & 7)
Boyd v. Denton is one of nine new short films by Kevin Jerome Everson. Image courtesy of VAFF.
For many years, filmmaker and UVA film professor Kevin Jerome Everson has figured prominently in Charlottesville’s moviemaking community. His experimental films have continually bypassed cinematic conventions in favor of “formal exercises,” he explains. A regular Virginia Film Festival guest, Everson will screen nine shorts on Friday, “all shot this calendar year,” he notes, and marked by his idiosyncratic style.
Everson’s suite of films focuses on disparate subjects, including birdwatchers; a drive-in theater; and a zoologist returning an endangered Puerto Rican crested toad from the Detroit Zoo to its homeland. Conventional Hollywood fare, this is not.
Practice, Practice, Practice meditates on monuments’ removal through its subject, Richard Bradley. “They call him ‘the original monument taker-downer’ because he climbed a flagpole three times to take down a Confederate flag in San Francisco,” Everson says.
The most technically challenging film was Boyd v. Denton, shot at the Ohio State Reformatory in Everson’s hometown, Mansfield, Ohio. The title refers to the 1990 court case that got the reformatory closed for overcrowding and brutal living conditions.
To convey a sense of the prison’s environment, Everson says he shot “a maximum of four frames of 920 cells. … It’s animation—just going 24 frames per second. … It took like six-and-a-half hours to make because I had to walk into every cell,” Everson laughs.
“The Ohio State Reformatory is the highest cellblock on earth: it’s six stories high. … [Filming] it took forever.”
Although these films’ subjects vary wildly, Everson sees a theme that binds his more character-driven pieces. He says, “It’s mostly … just making the invisible visible. Because we always think that things are automatically being done but there’s somebody waking up in the morning and doing these things for the public.”
Through these shorts, Everson wants his audience to come away knowing “that there’s other ways of presenting cinema,” he explains. “There’s other ways of presenting content. It’s not just storytelling—sometimes the situations are pretty good, too. And there’s all kinds of stories being told.”
Filmmakers trace William Faulkner’s complicated southern identity in Faulkner: The Past is Never Dead. Image courtesy of VAFF.
Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner arrived at the University of Virginia more than 60 years ago to begin his tenure as the first writer-in-residence. During his time in Charlottesville, Faulkner visited English classes, kept office hours, worked on his novel The Mansion, and left a lasting impact on the area’s literary, and wine, scene (His descendants own and run Knight’s Gambit Vineyard in Crozet.)
Faulkner: The Past is Never Dead, a new documentary from director Michael Modak-Truran, explores the life and work of the renowned-yet-flawed literary figure. Using a variety of storytelling techniques, including interviews, archival photographs, and newspaper images, the film immerses viewers in Faulkner’s world, paying special attention to his sometimes paradoxical words on race.
“Faulkner’s ‘unflinching gaze’ dissected issues of race relations, equality, and civil rights—themes that continue to resonate today,” says the doc’s Executive Producer Anita Modak-Truran, who speaks at this year’s Virginia Film Festival. “Faulkner’s relevance is painfully obvious. The issues of race and change that animated Faulkner’s writing were, and are, at the forefront of the American zeitgeist.”
Though Faulkner is frequently lauded for his at-the-time progressive views about Black Americans and racial equality in his writing, he sometimes made racist remarks. Modak-Truran says the documentary avoids presenting Faulkner through a revisionist history lens, and instead lets viewers untangle the good and the bad for themselves.
What sets The Past is Never Dead apart from other documentaries is its captivating reenactments, historical locations, and original score. The camera follows Faulkner through five decades, and steps inside real haunts from his past, including his Mississippi home Rowan Oak. When casting an actor to play the writer, filmmakers landed on Academy Award-nominee Eric Roberts.
“It gave me chills watching Eric from the set monitor navigating a spectrum of emotions,” says Modak-Truran. “[He] cracked through the contemplative Faulkner’s surface and traveled to internal places we may not want to see, like when he tells his daughter Jill, that ‘no one remembers Shakespeare’s child.’ It’s like a gut punch. Eric makes Faulkner’s words his own. His narration, in particular, is so richly nuanced that it lulls us into the heart of a troubled soul who is trying to understand the world around him.”
Known as one of the foremost authors in the Black Arts Movement, poet Nikki Giovanni has published political and inspirational work since the 1960s. Supplied photo.
This year’s Virginia Film Festival features Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a new documentary that chronicles the life, work, and enduring legacy of the titular poet. Going to Mars has already garnered much buzz: At its Sundance premiere earlier this year, the film received the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary award.
Produced and directed by Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, the film features Giovanni’s poetry, which has enjoyed the popular spotlight for over half a century, overlaid by captivating visuals as well as archival footage. Going to Mars places Giovanni’s work in the context of historical events, social movements—from the Black Arts Movement to Black Lives Matter—and the poet’s personal life. This contextualization illustrates how Giovanni’s appeal is rooted in her ability to weave the political and personal into deeply evocative poems. Ahead of the festival, C-VILLE Weekly had the opportunity to ask Nikki Giovanni a few questions.
C-VILLE: Many folks—including myself—are so looking forward to viewing Going to Mars. Could you talk about what the filmmaking process was like for you? How much were you able to contribute to the artistic vision of the project?
Nikki Giovanni: Mostly I tried to stay out of the way. My contribution was already [there], so I wanted Michèle and Joe to create from my thoughts and creations. I must add I was thrilled at how they used the future with history, which is pretty much how I think.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. Image courtesy of VAFF.
You are well known for writing poems that reach across generations, chronicling family and societal histories. What impact do you hope this film might have on writers, especially Black poets, who view it now and in the future?
If I could compare this documentary to any other film I would say The Godfather. The history and the love and the acceptance of duty are, I hope, in it.
What excites you most about where American poetry is today?
The voice of Black Americans has continually evolved. We are now at rap but another tone is coming. People all over are writing and reading poetry. There are festivals and there are classes. Wow! A lot of folk used to not even know about poetry who are now a part of its growth.
You’ve talked elsewhere about your quest not to let the world negatively influence you. At a time when so much is happening, and news of these happenings is so readily available to us 24/7, what helps you maintain that inner sanctum?
I avoid what I believe is called social media. I never argue to, at, or with people for whom I have no intellectual respect. I have a great belief in the strength of our ancestors who passed their wisdom along through The Spirituals. I prefer happiness.
Ricardo Preve reflects on his arrival in Charlottesville in Sometime, Somewhere, which will have its world premiere at the Virginia Film Festival. Image courtesy of VAFF.
Things have changed a lot since Ricardo Preve arrived at the bus station in Charlottesville in 1977 without money or a passport. There weren’t many Latinos in town then, and he found the locals welcoming, if ignorant about Latin America.
“It was so easy to become a citizen in the ’80s,” recalls Preve. When he became eligible for American citizenship, his boss called his congressman, who called a federal judge, and Preve was sworn in the next day. “I think the whole process took 48 hours from beginning to end.”
Now, he says, there’s no path to citizenship, and the current waiting time for a Mexican is 22 years.
“I feel the attitude toward foreigners has changed,” says Preve, who was born in Argentina. He cites September 11, 2001, January 6, 2021, and August 12, 2017, as “moments that exacerbated and brought out things that may have been here, but were hidden.”
His latest film, Sometime, Somewhere, is “a reflection on my past after being in this town for 45 years,” he says. He uses Charlottesville to tell the story, not only of contemporary migrants, but of this country’s history of immigration.
Preve had an advantage many immigrants don’t have. His aunt, Countess Judith Gyurky, also an immigrant who fled Hungary during World War II, established a horse farm in Batesville. “They received me with open arms,” he recalls.
In Preve’s film, the forced migration of African Americans is remembered by Jamaican-born Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, at the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers.
The Irish also play a part in the local immigration story. Fleeing the potato famine, they built the Blue Ridge Tunnel in the 1850s. And on Heather Heyer Way, Preve films where white supremacy took off its mask.
Preve links The Grapes of Wrath’s Joads, who were escaping the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, to the immigrant experience. “Substitute Garcia or Gonzales for Joad, and it’s the same story,” he says. “This is a repeating story in American history. People are exploited and they’re considered less than human.”
Preve didn’t ask about the immigration status of the people he interviews in the film, some of whom he found through Sin Barreras—Without Barriers—an organization that supports the Hispanic community.
“At first, people were worried I was undercover ICE,” he says. Then they heard his Argentinian-accented Spanish. “The rest of Latin America finds it amusing,” he explains. “It’s like a person from Alabama going to New York City. They realized we could not be undercover.”
The migrants and the immigration attorneys he talks to paint a dire picture of how the decisions to come to America are made.
“If you’re facing execution or starvation or rape, your choice is to either accept your fate or cross the border,” he says. “It is a death sentence to be a 15-year-old Salvadoran boy and the MS-13 says ‘either you join or die.’” Same for a young woman tapped to be a gang girlfriend.
He gave all the migrants the option to remain anonymous, and he was a little surprised at the number who gave their names. “I think that reflects a need for people to be humanized,” says Preve.
Preve, 66, made a career change in the early 2000s, moving from agroforestry to filmmaking. One of his earliest documentaries, Chagas: A Hidden Affliction, brought attention to a rampant disease that’s pretty much unheard of in the United States. Since then, he’s made almost 30 productions for television and film, most recently, From Sudan to Argentina.
Sometime, Somewhere is a more personal film for Preve. He tells film students at Light House Studio to pick a story they’re uniquely qualified to tell. “Immigrating from Latin America to Charlottesville is something I was uniquely qualified to tell,” he says.
And this story came with a special perk. “I got to sleep at home every night,” he says. “It was wonderful to stay in my hometown and shoot a film here.”
