The New Jersey Film Festival is like an acorn to a large oak tree: concentrated majesty in a small package.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
A recently restored print of Killer of Sheep, a beautifully shot, unflinchingly truthful tale of an urban African-American family struggling against suffocating odds to make it into the middle class, will be one of the first films shown in the fall 2007 New Jersey Film Festival at the Rutgers Film Co-op. It is, as festival programmer and Rutgers professor Albert G. Nigrin calls it, "one of the most important films ever made in this country," yet it has rarely been screened since its 1977 release. New Brunswick will be only the second city in New Jersey (after Montclair) to have shown it, according to Mr. Nigrin.
This is the 26th year for the festival, which used to be heavy on movies that had already played in area art houses but has been gravitating more toward area premieres. Some of the films have been screened only at other film festivals, while others made it into just a handful of commercial theaters, mostly in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Mr. Nigrin is carving a niche for his festival as a place where you can see some of the many interesting movies being made these days that won’t ever make it into a local theater. "There are so many wonderful films out there that I decided to move away from second runs of the art films," he says.
The exception this year is Michael Moore’s Sicko, which grabbed hundreds of screens and headlines when it opened this summer. "We’re showing that because we’ve shown all of Michael Moore’s films, and they’ve always done well for us," says Mr. Nigrin. "They wind up paying for the more obscure ones, where we get 50 or fewer people."
The festival is really more of "a cinematheque," Mr. Nigrin admits, "but most people don’t know what that means." The films it shows were selected by a jury, but they run every week throughout the fall and again in the spring, more like a film series than a standard film festival. Then again, Mr. Nigrin functions sort of like a festival director, staging special events and giveaways to help create excitement about the features. The admission fee for the 3-D Halloween-season screening of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, for instance, will also get you a pair of 3-D glasses. And Mr. Nigrin always brings in filmmakers to speak before or after their work is screened. At least 15 are expected to show up this fall.
"We have a visiting artist pretty much every weekend," says Mr. Nigrin. "We provide notes; we provide culture. We create a culture by having the artist there, giving away tchotchkes. You’re able to celebrate with the filmmakers, which is really what a festival should be."
The pickings this year were particularly good, according to Mr. Nigrin, who says he was "amazed at the quality of the work submitted." Of the 200 or so movies the judges screened, 31 were selected, but another 20 or so were good enough to have been shown. "The volume of submissions has increased over the years," says Mr. Nigrin. "You get double the films that are amateurish, but you also get double the good stuff."
One of the good ones is Notes on Marie Menken, a chatty biography of an early avant-garde filmmaker and genuine character who influenced influential people like Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol. "She was also the model for Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" says Mr. Nigrin. "You look at her films and you wonder, ‘Why haven’t I heard of her?’" The film argues that Ms. Menken deserves to be remembered for her own art rather than if at all for the company she kept, and some of her footage is indeed compelling. But the people who comment on her life talk more about her milieu and her marriage than her movies, and filmmaker Martina Kulácek seems a bit starstruck by Ms. Menken’s famous aging bohemian friends, letting more than one of them go off on tangents, blurring the film’s focus a bit.
Begging Naked is also about a female artist a "pretty amazing painter," according to Mr. Nigrin and substance abuser. During the nine years when the filmmaker documents her life, Mr. Nigrin says, "You see her slowly descend into madness and homelessness. It’s a very affecting film, but at the same time it’s uplifting because she’s still surviving and she’s finally being treated by the end of the film. It sounds depressing, but it’s not."
One of the festival’s strongest programs is an animation festival-within-a-festival consisting of eight short films that will be screened together in mid-September. One is the Chris Marker classic The Jetty, and another is the winner of this year’s Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award for Best Short Film. This is a good program to catch, Mr. Nigrin says, "If you want to see interesting films that have something to say but are fun or spooky and that you can’t see on video or DVD anywhere for at least a year."
When features are shown, they will usually be preceded by one of the short films selected by the jury. "Most people think of short films as throwaways, but to me they’re like acorns," says Mr. Nigrin. "An acorn is just as beautiful as a tree, but it’s completely different. It’s more concentrated."
The shorts, too, are "amazingly" good this year, perhaps because most are by "young people who really have something to say. They’re not driven by the dollar; they’re driven by passion. The short films that do well are not about the filmmakers’ own adolescent angst. They’re about presenting an issue or an idea that the filmmaker is passionate about."
The New Jersey Film Festival 2007 will run from Sept. 7-Nov. 16. Tickets cost $7, $5 students, $4 seniors, with some exceptions. Locations vary; (732) 932-8482; www.njfilmfest.com