Two thumbs up from team Graves! Looks like a terrific selection, and we
concur about the compressed schedule. Wish we could have been more help.
Thanks so much, Joel, for your hard work.
Laurie & Clif
On 11/18/2016 01:57 PM, Joel Johnson wrote:
Dear Friends:
This has been a much slower march to getting our film series put together than usual. Most of us have been dealing with various entanglements and barriers that have made it difficult to hold or attend meetings as well as do some of the other work that can make this process move faster. Since Alice and I spent a week preparing for and then being away on our trip to London, we are not exempt from this. We are looking at the Thanksgiving holiday next week and then we will be entering December. So it occurs to me that we need to finalize our film selection process and move to other aspects of putting together our film series. I would like you to look at my proposed films and research those films. Each of these films has been part of our discussions and some of you have advocated for one or more of them over the last two or three weeks. There are trailers, reviews, film websites, and information about awards for each of the films in addition to those for which we have had the opportunity to stream and watch. While the six that I have chosen may or may not be the best six films qualitatively that we could possibly choose, I think that they are six very good films for which we can attract a significant audience and for which that audience will appreciate having had the opportunity to see the films.
However before selecting this group of six films, I spent this past week looking over our list (see attached) and found that 14 of the 36 titles that we had on our last list are now or will soon be available for viewing on DVD, streaming services, VOD, or television. I have changed the entries for each of those 14 films to different larger font and italicized them with a notation as to why I had made that change. Most of these would be available before we would even begin our film series. I also looked at the NY Times Holiday Movie section to see if anything was now being released in November and December that wasn’t listed in their Fall Movie section that might be a good fit for us. There were a handful of films that might have worked in our film series, but all of them seemed to be opening at the same time both theatrically and on streaming services like iTunes, Amazon Video, etc.
I, therefore, am proposing that we select the following films and that we consider having a compressed schedule as opposed to the biweekly schedule we have generally used:
*_FILMS BIWEEKLY COMPRESSED_*
“THE ANTHROPOLOGIST” 1/14-15/17 1/14-15/17
“SPEED SISTERS” 1/28-29/17 1/28-29/17
“AS I OPEN MY EYES” 2/11-12/17 2/4-5/17
“DISTURBING THE PEACE” 2/25-26/17 2/11-12/17
“AFTER THE STORM” 3/11-12/17 2/25-26/17
“BABUSHKAS OF CHERNOBYL” 3/25-26/17 3/4-5/17
The reason I am opting for these films is that they provide us with opportunities to see the world from several different perspectives and I believe they offer certain levels of hopefulness and understanding about people in difficult situations. I thought we should start with “THE ANTHROPOLOGIST” for which we have near-unanimous acclamation from everyone on the group that has seen it. “SPEED SISTERS” provides us with what may seem to be a very unexpected and upbeat look at the Middle East. “AS I OPEN MY EYES” provides us with two quite different looks at coming of age in Tunisia as the “Arab Spring” (or specifically for Tunisia, the “Jasmine Revolution”) was percolating. One is a universal mother-daughter conflict about developing a life plan and the other is having your voice as a public performer come under suspicion by government authorities (two different critics expressed preference for each of these opposing perspectives of the film’s story which suggests to me that the filmmaker may have been fairly successful in telling both parts of her story). “DISTURBING THE PEACE” shows what would seem to be a very hopeful development of individual Israelis and Palestinians overcoming their long history of enmity to find common ground and seek peace. This film has not been the subject of very much reaction from people on the team, but I know that Alice and I were both very impressed with it. I chose “AFTER THE STORM” because I have seen earlier films by Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda which I have found to be very thought-provoking with a lot of compassion and empathy for the human condition. His film “OUR LITTLE SISTER” was in the most recent MIFF. “AFTER THE STORM” may not have quite as much of a crowd-pleasing story as “OUR LITTLE SISTER” as it is realistic, if compassionate in addressing family relationships and their failures. Finally, I think that “BABUSHKAS OF CHERNOBYL” shares some things with “THE ANTHROPOLOGIST” in that it shows a group of humans persevering in the face of adversity and raises the issue of the importance of feeling integrated into a social milieu. When is it better to stay together as a group as opposed to becoming displaced and seeking refuge in other places? Can humans, animals, and plant life successfully adapt to radiation exposure? Or is it only for those who are female, aged, and have a daily intake of vodka?
I didn’t include “OFF THE RAILS” which I found to be quite powerful. It tells the story of an individual with Asperger’s who is virtually addicted to the buses and trains of the transit service. Here is an individual who would probably be one of the best employees in that system they could ever have and he has been criminalized. While there are aspects of the film that are engaging and funny, it is rather dispiriting for how “the system” of public services in education, criminal justice, and mental health have so failed the film’s subject. I also didn’t include “OLD STONE” which is an interesting and critically well-received film. The film tells a pretty dark story that helping those injured in an accident is so fraught with negative consequences that drivers are better off making sure accident victims die than helping them to survive. The film is described as a psychological thriller and material about the film cite Dostoyevsky and Kafka. Although both of these films could potentially be interesting films to include if we can’t schedule the first choices, I felt that both offer darker and less hopeful stories than the six I chose. Needless to say, “BLOOD ON THE MOUNTAIN” is even darker and more bleak in telling about the coal industry’s grip on West Virginia.
I did not include any classic films in my selections. Most of the classic films we did articulate interest in are available or soon will be available on DVD and/or elsewhere. Some may see this as irrelevant in that older films that we label “classic” have been seen before by many in our audience and it is increasingly likely that most have been available in some home viewing format for a while. We have a couple (“A GUNFIGHT” and “MON ONCLE ANTOINE”) that are not readily available for big screen exhibition and possibly may not be available at all. Both “GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL” and “HOWARDS END” exceed to one degree or another the two-hour window for our films. Unfortunately, none of these classics seems to have created any significant momentum of support amongst our group.
I would like to try this compressed schedule for a handful of different reasons. First of all, when we initially met I indicated that one of our most successful years (2011) had a compressed schedule. I don’t recall exactly why that happened that year, but it did result in better attendance for a number of our films than we usually have seemed to get. I started the series on the second full (MLK) weekend in January. Usually we have done that at Alan’s urging to provide a little respite from the Christmas and then New Year holidays. I opted to not try to schedule any film on the weekend of January 21^st and 22^nd because the inauguration would be happening on Friday, January 20^th . I did not want to compete with any events related to the inauguration that might be happening that weekend. Then I would suggest that we schedule films on the next three weekends in a row. I would hope that this weekly schedule would help reinforce a routine supporting attendance at our films. We skip the President’s Day weekend (first weekend of school vacation) and then show our last two films on back-to-back weekends at the end of February and the first weekend in March. While I am open to feedback about which weekends may want to show our films (there may be very important reasons I am overlooking), I do hope you will agree that the inauguration weekend might be problematic whether people in our anticipated audience are celebrating or protesting the inauguration. I do think that as the weather warms and daylight levels increase in March, our audience starts to focus on other things rather than films—particularly during our time-slot. I am also thinking that we may not want to be adding to a potentially crowded film-going schedule if Railroad Square Cinema once again serves as a satellite site for the Maine Jewish Film Festival which is planning to run between March 18^th and March 25^th as has happened over the last couple years or so.
Obviously, I’m hoping that you will agree with what I have proposed. I would like to be able to give Ken our choices as quickly as we can. I certainly do hope to hear from you all and look forward to your feedback.
Joel
