Brooklyn International Film Festival

@ Brooklyn Museum of Art, April 29 through May 5, 2002
by Orin Buck

The Brooklyn International Film Festival (BIFF), now in its fifth year, has reached a whole new level this year with its new Brooklyn Museum of Art venue, its small but newly paid staff, and more films, prizes, and international prestige than ever. If you never heard of this festival, it’s because it also has a new name: Last year it was the Williamsburg Brooklyn Film Festival, and in 1997 it began as the Williamsburg Film Festival at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center. You should be hearing more about it from now on.

New York has many film festivals, but the BIFF does not resemble the festivals which gather old classics together for viewing, like a Charlie Chaplin film festival. Rather, it is built on the European model, like Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival. Festival Director Marco Ursino says that the festival the BIFF most resembles now is Slamdance (one of the alternatives to Sundance in Park City, Utah). All films and videos are in competition for $45,000 in prizes. None of the films are more than two years old, with many world premieres. Also, it isn’t limited to a specific area like the New York Women’s Film Festival or the New York Underground Film Festival – it screens films according to five broad categories: Documentary, Feature, Experimental, Short, and Animation. Videos are screened with films, and foreign language films are in competition with films in English. This year over 1,000 films and videos were submitted from 60 countries, and 80 to 100 will be screened during the seven days of the festival.

The Festival moved up its dates so as not to conflict with the widely-publicized new TriBeCa Film Festival (May 8 to 12), which according to the New York Times “is intended more to save a neighborhood than to celebrate film.” (New York Times, March 22, 2002). It has also moved from Williamsburg’s Commodore Theater to the Brooklyn Museum of Art's Cantor Auditorium. I attended showings at the Commodore, and the old movie palace had a charming decrepitude and what looked like special necking sections in the back. But under the gloomy shadow of the JMZ elevated tracks it was a little too far from the mainstream to be able to attract the audience the Festival deserves.
The Brooklyn International Film Festival's entire film program will be presented in BMA's 460-seat Cantor Auditorium. Ursino says new venues may be added next year, but this year it will still be possible to view all the programmed films. “The transition from an exclusively Williamsburg setting to our museum in the heart of Brooklyn will not only benefit the Brooklyn Museum of Art and BIFF, but also give larger, more diverse audiences access to the festival’s wonderful film programs,” says Mona Smith, Manager of Adult Programs at the BMA. “Festival ticket-holders can enjoy a whole day at the museum and BMA’s permanent collections for free.” Coincidentally, and illustrating how important film is in modern culture, the blockbuster show “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,” showcasing “ornately costumed characters and exquisitely detailed production models,” opened on April 5.
The films this year
A BIFF press release says “A common theme running through many of this year's film submissions is coming of age through intergenerational conflicts and misunderstandings....The genres are all represented: from Japanese martial arts and sexy New York comedy to Danish dogma and Italian and Chinese neo realism.”
I previewed a few films at the BIFF office, and there is certainly more to be seen than coming of age stories. The Man With a DV Cam starts with a guy wondering what to do with his new DV cam and follows him around through various special effects and solitary outdoor settings. Clyde – A Tough Guy is a short documentary about a black homeless man's response to 9/11 and how the square guys got good jobs while he, the tough guy, keeps doing worse as he gets older. The Hunger Artist is a beautiful puppet-animation version of Kalfka’s story. The lighting of the constructed sets and characters is outstanding.
Dog is a very short film from England that fits the ‘coming of age’ theme. I hate to give away this story, so let me say that it is about what a little boy discovers about life through the death of his mother and what happens next.There are a few short lines of dialogue, and everything else is revealed in truly cinematic fashion. The puppet animation in this piece is extraordinarily lifelike and touching.

I didn’t view any of the features, but the entire festival program is detailed on the website. Operation Midnight Climax sounds really fun, especially for the New York audience. It was locally made by veteran independent actor, producer, director, writer, casting director, and stunt-man/choreographer Will Keenan, together with Gadi Harel. One of the actors is Village Voice writer and Metro TV host Michael Musto. Will Nitch is leading a secret life, not telling his girlfriend that he is organizing a secret society of women to counter the global conspiracy against them. Of course, for their powers to reach full potential he is forced to practice tantric sex with them. Stylistically, OMG “is a unique live-action comic book synthesis of Golden Era stunt-comedy and our paranoid, seductive, chaotic 21st century world in which interviews, documentary segments and recorded phone calls are all woven together within the narrative structure.”

Promoting the films after the Festival
Operation Midnight Climax will have its world premiere at the Festival. Another local premiere is Sergio Goes’s Black Picket Fence. Ursino says that this is a new thing this year – while the BIFF has always had world premieres, major local films went to bigger venus for the glamour. Now the BIFF seems like a wise choice for nurturing the life of a new film.
This is partly the result of the other major activity of the Festival besides screening films. What strikes me as particularly unique about BIFF is its emphasis on promoting films and filmmakers after the festival itself. Ursino summarizes the core mission of the BIFF: “to discover, expose and promote Brooklyn filmmakers while drawing worldwide attention to Brooklyn.” Ursino says he spent most of the last year promoting the films that were in last year’s festival.
“ We stay behind a film for two years – we showcase it, suggesting films to distributors, overseas and here, and just sending a tape, presskit, take a look at this, whatever...we have the media involved in the process, so we try to have all the articles written about the films. So we try to push those certain films, the winners. We have a package now after five years...we have about 350 films that we have handled, and some of them are still looking for distribution.

We are thinking about compilations...I don’t know, we’re trying to have a way for people outside to see this. That’s one part of the job. The other part – and we started this already this year – is to work on the talents. We don’t only have a library, we have friends – we have directors, producers, directors of photography, sound people, etc. – we have the best. So now it would be nice to find jobs for them. We just want to have our logo attached somewhere. I’m doing it with a TV commercial for this year. I took a director from a previous year instead of doing it myself. I took people we know, related to the Festival, and we’ll be shooting it this Sunday, you know, 35 millimeter black and white, with everything sponsored, Technicolor, Panavision, TapeHouse. This is important, because we can not only find jobs, but if we believe in a project we can actually ask these companies – Panavision, Kodak – to give you the camera, to give you the film, because they know that the festival has good taste in people and films, so they know that it’s money well spent, so they know that this is a person who they want to grow with.”

Foreign films
The Festival has strong contacts in Europe. They put effort into marketing the films there, for example pitching them to the individual television networks. This is a two-way street: they also seek out the best new European films. Among those having their US premiere at the Festival are Getting My Brother Laid and Jullietta, both from Germany. Getting My Brother Laid is about Josch, Mike and their younger sister Nic and their search for first love. The older brother is mentally handicapped and into Dracula – and he wants his brother’s girlfriend. The sister is experiencing the world through a video camera. Director Sven Taddicken has won several awards in Europe, and was nominated for the 2000 Oscars Honorary Foreign Student Award. Jullietta begins in the Berlin Love Parade (do we need one of those here?) and follows the relationships of a young woman with two young men. It is the first feature from Christoph Stark, a young director of ads and music videos. About two thirds of the BIFF’s entries are from outside the US. Even some of the local films (about half of the US entries are from New York) are made by non-natives, so the Festival is extremely international, in keeping with the nature of Brooklyn. Ursino hopes to show the distributors that our audiences are ready and willing to see subtitled films, so long as they are good.

The awards competition
Films are selected from entries in a process where a core group at the BIFF views all of the submissions, and other screeners join to view all of the films in a particular category. The top “Grand Chameleon” award is for the best of the festival, regardless of genre or length, and the winner gets $25,000 in services. Ursino says “The winner of last year’s festival, from Argentina, is currently planning a project in New York that will use the services he won.” There are other awards, including for audience favorites.
The judges are local people from all disciplines: Vincent Musetto, NY Post; David Chachere, NY Independent, Film Monitor; Neif Yehya, El Financiero; Peter Hall, Film Critic & Filmmaker; Steve Dovas, Animator; Karl Bardosh, NYU Professor; Matt Goldman, Filmmaker; Josh Harris, Artist; Bruno Derlin, IndieVision Magazine; Lisa J. Curtis, GoBrooklyn Magazine; John Mhiripiri, Anthology Film Archives; Willow Rossetti-Johnson, Filmmaker; Ed James, Zentertainment, Lorenzo Benedick, Filmmaker
At the end of the festival the films are judged according to categories. They try to arrive at unanimous decisions; otherwise, decisions come from the number grades awarded by each judge.
Throughout the Festival there are events like parties and a seminar hosted by John Dowdell of TapeHouse, the inventor of the Spirit Machine, on “Film, a Medium for all Resolutions.” BMA’s central Beaux Art Court will be a networking center for the Festival, with informational tabbles and so on. For further information about tickets and scheduling, go to wbff.org, e-mail festivalwbff.org, or call (718) 388 4306.

If you can’t go to the Festival
Locally, an important part of having the films seen are the Festival’s other screenings. Ursino says the Festival has always had the monthly showcase, previously at locations like Anthology Film Archives, Limelight Gallery and the Queens Museum of Art. More recently there has been a series of shows at the Pioneer Theater in the East Village. And they have begun to show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s popular First Saturdays. This is a free event with something for everyone. April’s First Saturday, for example, included a gallery talk, world music, hands-on art with “sculpt your own spaceships,” the Brooklyn Philharmonic, a family film, artists and curators and critics discussing Star Wars, and a dance party – and everyone can see the art as well. The BIFF plans a special program for the First Saturday that falls during the Festival, with its only showing of films not in competition.

The Festival’s outreach has led to a couple of firsts: Ursino says that the BIFF is the first US festival to send a program of films to the Cuban film festival that is the largest Spanish language fest in the world; and the BIFF is the first film festival to be broadcast over the Web. I remember seeing webcasting pioneer Terri Ferrari of Metal Tiger Technologies with his portable setup in the back of the Commodore. In the future, high bandwidth webcasting could radically change the film fest experience.
Film festivals should be at the top of the list for anyone with a general interest in modern art. In my opinion, film/video and recorded music are the most important art forms of the 20th Century, and anyone interested in modern art should be well acquainted with the most serious works in film/video. One of the best places to seek out those works is film festivals, especially those where aesthetic standards have a priority over mass marketability. Mass market products require appeal to lowest common denominators, established categories, star power and other priorities that can bury the best work. Artists should seek out the best film, not wait for it to find them through the many filters of the market system, and not have their taste in this medium remain degraded and uneducated by just watching TV.

Appearing in galleries and museums makes art film and video safe for the artworld to take seriously. But a lot of self indulgent crap gets attention merely because it is created by degreed artists. Just as the label ‘performance art’ can legitimize bad theater, ‘video art’ is a license for bad production values and mediocre ideas. Artists such as Bill Viola and Nam Jun Paik can extend the forms of film/video into a multi-media world beyond the flat screen, just as 20th C. painting escaped the pure rectangle. But, just as outstanding 2D painting is still (after all these centuries) being created, the best work meant to be presented in the confines of a theater or video screen can be far more interesting than run-of-the-mill video installations.
At filmfestivalspro.com I found over 600 film festivals listed for the US, including over 80 in New York. If you can’t attend this Brooklyn International Film Festival don’t wait until next year to taste the banquet of contemporary film art!

[nyarts magazine]

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