W&M presents 2nd annual film festival
(Williamsburg, VA) – The College of William & Mary will present its second Annual Global/Local Film Festival, “Global Film Migration,” March 16-22. Screenings will run at the Sadler Center on the W&M campus, the Williamsburg Regional Library, and at the Kimball Theater in Colonial Williamsburg. Screenings are free and open to the public (Screenings at the Kimball theater require tickets, available at the box office or by calling 1-800-HISTORY). Most screenings will also be followed by a question and answer session. A complete schedule of movie screenings is available on the festival's web site.
The Festival is the culminating weekend of the Global Film and Migration Film series that has run in Williamsburg since January in partnership with the Williamsburg Regional Library. For the Festival, international filmmakers, actors, scholars, and musicians will come to Williamsburg to present and perform their work and join in a community-wide dialogue on the ways film and human migration have shaped our lives and the stories we tell…. and sing… and listen to…and watch, both globally and locally.
Events include:
March 19: (5:30 p.m., Williamsburg Regional Library) Prof. Paul Buhle (Brown University) will present The Jazz Singer (1927), Hollywood’s first talkie and a film that turns on the generational tensions of Jewish immigrants. Buhle’s presentation will draw on his book From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in Popular American Culture.
March 20: (7 p.m., Kimball Theater) Emanuele Crialese will come from Italy to present his award-winning film, Nuovomundo/Golden Door (2006) which blends magical realism with a historical period film depicting Italian immigration to the U.S. in the early 20th century. Crialese’s film won the prestigious Silver Lion “revelation” award at the 2006 Venice film festival and went on to be distributed in the U.S. as part of the “Martin Scorsese Presents” series.
March 20: (10:00 p.m. at the Kimball Theater) Miguel Coyula, a young filmmaker from Cuba now based in New York city, will present his award-winning 2003 science-fiction cult film Red Cockroaches. Friday-night will be capped with a live musical performance from the Brooklyn-based Latino-Reggae band Guarco and the local band French Letter accompanied by screenings of migration themed new media music videos (W&M Sadler Center, Chesapeake A, 10:30 pm)
March 21: (1 p.m. at the Kimball Theater) Coyula will be back presenting a first-ever pre-release screening of the rough cut of his film Memories of Overdevelopment. The film is a sequel to the landmark of Cuban cinema Memories of Underdevelopment by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea which will also be shown in a 40th anniversary screening just prior to the sequel. In the presentation of both films, Coyula will be joined by W&M’s Film and Hispanic Studies professor Ann Marie Stock, who specializes in Cuban cinema.
March 21: (2 p.m. at the Williamsburg Regional Library Theater) The classic animated Children’s film An American Tail will screen along with Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 short The Immigrant.
(7 p.m., W&M Sadler Center, Commonwealth Auditorium) A 25th anniversary screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, a landmark of American independent filmmaking and a simultaneously comic, poignant, and incisive depiction of immigration and the US. This screening will be preceded by a Filmmakers’ Roundtable at 4:30 p.m. Both events will be in the Sadler Center Commonwealth Auditorium and are free and open to the public. The film’s female lead, Eszter Balint, will present Stranger Than Paradise and discuss her experience in making the film as well as her perspectives on immigration, filmmaking and creative expression as a Romanian-born resident of New York city.
March 22: Events will focus on the works of Franco-Algerian filmmaker Yamina Benguigui with screenings of two of her films: her 2004 documentary Plafonde de Verre/Glass Ceiling about work place discrimination in France against North African immigrants, and her award-winning 2001 fiction film Inch’Allah Dimanche. Plafond de Verre/Glass Ceiling will be paired with a 3pm screening of the award winning documentary Immokalee, U.S.A. presented by the director Georg Koszulinski. All three films will screen at the Kimball Theater.
(9:30 p.m. at Lodge One in W&M’s Sadler Center) Actress Eszter Balint will be back Sunday evening to close the festival weekend with a free concert where she will perform both new and old songs from her post-filmmaking career as New York-based singer songwriter.
For any additional questions visit the Festival’s web site.
