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September 18-22, 2002
A catalogue and full listing
of films will be
SCREENINGS SECTION
Adrift
Alcatraz Is Not An Island
TRT: 100 minutes Bike Like U Mean It
TRT: 86 minutes Bunny 88 minutes Daddy and Papa
TRT: 96 minutes
Go Tigers! 103 minutes Hell House 85 minutes Kaaterskill Falls 86 minutes The Last Big Attraction
90 minutes 78 minutes Live and Let Go--An American
Death TRT: 57 minutes The Misanthrope
85 minutes Photos to Send 89 minutes The Poor and Hungry
118 minutes Purple Haze 97 minutes 95 minutes
80 minutes TRT: 78 minutes 95 minutes TRT: 72 minutes
Late Night Screenings IFP MSP is proud to introduce the Twin Cities to three wild and amped up movies perfect for your late night state of mind.
93 minutes Existo
90 minutes
70 minutes
TRT: 84 minutes
TRT: 80 minutes
PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBIT | VENUES | TICKETS AND PASSES |
In this very personal documentary, Emmy
Award-winning cameraman Tom Curran revisits his Irish-American
childhood in Alaska and Cape Cod to trace how he and his siblings
dealt with the early death of their father, and the complex range of
emotions each faced in living up to their late father’s expectations
of success. The story is poetically crafted from a mixture of
super-8 home movies, remembered recreations, contemporary
interviews, and verite cinematography; it suggests in stunning
visual fashion how Curran’s pursuit of success masked his grief and
ultimately delayed his true coming of age. Includes music by famed
Irish fiddler Kevin Burke.
In November of 1969 a small group of Native
American activists reclaimed Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco
Bay on behalf of all Native American nations. Documentarian James
Fortier’s historical documentary remembers an important era in
Native American civil rights activism--and American activism in
general--when optimism that real change could be effected suffused
leaders from every American tribe (including Dennis Banks and a few
Ojibwe who journeyed from Minnesota to participate). Narrated by
Benjamin Bratt, Alcatraz Is Not An Island is an inspiring
story of bravery, personal sacrifice, cultural renaissance,
self-determination and Native American empowerment, a story of an
era in whose aftermath we are all living.
Barberland is a poignant coast-to-coast
portrait of the men who cut people’s hair for a living: the
all-American barber. From explaining the significance of the stripes
on a barber’s pole to the difference between black men's hair and
white men's, from first haircuts to worst haircuts, from the ancient
history of barbers to the story of when stylists began replacing
barbers, just lean back in your chair, stare straight ahead, and let
the men talk. Barberland is the Liano brothers’ look at a
profession in danger of disappearing into Americana. Includes
interviews with Twin Cities barbers Raymond C. Newton Jr. and Dick
Kramer, and a trip to the last company in the U.S. to make barber
poles, The William Marvy Company in St. Paul, Minnesota.
From acclaimed music video director Mike Mills
comes Paperboys, a beautifully photographed peek into the
lives of six young boys who deliver the newspaper in Stillwater,
Minnesota. Shot in lush 35 mm format, this documentary gets up with
the alarm, climbs on the bicycles, straps on the paperbag and sails
through the early morning midwestern streets right alongside the
kids who toil in this fading line of work. After the papers have
been delivered, the boys talk about their lives, what they’ll do
with their paper-route money, and where they think they’ll end up. A
nostalgic look back at life looking forward.
Bike Like U Mean It is a charming
portrait of bike activists in Austin, Texas; people who ride their
bikes for transportation and defiantly eschew cars. Outspoken and
iconoclastic, they actively promote not only "human powered" forms
of transportation, but an alternative vision of cities, urban
design, lifestyle, and culture. Packed with interesting insights
from thoughtful people, Bike Like U Mean It is a way for one
growing city--Austin--to discuss its growth problems with
another--Minneapolis--facing the same critical questions: How many
roads? How many trains? How many bike paths?
Do you have a picture of the SWAT team as the
good guys who come in to save the day? Local filmmaker Matt Ehling’s
thought-provoking new documentary Urban Warrior shows how an
army-style police force equipped with troop carriers, gas masks,
automatic rifles, and stun grenades is unable to observe the same
civil rights when making an arrest as two officers with badges, caps
and mere side arms. What’s more, Urban Warrior explains how
the use of these units is ever expanding to cover ordinary police
work. Through numerous interviews, dramatic recreations and
never-before-seen footage from the Seattle riots, Urban
Warrior takes a close-up look at an alarming social phenomenon
invisible to most citizens.
After fleeing their Eastern European homeland
and immigrating to America, Nik and Luda have little going for them
other than their unusually strong love for each other. Desperate for
money, they accept absurdly demeaning jobs working for an
experimental Public Works project. The strange, absurd work they
find themselves doing is guaranteed to intrigue you and make you
laugh; it may even remind you of a job you’ve had. With Kafka-like
allegory and unexpected twists of fate, writer-director Mia
Trachinger’s debut is a fascinating and absolutely original love
story about falling out of love. Bunny was a 2001 IFP Spirit
Award Nominee and the Maverick Spirit Award winner at Cinequest
2001.
Daddy and Papa examines the
growing phenomenon of gay fatherhood and its impact on American
culture. Through the stories of four different families, native
Minnesotan filmmaker Johnny Symons explores the challenges facing
gay men who decide to become dads; from surrogacy and interracial
adoption to the complexities of gay divorce and the battle for full
legal status as parents. Daddy and Papa also brilliantly
articulates the unraveling of stereotypes on both sides as gay
parents find themselves driving station wagons and straight parents
suddenly find they have a gay son and a grandson. A
thought-provoking look at some of the vanguard gay fathers who are
breaking new ground in the ever-changing landscape of the American
family.
Shades of Gray is a documentary that
focuses on the lives of five gay people living in Lawrence, Kansas
and their struggle to add the words 'sexual orientation' to that
city’s list of banned discriminatory policies. Director Tim
DePaepe’s film deftly lays in the social context of a contemporary
battle for equal rights in small-town America: including religious
bigots, the special difficulties of coming out in a community where
everyone knows you, and the surprisingly enlightened views of some
small town citizens. A look at the rearguard battle for equality in
the small towns and countryside of America.
Go Tigers! spends a season with the high
school football team in hardworking Massillon, Ohio, where from
cradle to grave the town worships the Tigers like football was
religion. Director Ken Carlson takes us into the pep rallies, Main
Street parades, blue collar player homes, beer-soaked victory
parties and the vaunted football locker room--ground zero for
prayer, humiliation, and stunning pressure--to pose the question,
"When has a community gone too far in identifying itself with its
sports team?" When the Massillon schools run up against their
perpetual lack of funding, voters must approve a school levy
associated with the success of the football team or coaches and
teachers will lose their jobs. Everyone is counting on the Tigers to
save the town.
From documentarian George Ratliff comes a new
film about Hell House, a haunted house produced each Halloween by
the Trinity Assembly of God Pentecostal Church in Cedar Hills,
Texas. What makes this haunted house special? The horrors for these
Bible-belt fundamentalist Christians aren’t from another world,
they’re from this world. A pregnant girl has a gory abortion and
goes to hell, a gay man dies of AIDS and is taunted by demons, a
teenager takes drugs at a rave and is dragged down to hell.
Ratliff’s film examines with keen insight the relationship between
the lives of the townspeople who act out Hell House’s horror scenes
and the scenes themselves; in some cases, the close connection
between art and reality is downright frightening!
Mitchell and Ren are getting out of Manhattan
for the weekend; the professional young couple are going to a cabin
in the Catskills to drink some wine, relax, and try to get pregnant.
But when they impulsively pull their Volkswagen Beetle over to pick
up a hitchhiker their weekend, as well as their relationship--and
maybe even their lives--take a different turn. This debut feature
from filmmakers Josh Apter and St. Paul native Peter Olsen recalls
Bergman in its fascination with the metaphysical and Roman
Polanski’s Knife in the Water for its intrigue. Winner of the
Critics’ Jury Prize at the 2001 Los Angeles Film Festival and a 2002
IFP Spirit Award Nominee.
Shot on a shoestring in Michigan, The Last
Big Attraction is Wolverine director Hopwood DePree’s
refreshingly sweet and uniquely midwestern answer to the Hollywood
screwball comedy. He plays Leed VanderWal, a 25 year-old slacker who
carves wooden clogs for tourists at his father’s stale roadside
attraction, Windmill Island--a 17th-Century Dutch farm village. Leed
dreams of the good life in Detroit, but instead finds himself
dressing up in ridiculous costumes and hanging out with a
candle-dipping stoner while trying unsuccessfully to impress his new
girlfriend’s preppy friends; what’s more, the clog-crazed girl from
Wisconsin is after him, and the family windmill is losing money.
Time to call in the mannequins!
Jennifer Langsam has disappeared. She was last
seen five days before Homecoming on the school racing track,
running, head back, arms spread wide; then suddenly she seemed to
just ascend into the ether. There is no evidence of foul play. Her
backpack was found in the Biology Lab, containing her notebook and
several books about Joanna Southcott, a 17th-century mystic and
prophet with an apocalyptic prediction. As for Jenny herself...she
is gone. Last Seen was filmed in the Twin Cities and includes
many actors familiar to local theatergoers. Director Eva Ilona
Brzeski was recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New
Faces of Indie Film.
Sam Niver fought in World War II, was a devoted
family man, a respected newspaperman and beloved civic leader. In
this moving documentary made by Niver’s son, documentarian Jay Niver
(with Jay Spain), we learn of Sam’s losing battle with cancer and
his desire to end his life in the same way he lived it, with
dignity. This powerful document of Sam’s final days thoroughly
articulates the issues associated with doctor-assisted suicide, the
current state of the right to die movement in this country, and the
problems one faces in choosing to die with dignity. An issue
familiar to many in the abstract, Live and Let Go puts a very
real, very human face on the story of life drawing to a close.
(Content may offend some viewers).
The Misanthrope chronicles the hilarious
story of Artemis, an owly, middle-aged Chicago actor who drinks too
much, teaches sixth grade full-time, and doesn’t suffer children
easily. Soon after he is rejected for a part in a professional
staging of Moliere’s "The Misanthrope," Artemis is confronted by his
school principal with the choice to either resign or take over
directing incorrigibly troubled kids in the school play. Moliere’s
bilious lines sound strange coming from such young children, but
Artemis is focussed on showing how much better he does things than
the rest of the detestable species. This gem was the winner of the
2002 South by Southwest Special Jury Award for a Narrative Feature.
In 1954, world renowned photographer Dorothea
Lange traveled to County Clare, Ireland on assignment for LIFE
magazine. She took 2,400 photographs, creating a lasting record of a
rural way of life that was fast disappearing. In her directing
debut, Irish-American director Dierdre Lynch retraces Lange’s
footsteps, traveling the country roads to visit many of the same
people who Lange met nearly a half century ago. Her film uses
Lange’s photographs to unlock the poignant, somehelvetica humorous,
somehelvetica painful memories of another era, of ceili dancing and
Gaelic hurling, friends lost to death, people lost to America.
Photos To Send is a sensitive and moving portrait of the
countrymen and women who chose to stay on their land--no matter what
the price. Winner of the Golden Gate Award and Audience Award at the
San Francisco International Film Festival.
A black and white "digiflik" demonstrating the
high quality of regional filming in places other than New York and
Los Angeles, The Poor and Hungry is an authentic tale of the
Memphis underground as told through the eyes of resident Memphis
director Craig Brewer. The film’s main character Eli is involved in
a clever plot stealing cars and breaking them down, since "most of
the time...the parts are worth more than the whole thing." The same
could be said of Eli’s circle of friends, an interdependent band of
lovable rogues who hustle and drink for a living. When Eli listens
to the music of a beautiful cello player whose car he is forced to
steal, he begins to hear the song of the siren, the song of himself,
the song of the Memphis streets. Voted Best Digital Feature, The
2001 Hollywood Film Festival.
Purple Haze recounts the story of Matt
Caulfield, a young law student at Princeton who returns to Minnesota
during the tempestuous summer of 1968 to face the draft, his father
and his ever-changing world. When Minnesota producer-director-writer
team Victoria Wozniak and David Burton Morris made Purple
Haze in 1983, the 1960s were barely 10 years distant, so their
story doesn’t suffer from the stale 60s nostalgia of later Vietnam
films. Purple Haze is set in Minnesota (some scenes were even
filmed on the West Bank, the actual nexus of the Twin Cities Hippie
Movement), which makes the now-familiar story of draft resistance
new again to local audiences. Add nostalgia for early 80s local
filmmaking, a brilliant soundtrack featuring Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson
Airplane and Steppenwolf, an incredible final shot and you have
Purple Haze, a great film ready for another look.
Part road picture, part family drama, this
tense contemplation of the nature of human frailty and resiliency
focuses on the confrontation between a headstrong teenage girl and
her mother’s menacing boyfriend. The story’s heroin Alex takes her
younger sister Sara away from their unsafe home by bus to the
equally unsafe streets of New Orleans, where they hope to find
protection with their estranged father. Riders is a
sumptuously rendered story of three women trapped in America; one an
innocent child, one a jaded adult, and one a conflicted adolescent
emotionally poised between the two, struggling to protect her family
fromdanger while also finding her own way. Directed by Sundance
Feature Film Lab fellow Doug Sadler was also named one of Filmmaker
Magazine’s 2001 25 New Faces of Indie Film.
In his first feature film, writer-director
Bobby Sheehan creates a lachrymose fictional every man protagonist,
Mr. Seed, who walks up to ordinary people and begins a dialogue by
saying nothing more than "I’m dying." The responses people give are
as profound and insightful as they are surprising: a junkie, a
rabbi, a transvestite, and an old wise man named Sonny stun the
viewer with insights about living and dying, loving, faith, art,
children and fame. As Mr. Seed traverses deserts, mountains and
glaciers--representing the internal and external landscape of
America--the viewer becomes lulled into a state of profound
thoughtfulness in this affecting love letter to life and all the
reasons for living it.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back
into the woods! Soft for Digging is the story of an elderly
man who wanders out into the deserted Maryland woods near his cabin
to search for his runaway cat. Alone and disoriented he stumbles
onto a mysterious child and a bizarre giant alone in the woods.
Fifteen minutes into this fabulously innovative psychological
thriller the story’s protagonist speaks the film’s first word of
dialogue: "Murder." Writer-director JT Petty--one of Filmmaker
Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Indie Film--shot Soft for
Digging on 16 mm color film for a mere $6,000; a mainstay on the
recent festival circuit, the film stands as a testament that a
hugely successful and entertaining film can be made with very little
resources.
From the hard scrabble plains of Texas to the
manicured lawns of Connecticut, from the rebel-sympathizing Ozark
countryside to the housing projects of Washington D.C., this new
documentary from Jeffrey Blitz follows eight American teenagers out
to win the National Spelling Bee. Using the competition as a
dramatic backdrop, Spellbound peers into the lives of these
eight youngsters as they work tirelessly to transform themselves
from ordinary kids into driven competitors and perhaps champions.
Through their comic, nail-biting and often heartbreaking tales, we
are given an inspirational look at class in America and the
endurance of the American dream...one nerve-wracking word at a time.
A brand new documentary about farming, faith,
and the resilience of the human spirit, Kirsten Tretbar’s
Zenith was filmed in 1999 over a period of 5 months in two
small Kansas towns: Zenith--a wheat and cattle farming town of only
30 souls--and neighboring Stafford, pop. 1,500. The story focuses on
The Great Plains Passion Play, and the farmers, cowboys,
ranchers, retirees, women and children who put on make-up and stage
this outdoor drama about the life of Jesus. In many ways, their own
life stories mirror the stories they act out. This film is dedicated
to the people of Zenith and Stafford, Kansas, whose courage, faith,
and humor inspires Zenith.
Shot on location in Chicago, Lauretta Tagli’s
Crushed is a raw improvised comedy about an ad agency
Christmas party held on the night the agency is forced to shut down.
Twenty of Chicago’s top performers (including Seth Meyers of
subsequent Saturday Night Live fame and Stephanie Weir of
Mad TV) followed a script for the first half-hour of the
movie; after that, each was free to use their wit and extensive
improv experience to decide the fates of their characters. The
result: a raucous and unpredictable movie depicting 24 outrageous
hours in the fictional lives of the crazy people who make your TV
and newspaper ads. Don’t touch that dial!
From Nashville comes a music-filled romp
hilarious and grotesque enough to rival any ever told by John
Waters. Existo (former Minnesotan Bruce Arntson) is a performance
artist and former revolutionary who has been ten years
institutionalized and undergone a chemical lobotomy; now he has
returned to save our world. This unstable genius, along with his
cadre of bohemian dregs (including the late Jim Varney), will of
course use art as his weapon to wage a war of resistance against the
hypocritical forces of decency and traditional family values. But
the guardians of moral rectitude are not about to let this rebellion
go unchallenged; they fight back with the oldest trick in the book:
vapid blonde pop singer Penelope. Will Existo be able to keep his
libidinal weaknesses in check, stay on his penis pogo stick, and
turn the power of performance art to his advantage? Stay tuned loyal
compatriots!
After a hitman’s son is kidnapped by Mal, a
crime lord, old friends will be forced to do deadly kung fu chops on
each other. Into the mix add Big Bertha, Psycho Bowtie, three
African Hitmen from Wisconsin and a host of other slit-eyed bad
dudes, dames and daggers. From the Washington D.C. area, Alvin
Ecarma’s Lethal Force is a tongue in cheek no-budget zinger
directed in the Hong-Kong style, drenched in fake blood and ready to
throw every hilarious but amazing action move in the book at you,
and then throw the book at you too!
