For Reel

Woodstock Film Festival

by Jay Blotcher, August 30, 2011

Now in its 12th year, the Woodstock Film Festival (September 21-25) is an autumn tradition in the Mid-Hudson Valley, as vital and colorful and nurturing as the local harvest. For five days, it will be omnipresent, beckoning you with premieres, concerts, seminars, and parties.

Once again this year, Chronogram’s preview of WFF offers a road map to the festival veteran and newcomer. Capsule reviews and interviews allow you to navigate through the week’s offerings more effectively. For specific show times, late-breaking information, and ticket sales, visit www.woodstockfilmfestival.com or call (845) 810-0131.

Each year, WFF manages to skirt the growing pains that other independent festivals suffer, and re-emerge as a no-frills gathering of the faithful. Celebrity-politicos and indie studio icons are lauded, counterculture phenomena are celebrated and cult actors walk around Woodstock and Rhinebeck to polite acclaim. Let other film festivals grow in size and self-importance, WFF clings with the stubborn pride of an ageing hippie to its slogan “fiercely independent.”

The leftie values of WFF, in place from the beginning, are merely reaffirmed year after year, to the delight of unreconstructed rebels, veteran counterculturists, and musicians who seek a liberal oasis from Tea Party rhetoric and baffling stances by a president who once seemed poised to undo the nightmare of the previous eight years.
As the optimism of Election Night 2008 continues to erode, filmmakers have turned their fears, concerns and frustrations into a number of new narratives and documentaries that address our current plethora of follies: war born of religious strife, corporate corruption, middle-class poverty, the energy crisis, environmental pollution, and the multiheaded hydra known as celebrity culture. These topics and similar dilemmas will be screened at WFF, as will works that spotlight people who take a leap of faith and rush to the aid of their fellow earthlings.
Festival co-founders Meira Blaustein and Laurent Rejto continue their benevolent reign. Like any labor of love, the festival remains a grass-roots affair; eager volunteers will try once again in vain to contain the surging lines of ticketholders for a buzzworthy screening. And once again, some yearning first-time director will receive a statue at the Gala Maverick Awards Ceremony (September 24) and dare to create a more audacious film next time.

While WFF tends to emphasize substance over glitz, there is always star power in attendance, albeit of the hip, indie caliber. Ellen Barkin, fresh from a Tony win for the revival of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” will appear in the family drama Another Happy Day and accept the WFF Excellence in Acting Award. Oscar-nominated actor Mark Ruffalo will show up to receive the first honorary Meera Gandhi Giving Back Award for his honest and egoless work to fight fracking in New York and Pennsylvania. (See the Chronogram interview with Ruffalo on page 50.)

The opening night film is the US premiere of Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding. In this film by WFF 2010 Honorary Maverick Award recipient Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) Catherine Keener plays a conservative lawyer who takes her teenage children to meet their estranged, hippie grandmother (Jane Fonda) in Woodstock. Shot and produced here, the opening night film will take place Thursday, September 22, at the newly renovated Woodstock Playhouse. Beresford, along with writers, producers and select cast will attend the Q&A after the screening.

Last year, I joked that future Woodstock Film Festivals may dispense with screens and download its roster to your nearest smartphone. As multinational companies subsume a larger market share of new media, certain films that expose their environmental, fiscal, and ethical violations may find themselves without a mainstream venue, banished from megaplex screens, corporate-owned network television, certain websites and even your own iPhone. A sobering reminder that independent festivals like WFF are often the only forum for certain films that corporate America, in its infinite wisdom, prefers you not see.

While less than a quarter of the WFF 2011 films were made available to me by press time, I spent the better part of my summer watching 34 different documentary and narrative works. Some will thrive briefly on the festival circuit. Others will deservedly find mainstream distribution. Too many others, however, owing to the uncompromising honesty of their subject matter, as well as a nonexistent marketing budget, may undeservedly disappear, to our detriment as filmgoers and as citizens of the world.