They helped bring Ethan Hawke here in July, "Donnie Darko's" Richard Kelly last spring and dozens of other significant filmmakers and guests over the past 10 years. So what special events do we have to look forward to this year? Quite a few. The Virginia Festival Film Society's new season starts tomorrow with a riveting, beautifully filmed documentary very relevant to current events, and it only gets better from there.
The Film Festival Society, like the Virginia Film Festival, is one of Charlottesville's treasures. In its decade-long life span, the society has brought scores of extraordinary films and filmmakers that Charlottesvilleans otherwise never might have gotten the chance to know.
"Charlottesville felt like a desert to me," said Richard Herskowitz, director of the Film Society's programming. Coming here in 1994 after running Cornell Cinema, a society that shows over 500 films a year, Herskowitz combated movie withdrawal by quickly getting involved with the fledgling Virginia Festival Film Society.
"With the Film Society, we decided to do a monthly program that would be like a festival, in that we would always try to bring the filmmaker or speakers to accompany the shows," he said.
What makes the society unique to Charlottesville is its encouragement of participation. Guests discuss a film or the issues brought out in a film after each screening, and audience members are welcome to throw out any questions or comments, be they enthusiastic praise or barbed challenges.
"The participation is really fundamental to our vision," Herskowitz said. "That is, to make it more of an interactive experience than the usual pure state of consumption in which we just go in and leave without having a chance to interact."
At the moment hard at work as artistic director of October's Film Festival, Herskowitz says "this is probably the most expansive society schedule we've ever put together."
"The thing I enjoy about programming the Film Society is that it's pretty much all over the map," he said. "'All over the map' being anything outside the commercial mainstream."
This season the Society is showing a few documentaries, a program of lo-fi features, some short experimentals and a more expansive long weekend program on Argentine cinema.
Australian documentary "Facing the Music" starts the season off tomorrow evening. The film offers a gripping look at the unfortunate reality of a problem we're all too familiar with by now -- budget cuts. Ethnographic filmmakers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson observe on camera the real drama of a budget crisis in Sydney University's Music Department, where contemporary composer and department chair Anne Boyd struggles to keep it all together.
"'Facing the Music' is the only film I know of dealing with the impact of budget cuts on the arts and education, and we're in the thick of it right now," Herskowitz said. "It's going all around. This university, like others, is really being dealt a body blow."
"It gives us an opportunity to follow the film with a discussion not just about the film, but its relevance to our own situation," he added. The head of the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Peggy Baggett, will be a guest speaker, along with Judith Shatin, a composer and former chair of the University's Music Department.
Next month, before the annual Film Festival soaks up all the attention, the Lucky Bum film tour will set up its low-tech projector to show indie films in Plan 9's outer room. The filmmakers have been traipsing all over the country; Charlottesville is next stop on the tour.
"Their films are emblematic of a movement in avant-garde, independent filmmaking right now, called lo-fi," Herskowitz said. "The filmmakers are reacting against hi-tech production by using the cheapest possible means to make really expressive films."
A month later, writer and co-director Barak Goodman will bring his documentary, "Scottsboro: An American Tragedy" to Vinegar Hill. One of the most important political documentaries to come from the South, "Scottsboro" investigates a relatively unknown moment in American cultural history, in which two white women in 1931 accused nine black men of gang rape. The film resurrects the situation in all of its many-layered complexities.
The spring series includes the biggest event of the season: Nationally prominent documentary filmmaker Ken Burns ("The Civil War," "Jazz") and his co-writer Dayton Duncan will preview and discuss an episode of their new series on Lewis and Clark. The event will occur in conjunction with the Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration, kicking off in Charlottesville mid-January.
Burns' "series tend to be extremely important cultural events when they appear," Herskowitz said. "And from everything I've heard, these dialogues between Duncan and Burns are really phenomenal. We're expecting this to be a really big event."
Other spring events include "How's Your News?," a film in which Arthur Bradford (a writer and filmmaker from Charlottesville) documents a news program conducted by disabled people, and the Black Maria Film Festival, a diverse program of experimental films, film shorts and animation that has been coming to Charlottesville for nine years now.
Still in the works is a program on Argentine cinema. The films are not yet selected, but the event will take place over a long weekend as a conference with a variety of speakers and filmmakers as guests. Argentine cinema has undergone a renaissance in the past few years, and the spring conference hopes to introduce and inform people about this area of emergent filmmaking.
"We'd like to do a conference like this every couple of years," Herskowitz said. "What we're responding to is where the energy is emerging right now in international filmmaking, and what people in Charlottesville may not be aware of."
Although non-mainstream film tends to intimidate viewers not well-versed in its forms, this is without reason. Those who think documentaries are boring usually haven't seen a good one, and any unfamiliar film genre requires only an open mind.
"There are some programs that are very challenging to people, especially the experimental programs," Herskowitz said. "But often people come who are just fascinated with the topics our films raise."
"It's really just for people who want to learn about film, and want to meet and discuss film," he said.
The season kicks off tomorrow night at Vinegar Hill, 7 p.m.
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