Tag: virginia film festival

You don’t forget Eugenio Caballero’s production designs. There’s the otherworldly Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he won an Academy Award. There’s the black-and-white Mexico City in Roma, for which he was nominated for another Oscar. And his most recent efforts in director Alejandro Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will be screened at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.

Caballero will also be presented with the film fest’s first Craft Award, which recognizes a distinguished and outstanding practitioner of behind-the-scenes craft.

A production designer is “the artist hired to create everything you see in the environment that the actors inhabit on screen,” explains film critic Carlos Aguilar, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wrap, and who is the festival’s first critic-in-residence.

“I think [Caballero] is an incredible artist with a talent for creating worlds that either existed in the past or that are sort of fantastical,” says Aguilar.

Caballero has worked with Mexico’s three most renowned directors: Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Iñárritu.

Aguilar’s review of Bardo for The Wrap describes Caballero as “a magician dexterous at turning places long frozen in the directors’ unreliable memory tangible once more for the screen.”

Says Aguilar, “In Roma, he basically brought to life the Mexico City of the ’70s and Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood home.” In Pan’s Labyrinth, “he built the magical world Guillermo had envisioned that is really striking.”

Pan’s Labyrinth had “very strict rules with colors and shapes,” says Caballero in a podcast called Decorating Pages. The filmmaker chose a cold palette for the reality of Franco’s Spain, and a warm palette for the fantasy “that’s supposed to be scary, but at the end it’s a refuge or shelter for this girl,” he says. The furniture was built to be a little bigger. “We really wanted to change the scale.”

Aguilar notes Caballero’s “incredible attention to detail in painstakingly bringing to life these worlds. In Roma, making it seem organic and natural, not artificial, is part of the magic he does.”

Writer/director/producer Dustin Lance Black’s films and television work—including his Academy Award-winning Milk script—are frequently outspoken about LGBTQ+ issues. The Mormon Church also resurfaces throughout his work, as in the hit FX series “Under the Banner of Heaven.” The two topics merge in director Laurent Bouzereau’s new documentary Mama’s Boy, which focuses on Black and his late mother, Anne. And they’re more deeply personal than ever.

Black, 48, half-jokingly calls the film “This Is Your Life and Mostly the Painful Bits.” Working from Black’s memoir Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas, Bouzereau follows him as they retrace his experiences growing up gay among strict Mormons in Texas. There, homosexuality was considered venal, and he was terrified to reveal his true self. Meanwhile, Black’s resilient mother bravely lived with polio. Mama’s Boy explores how his coming out to her revealed her extraordinary gift for compassion.

An Instagram DM from Bouzereau concerning Black’s book led to their collaboration. Black was already aware of Bouzereau from his film-related documentaries, and was “very interested” in working with him. As they became acquainted, Black discovered that “to know Laurent is to love Laurent. … It’s easy to trust him. And I do feel that that trust was well placed.”

Black wrote his memoir “from the safety of my home now as a grown man,” he points out. But facing his tough childhood memories on camera—particularly where they occurred—was another matter. “I would imagine many a therapist would say it’s incredibly bad therapy,” he says.

Black stresses that he deliberately didn’t write, produce, or direct Mama’s Boy: “I hate it when I watch documentaries and then at the end it says ‘directed by’ or ‘produced by’ the person who was just featured because then you don’t necessarily trust it.”

“This is my mom’s story more than mine,” he says, “and I feel like the lessons that I learned from her are vital now—are even more necessary now than when she shared these lessons with me when she was still around.”

Despite her background, Black’s mother not only accepted her son’s sexual orientation, but his friends’, as well. He was moved, he says, “to see how a conservative military Mormon woman showed the courage back in the ’90s to share space with a bunch of my queer friends … who she had been taught her whole life were immoral and illegal and hellbound. … And [show] the curiosity to listen. And we found common ground.”

Eventually, he recalls, she “challenged me to do the same in the other direction. And it’s not easy. … But what you find is you can build a bridge because you still do, for the most part, have more in common than what the 24-hour news channels and the newspapers would claim.”

Black hopes the film will encourage greater civility and humaneness, especially in the current climate of intense political polarization. “Perhaps we can just learn to live and let live a little bit more,” he says. “That’s the way we’ve kept the country together for nearly a quarter of a millennium. Are we going to make it any further? Not if we keep on like this.”

Looking back, Black says, “Everything I do in my activism is for that next generation so they don’t have to grow up having their adolescence spoiled by homophobia. … Frankly, we’ve already lived our youth. We’ve already survived those years, thank God.

“It’s really not for us, is it? It’s all for that next generation. That’s why we do it.”

With a prime-time Virginia film fest screening at the Paramount Theater, the movie Stay Awake has made longtime Charlottesville resident Jamie Sisley an indie-festival darling again.

Sisley first produced Stay Awake, which chronicles a family’s struggles with a mother’s addiction, in 2015 as an award-winning short. After securing Best Narrative Short honors at the Slamdance Film Festival, the picture went on to be nominated for another award at the acclaimed Berlin International Film Festival.

Now, Sisley is back with a full-length version of the movie, a semi-autobiographical story drawing on the UVA grad’s childhood in Chantilly and Leesburg near the well-known drug trafficking corridor along Interstate 81.

But, as Sisley considers the geographic touchpoints that have made him who he is today, he focuses not on his more rural place of birth and early life, but rather on Charlottesville.

“I did most of my growing up in Charlottesville,” he says. “I have an almost obnoxious affinity for my home state … and the Virginia Film Festival was such an education for me. It brought films and people to contextualize those films in a way that really opened my mind.”

While earning his business degree from the McIntire School of Commerce, Sisley heard a Red Light Management rep was speaking at James Madison University. He skipped class, drove to Harrisonburg, and sat in a JMU classroom as Randy Reed talked about what it meant to be an artist manager. He asked Reed if he could join the agency as an intern. He got the gig.

Sisley says his time at Red Light started it all—his desire to work in the arts, his understanding of the way business and creativity could mingle, how artists could find their voice, and what it meant to be the kind of leader he’d have to be to someday sit in the director’s chair.

“Red Light was probably the greatest and luckiest opportunity I’ve ever gotten,” Sisley says. “It was a master class in business, but it was more than that. Coran [Capshaw] really brought the best out of me, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how he did that and trying to replicate it on set.”

While working at Red Light, Sisley began watching movies in bunches—titles by Fellini and Bergman and Carlos Reygadas. He bought a book about directing by Nick Proferes. He teamed up with another local filmmaker, Miguel Martinez, and applied for a PBS grant to make a documentary. Against all odds, Sisley and Martinez won the funding.

Next for Sisley was film school at Columbia University. While in New York, he also worked on his funded documentary, Farewell Ferris Wheel, which followed Mexican migrants in the U.S. carnival industry. Absorbing theory in the classroom while shooting and budgeting for the doc was like “going to film school twice,” he says.

Sisley released the 14-minute version of Stay Awake as his capstone grad school project in 2015, and Farewell Ferris Wheel in 2016 after seven years of production.

It was on Stay Awake’s first festival circuit run that Sisley decided to write and direct a full-length. So many people approached him to talk about their own issues with addiction—and their family members’ issues.

“I didn’t want to make another film about addiction,” Sisley says. “It takes a lot out of you from the writing side.” But make it, he did.

Stay Awake is different from most addict pics because it focuses on the caregiver, Sisley says. The angle has resonated—both with star talent and critics. Chrissy Metz of “This Is Us” fame took on the role of the mother battling addiction, and the film made it back to the Berlin festival for its world premiere, this time being nominated for four awards. It won two of them. Variety called Stay Awake “especially resonant,” and IndieWire said it was a “sensitive drama [that] illustrates a key truth about addiction: It doesn’t only affect one person, but sucks everyone around into its vortex.” With some reservations, the reviewer went on: “It’s an earnest look at the collateral damage surrounding addiction.”

In addition to Metz, Wyatt Oleff headlines the Stay Awake cast as Ethan, one of two brothers trying desperately to handle their mother’s drug use.  

“Stay Awake was an unforgettable experience with an excellent cast and crew who bonded together like a real family,” Oleff says about working with Sisley. “Such a great team to tell such an important and impactful story, and there’s not one thing about it that I would’ve changed.”

Oleff had a major role in the two-part 2017 adaptation of the Stephen King novel It and a minor role in Guardians of the Galaxy. Fin Argus, a multi-talent artist whose biggest role was on Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” rounds out the cast as Derek, the film’s second dogged brother.

At the screening, Sisley will receive another honor, the festival’s own Governor Gerald L. Baliles Founder’s Award, which recognizes “excellence in Virginia filmmaking and honors an exceptional filmmaker who has roots in Virginia or prominently spotlights Commonwealth locales, history, and culture.” Discussion of Stay Awake will follow, featuring Metz and Oleff in addition to Sisley. USA Today’s Brian Truitt will moderate.

The post-screening discussion is certain to hit on addiction, still a significant and growing problem in the commonwealth. Opioid overdoses in Virginia increased by one-third from 2019 to 2022, as measured by emergency department visits. 

Sisley hopes his film humanizes the folks who struggle. “In the vast majority of the films I saw growing up … addicts were demonized,” he says.

The filmmaker says he still has so much love for his mother, who is doing well handling her own addiction. But the battle continues. “She would be the first to say that it is a daily struggle,” Sisley says. “I don’t think you’re ever cured of addiction.”

The first use of a black panther in the Black power movement didn’t start in Oakland, California. The symbol came from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, where 80 percent of the population was Black and none were registered to vote, a place nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes.”

Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, the latest film from noted documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard and co-director Geeta Gandbhir, tells the story of the community’s grassroots organization that, with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, worked to get Black citizens not only the right to vote, but to hold power in a community that had long shut them out.  

“It’s an unknown story that deserves to be told,” says Pollard in a phone interview from his home in Baltimore. “Most people think the high point of the civil rights movement was the march from Selma to Montgomery. They forget what SNCC was doing after that period.” 

The march went through Lowndes County in Alabama’s Black Belt, where SNCC members, including Stokely Carmichael, connected with people there and realized they needed support.

“It was called ‘Bloody Lowndes,’” says Pollard, “because Black people who tried to vote were either turned away at the polls or murdered.”

Black citizens formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and ran their own candidates. Each political party in Alabama had to have a logo for voters who couldn’t read, and the Lowndes party used the black panther as its symbol on the ballot. 

The film uses a trove of footage unearthed by archivist Lizzy McGlynn, with whom Pollard had worked on his 2020 film MLK/FBI. “She found materials that even surprised me, knowing it was a story that hadn’t been told,” says Pollard. 

Members of SNCC lived there for over a year-and-a-half at a time when it was dangerous to be Black and to be walking on the road at night. The commitment of the community and SNCC impressed Pollard.

Many of those original activists are interviewed in the film. “To have the people who were there on the ground day-to-day, fighting the good fight, is what makes the documentary, in my opinion, stand out, what makes it special,” he says.

Pollard has produced, directed, and edited dozens of films, some with Spike Lee, who was his colleague at New York University and who calls him a “master filmmaker.” He edited Lee’s Jungle Fever, Mo’ Better Blues, and 4 Little Girls, which received an Academy Award nomination in 1998.

The International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award in 2020, and the Virginia Film Festival will bestow its Chronicler Award upon Pollard at the November 6 screening.

Pollard laughs when asked about his favorite films, but lists 4 Little Girls, MLK/FBI, and Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me, as movies that “speak to me about the importance of the African American experience.”

Stokely Carmichael called for Black power after James Meredith was shot in Mississippi in 1966. “Any time I hear those things from films I’ve done, it’s always invigorating and exciting and makes one thoughtful about the process of what it means to be an American, and how complicated America is,” says Pollard. “It has a lot of baggage.”

Joyce Chopra, known for her documentary, television, and filmmaking career, recounts her experiences in a new no-holds-barred memoir,Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and Beyond. But it wasn’t until she read her book’s promo blurbs that Chopra says she understood she had completed “a history of how hard it was for women to ever get a chance to make fiction films.”

Lady Director makes it clear that Chopra, a Charlottesville resident, always had the people skills and the business sense needed for a successful artistic life. As a bored 21-year-old graduate of Brandeis University, she opened Club 47 in Boston for jazz aficionados, but soon an unknown Bob Dylan was playing there, and Joan Baez was singing on Wednesdays for $10 a ticket. 

In her book, Chopra talks about casting her 1985 feature debut, Smooth Talk, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. She cast Treat Williams as the malicious hunk Arnold Friend, but struggled to find someone to play the young female lead. A friend suggested a neighbor’s daughter, the gifted teen actor Laura Dern, resulting in a performance that propelled Dern’s career. 

Chopra and her husband, playwright and screenwriter Tom Cole, asked a different neighbor, James Taylor, if he’d give them the rights to his song “Handyman” for two scenes in which Dern and screen mom Mary Kay Place dance. Taylor asked if he could write music for the film.

Other vivid anecdotes in Lady Director include being bullied in an editing room (but not assaulted) by lecherous producer Harvey Weinstein, as well as details of other toxic Hollywood behemoths’ behavior, including Oscar winners. When producers in Paris grabbed her up and down, “It was considered annoying but normal,” she says. 

Hollywood’s aggressors do destroy people, such as Marilyn Monroe in Chopra’s TV miniseries “Blonde” (not the Blonde currently on Netflix), but the director was more interested in portraying the lives of typical young women, like in her short, bittersweet documentary Girls at 12. 

Chopra’s own path was easier with Cole, who assisted greatly once their daughter was born. When it was suggested that Chopra make a documentary about her pregnancy and childbirth, her reaction was that it was “the most narcissistic thing imaginable.” But she did, and the film, Joyce at 34, captures tough decisions, exhaustion, and the beauty and bedevilment of another lifeform altering a body.

Fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic, when that adult daughter, a UVA dean, made a new creative suggestion: Write a book about your life. (Her daughter is the reason Chopra moved to Charlottesville, a few years after Cole died in 2009.) The director pulled out a familiar argument when she said, “Writing a memoir is narcissistic!” But restless without film work, she wrote one sentence, and finally some more. Memoirist Honor Moore showed the work to an agent who contacted San Francisco’s City Lights Books, a well-known publisher of the Beat writers. 

Now that Chopra’s book is out, the accomplished yet modest director asks how she might get followers on Instagram. Make a note to follow her when her Insta and other feeds go live.