MIFF 2006 Films with Maine Connections
By Joel Johnson
Most film festivals, no matter how international the
festival aspires to be, have a certain amount of parochialism. They serve to
promote filmmakers that are from wherever the festival is located and to
promote filmmaking that is about the locality where the festival is taking
place. There are probably no better examples of this than the films that
bookend this year’s Maine International Film Festival (MIFF).
The opening night
film is Islander. The setting is the coast of Maine, and the main
character has been a lobsterman. How much more “Maine” can you get? Eben
(Thomas Hildreth) is trying to reconnect with his home community after being
away for several years. This is not an uncommon experience here in Maine as
the economics of living on the coast and working as a lobster fisherman have
gotten more and more challenging—it is no longer a given that sons will be
able to make a living doing the same work that their fathers and
grandfathers did. Director Ian McCrudden has made four other films:
Trespassers (2006), Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler (2002), Trailer:
The Movie (1999), and The Big Day (1999). Aside from their lack
of name recognition, these have many hallmarks of truly independent
filmmaking. In addition to directing, McCrudden has also been a writer,
producer, editor, camera operator, and actor for one or more of these films.
The casts have been filled with supporting players from films and television
who get an opportunity in an independent film to play a higher profile—even
a leading role. Islander shares many of these characteristics.
McCrudden shares screenwriter credit with the film’s star (Hildreth), who
also was the film’s producer. With the exception of veteran character actor
Philip Baker Hall, the remainder of the cast has mostly played supporting
roles in television. Hall would seem a natural as the kind of crusty sea
barnacle that every harbor, bay, cove or inlet on Maine’s rockbound coast
claims as its own. Most characteristic of an independent production is that
this film has been completed entirely under the radar of the entertainment
media. The MIFF Opening Night audience will be just the second screening
ever for the film. With the exception of Hall, there’s not much of a track
record to use in sizing up a film like this so that one could be equally
likely to see a dazzling gem or a dismal disappointment. However considering
that the MIFF programmers have decided to showcase the film as the festival
opener, one suspects that they were truly impressed by how accurately the
film portrayed a Maine coastal community and with the performances by Thomas
Hildreth and Philip Baker Hall. The odds for a dazzling gem just got more
favorable.
The
closing night film is Keeping Mum. This film seems quintessentially
British with comic genius Rowan Atkinson (Bean films and TV programs;
Johnny English; and Four Weddings and a Funeral)
as a clueless vicar and Academy Award nominee Kristin Scott Thomas (The
English Patient, The Horse Whisperer, and Gosford Park)
as his neglected wife. The vicar’s troubled children are played by the
ever-so English Tamsin (Egerton) and Toby (Parkes). Dame Maggie Smith (the
Harry Potter movies, Gosford Park, A Room with a View,
and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) plays their mysterious new
housekeeper. The film was filmed entirely in the United Kingdom on the Isle
of Man, in Cornwall, and in North Yorkshire. Yet there’s a very strong Maine
connection to this film in the person of novelist and screenwriter Richard
Russo. Russo, best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire
Falls and the award-winning HBO miniseries based on it, is a former
Colby College professor and longtime Maine resident. He now has eight film
or television productions for which he either wrote the screenplay and/or
the story from which the film was derived. For Keeping Mum, Russo
wrote both the original story and the screenplay (with collaboration with
director Niall Johnson). Russo has been a regular fixture for MIFF festival
goers over the last few years. He was much in evidence two years ago when
Empire Falls star Ed Harris and a brief segment of the film itself were
centerpieces for the festival, but he has also participated in several
forums over the years. He has always been one of the more informative and
entertaining participants. Clearly, it is hard to imagine any film starring
Rowan Atkinson being anything else besides a comedy, but it appears that the
comedy is quite dark. With strong performances by Kristin Scott Thomas and
Maggie Smith as well as a more subtle one than we usually see from Rowan
Atkinson, this film is likely to be a very pleasing curtain-closer for MIFF
2006.
www.keepingmumthemovie.com
In between the opening night film and the closing night
film are several other films with Maine connections. Most of these are
documentaries.
Linda Pattillo’s The Breast Cancer Diaries chronicles Hallowell
television journalist Ann Murray Paige’s successful nine month treatment for
breast cancer. This is intense material that strikes pretty close to home
for me since my wife is a breast cancer survivor. The film promises an
intimate, unflinching, and sometimes amusing look at coping with both a
deadly disease and its arduous treatment. The film would appear to have the
agenda of providing a first-hand account of dealing with the disease so that
patients and their families can be forewarned and thus forearmed about the
challenges to be faced. Although the film crew and the film’s subject are
both from Maine, the story is meaningful far beyond Maine as cancer has no
respect for state and national boundaries.
www.thebreastcancerdiaries.com/home.php
Call to Return:
The Oxycontin Story is a film that chronicles how the corporate strategy
for maximizing profits affects real people. In this case, the real people
are people living in rural America who are disproportionately affected by
this new medication. Director Sam Carroll has specifically focused on Maine
to tell this story. As a cog in the bureaucracy to deliver health care to
Maine, this film may actually have relevance for my day job. Hmmm….but I’m
going to be on vacation!
First Impersonator is a look at Maine native Abbott “Vaughan” Meader’s
brief meteoric career as the impersonator of President John F. Kennedy. His
The First Family album was one of the first LPs to arrive in my home,
and his success seemed particularly special to me since he was from Maine.
Tragically, the assassin’s bullets that ended Kennedy’s life in Dallas
virtually killed Meader’s career as well. Director Chad Friedrichs (Jandek
on Corwood from MIFF 2004) also focuses on Meader’s contemporary
successors as presidential impersonators to comment on our culture and our
focus on celebrity. Since I was only nine years old when Meader’s career
died in Dallas, it will be very interesting to get the full story on the man
behind “The First Family.”
www.firstimpersonator.com
Tony Montanaro:
The Theatre of Inspiration is by Maine filmmakers Huey, Leland
Faulkner, and Richard Searls. Huey and Richard Searls have each made several
appearances over the years at MIFF. The subject of their film is Tony
Montanaro, who was something of a big kahuna in the world of mime. He went
to Paris to learn from undoubtedly the best-known mime of all time: Marcel
Marceau. After an extensive performance career, Montanaro then came to Maine
to set up shop at Celebration Barn Theater in South Paris. This film will
attempt to capture Montanaro’s contributions to this unique art form as well
as the allure and challenge of being a performance artist in Maine.
Images of Maine is a screening of five short Maine films. There are
three really short films: The Ballad of the Purple Clam
(six minutes), Why Don’t We Do It in Our Sleeves? (five
minutes), Alehouse Jam (seven minutes). Then there are The
Hermit of Manana (twenty-seven minutes) and Get Off the Truck: Black
Factory Rehearsal 2005 (fifty-three minutes). The description of
Purple Clam as a revenge story for losing a finger to a clam
suggests an animated version of Moby-Dick with a land-based Captain
Ahab. My mom never taught me this technique for sneezing, but apparently the
hygienic way to limit the spread of germs is to “do it in our sleeves.” The
challenge of making a health tip memorable is taken on by filmmaker Ben
Lounsbury, who shares the same name as a Lewiston otolaryngologist.
Alehouse Jam lets us share an evening of music at a Gorham nightspot.
Elisabeth Harris is a young filmmaker who has worked on several films—mostly
documentaries—over the last ten years. The Hermit of Manana is the
first film that appears to be all her own, and she has tackled a subject
that has fascinated her since childhood. Ray Phillips was a World War I
veteran and a New York grocer when he decided to leave New York City in
1928. He sailed up the coast and eventually landed on Maine’s Manana Island.
He claimed this small island near Monhegan Island as his own, and it became
his home for the remaining fifty years of his life. Ms. Harris’s challenge
is the same she felt during childhood: explain why he chose this unique life
www.chestnuthilllocal.com/issues/2006.05.25/locallife2.html
. Get Off the Truck: Black Factory Rehearsal 2005 is William Pope.L’s
training sessions for his Lewiston-based Black Factory mobile performance
artists who need a light touch in confronting the very difficult issue of
dealing with differentness in our contemporary world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pope.L
The final Maine
film also deals with individuals who are different and for whom that
difference can lead to not being accepted by others and sometimes not even
by themselves. The film is Ugly Ducklings and the difference is
sexual orientation. Cinematographer Fawn Yacker turns director in bringing
Carolyn Gage’s stage play to the screen. Colby College professor Lyn Mikel
Brown and Lauren Sterling, winners of the Groundbreaking Activist Leader
Award at the Second Annual Maine Film Academy Awards Gala for their work on
Ugly Ducklings, served as producers for the production that was
filmed on the Colby College campus. Now the MIFF audience will get to see
the finished film that promises to be a thought-provoking treatment of
homophobia as a potential trigger for bullying and teen suicide.
