2004 Wisconsin Film Festival set for April 1-4

This year’s Wisconsin Film Festival, a public program of the Arts Institute at UW–Madison, is slated for Thursday, April 1, through Sunday, April 4. The 2004 festival kicks off with a “Vote Film ’04” marketing campaign by Madison’s Planet Propaganda, which plays off the election year, encouraging people to get out, have fun and support independent film. A preview of festival programming follows.

In 2003, the festival screened more than 150 films from 25 countries, including 50 films by filmmakers with Wisconsin ties, and had record-breaking attendance of 21,000. Last year’s success prompted calls for festival expansion.

This year, the festival remains a four-day event, but in response to audience feedback, organizers have implemented some changes to maximize capacity and accommodate the ever-increasing demand. The changes include restructuring ticket sales to allow for more flexible packages, and a guaranteed number of available day-of-show tickets to be sold at the door for fans making last-minute plans. The festival also has partnered with the Orpheum Theatre and UW Cinematheque for a post-festival run of the “Global Lens” Festival series of feature films from developing countries.

Festival Director Mary Carbine and the programming team are busy scouting potential films at the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals this week to round out the 2004 program, which will feature more than 100 independent feature films, documentaries, world cinema, experimental films and shorts from across the country, around the world and from Wisconsin’s own filmmakers.

Downtown Madison venues include the Orpheum Theatre, the Bartell Theatre (formerly the Esquire) and the Club Majestic. UW–Madison campus-area venues will include University Square Theatre, the Memorial Union Play Circle and the UW Cinematheque (Vilas Hall), plus a special opening-night program at the UW Hillel. The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (formerly the Madison Art Center) will not be a festival venue this year, as the museum will be closed temporarily as it relocates to make way for a new and enlarged facility within the Overture Center for the Arts. The museum and the festival plan to resume their partnership in 2005.

The full schedule of films, talks and panels will be announced March 3; advance ticket sales begin March 4. For information, visit www.wifilmfest.org or call (877) 963-FILM.

Festival programming: a preview of festival highlights

Contemporary European and World Cinema
Travel around the world without the airport headaches. Festival selections of contemporary European and world cinema will include:

• “Nói” (“Nói Albinói”), the latest standout of new cinema from Iceland in the spirit of “101 Reykjavik” and “Icelandic Dream.” In this quirky coming-of-age fable, an eccentric 17-year-old albino named Nói drifts through life on a remote fjord in the north of Iceland, dreaming of escape with a city girl who works in a local gas station. Is he the village idiot or a genius in disguise? With a deadpan protagonist and 1970s-style decor in a bleak, snowbound setting, first-time director Dagur Káribrings presents an intriguing and clever blending of comedy, tragedy and coming-of-age angst. Official selection of the Toronto, Rotterdam and Telluride Film Festivals, and recipient of a Special Commendation, Guardian New Directors Award, Edinburgh Film Festival.
• “Since Otar Left,” a charming drama of three generations of women in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and winner of the prestigious Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. “A sweet, accomplished fable of loss and self-deception in the post-Soviet world” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).

• “Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself,” the English-language debut from acclaimed Danish director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners”), a romantic dark comedy about two very different brothers who both fall in love with the same woman. “A love story, a melodrama and a tearjerker that packs a considerable punch.” (Allan Hunter, Screen International).
• “James’ Journey to Jerusalem,” a cannily droll mix of social commentary and contemporary fable that follows the young James on a religious pilgrimage from his African village to Israel, where he ends up as a migrant worker in a not-quite-as-promised land.
• “Reconstruction,” the ambitious and stylish debut feature from Denmark’s Christoffer Boe, winner of both the Camera d’Or and Critic’s Week Youth Jury Award at Cannes.
• “Moi et Mon Blanc”/”Me and My White Pal,” a contemporary dramatic comedy about an African student in Paris who returns home to Burkina Faso with a white friend, turning the tables on who is the “immigrant” in a new land.
• “Yossi & Jagger,” based on a true story about two men, both Israeli army officers serving in Lebanon, who have a secret love affair that adds further complication to life in the remote base in which they serve.

Documentary
The documentary continues to capture the attention of film enthusiasts by proving time and again that life can indeed be stranger than fiction. A special focus on documentary will include films such as:

• “The Agronomist,” Academy-Award winning director Jonathan Demme’s portrait of Haitian journalist, broadcaster and human rights activist Jean Dominique.
• “The Story of the Weeping Camel,” Mongolia’s first submission for the foreign language Academy Award competition, follows a nomadic family of Mongolian shepherds in the vast Gobi desert who must contend with a mother camel that rejects her newborn after a difficult delivery. Directed as a graduating thesis for German film school by Italian filmmaker Luigi Falorni and Mongolian Byambasuren Davaa, the “The Story of the Weeping Camel” was a surprise hit at this fall’s Toronto Film Festival.
• “S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” draws on the testimony of former prisoners and guards at Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge interrogation center to attempt to come to terms with the atrocities inflicted and the toll they took.
• Filmmakers Kate Davis (“Southern Comfort”) and David Heilbroner will be in attendance to give festival attendees a behind-the-scenes look at horse racing with their new film “Jockey,” which tells the story of three Kentucky riders as they confront injury, stardom, starvation and fight to change the rules of American horse racing.
• Filmmaker, author and musician Yale Strom (“L’Chayim,” “Comrade Stalin!”) with “Klezmer on Fish Street,” tours Krakow’s former Jewish Quarter and concentration camps through the eyes of a group of young, Jewish Americans and aspiring klezmer musicians.
• Peter Raymont will present his multi-award-winning film, “The World Is Watching,” which documented the 1988 media circus in Managua, Nicaragua during the Sandinista/Contra period and his follow-up “The World Stopped Watching,” which follows two American journalists who return to Nicaragua to explore what happens to a country and a people when the media spotlight is turned off.

Panelists such as Mark Samels, executive producer of PBS’s “American Experience” and Lisa Heller, vice president of original programming at HBO, (both UW–Madison alumni) are also slated to participate.

Experimental Filmmaker James Benning
Few filmmakers have explored the aesthetic and political impact of our national landscape as vividly as experimental filmmaker James Benning. A Milwaukee native and UW–Madison alumnus, Benning will introduce his recent “California Trilogy,” which has been featured at several international film festivals, including Sundance, London, Berlin and Vienna. “El Valley Centro” (1999), “Los” (2000) and “Sogobi” (2001) present interrelated portraits of California’s agricultural, urban and wilderness landscapes, each film consisting of 35 stationary 2-minute shots. “Benning’s poetic explorations of the American space bring us to a moment of pure contemplation, in which a fleeting absolute may be glimpsed behind the cool seduction of appearances.” (Berenice Reynaud, Film Comment.) “James Benning is one of my filmmaking heroes, an independent artist in the purest sense of the word” (Richard Linklater, filmmaker.)

Global Lens Film Series: Raising Cross-Cultural Awareness Through Cinema
The festival is pleased to present The Global Film Initiative’s “Global Lens” series of feature films from developing countries. Culled from international film festivals such as Cannes, Toronto and Rotterdam, the films were chosen for their cinematic and narrative excellence, cultural authenticity and relevance to The Global Film Initiative’s mission: raising cross-cultural awareness through cinema.

The festival will inaugurate the series with films such as:

• “Ticket to Jerusalem” (Palestine), an inspired hybrid of documentary and fiction about a Palestinian film projectionist in a refugee camp near Ramallah.
• “Mango Yellow” (Brazil), which intertwines the stories of working-class dreamers living hardscrabble lives in the favelas of Recife.
• “Angel on the Right” (Tajikistan), a contemporary take on an ancient Islamic legend of good and evil in which a tough Tajik gangster is lured home from Moscow to see his dying mother and face his past.
• “Khorma” (Tunisia), in which a seemingly idiotic man is appointed the village’s official announcer of births, deaths and marriages, until his power begins to corrupt him.
• “Wretched Lives” (Philippines), follows a fractured family struggling to survive during the political unrest of the short-lived and ill-fated reign of Joseph Estrada.

  The series will continue after the festival, with additional films shown at the Orpheum Theatre and UW Cinematheque. In a related outreach program supported by the Evjue Foundation and the UW–Madison Brittingham Trust, the UW–Madison College of Letters and Science will host “World Cinema Day,” an educational program for high school students that includes screening a Global Lens film, and is patterned on the college’s successful “World Languages Day” program.

Festival sponsors, partners, venues

Sponsors for the 2004 Wisconsin Film Festival include Planet Propaganda, The Evjue Foundation, Isthmus, 105.5 Triple M, Charter Communications and the Independent Film Channel, IMS (Interactive Media Solutions, LLC), i^3 [i-cubed], CineFilm Laboratories, the Madison Concourse Hotel & Governor’s Club, University Book Store, Wisconsin Film Office, Steep & Brew, Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission, Eastman Kodak Company, Funnel Incorporated, Burne Photo Imaging, the Greater Madison Convention and Visitors Bureau, DataVision, Roscor, Midwest Airlines, Downtown Madison, Inc., IATSE Local 251, Wisconsin Public Television, the UW–Madison Anonymous Fund, University Research Park, European Studies Alliance, Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Communication Arts, the Asian American Studies Program, and Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Venues and partners include the Orpheum Theatre, Club Majestic, the Bartell Theatre, University Square Theatres, the UW Cinematheque, the Wisconsin Union Directorate Film Committee and UW Hillel.

Additional partners include the Milwaukee Independent Film Society, the Wisconsin Screenwriters Forum and IFP/Chicago.