Reel Life Maine International Film Festival to honor director Demme

Without even looking at a map, it’s easy to tell that Waterville, Maine, is about as far from Hollywood as you can get – and not just in the geographic sense. Then again, so are Toronto and Park City, Utah, both of which host two of the biggest and most influential film festivals in the Northern Hemisphere. So why not Waterville?

The Maine International Film Festival has asked that same question for the past four years – and it seems to get louder each year. The 10-day event kicks off July 12 and continues until July 21, with screenings of more than 50 films and special events at two venues, Railroad Square Cinema and the Waterville Opera House.

This year, Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme will accept the festival’s Midlife Achievement Award at the Waterville Opera House on July 17.

“We try to choose somebody we feel has a really terrific body of work behind them and yet also has potentially a lot of their future ahead of them,” said Ken Eisen, the festival’s programming director. “The first year we awarded it, the director we awarded it to said, ‘Well, I’m not ready to call it quits.’ And we said, ‘Oh yeah, right! We’re going to make it the Midlife Achievement Award.’ And that’s become sort of a traditionalized thing ever since, that we are trying to recognize a director who has something terrific behind them but a lot to look forward to. I certainly think that’s the case with Demme, whose body of work really seemed to us more diverse and remarkable than anyone else we could think of.”

Demme perhaps is best known for his 1991 thriller, “The Silence of The Lambs,” which swept the Academy Awards that year. That film will be shown on the big screen as well as “Something Wild,” a 1986 comedy with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith, which was chosen by Demme himself for an award-night screening. Also showing will be another of his comedies, 1988’s “Married to the Mob,” and his groundbreaking rock-umentary about The Talking Heads, 1984’s “Stop Making Sense.” Demme also will debut his work-in-progress, “The Agrarian,” a documentary portrait of assassinated human rights activist Jean Dominique.

Previous winners of the award include director Terrence Malick and actress Sissy Spacek. When Spacek was honored at last year’s festival, audiences were treated to an unannounced screening of her then-unreleased new film, “In the Bedroom.” One of the few films not just set in Maine but actually filmed here, “In the Bedroom” was nominated for five Academy Awards, including a best actress nod for Spacek.

Unique to the festival’s scheduled events this year will be a program titled “Vietnam: The Aftermath.” Named in honor of a recent album by jazz musician and Vietnam veteran Billy Bang, the program will explore the residual effects of the Vietnam conflict. The acclaimed jazz violinist Bang and his sextet will perform at 8 p.m. July 18 at the Waterville Opera House. Also, nine features dealing with the era and its effects will be shown with discussions to follow.

As part of “Vietnam: The Aftermath” film director and Maine resident Peter Davis will present his Academy Award-winning meditation on the Vietnam War, “Hearts and Minds.”

“The film ‘Hearts and Minds’ is about American participation in the war,” Davis said. “And although they are never stated, three questions float around throughout the whole film: Why did we go to Vietnam? What did we do there? And what did the doing in turn do to us? No film can answer those questions. I’d always hoped that ‘Hearts and Minds’ would call to them and get a chance for people to feel the weight of these questions.”

Initially released nearly 30 years ago, “Dead River Rough Cut” has been revamped and will take to the screen again during the film festival.

Recently, the film’s two directors, Stu Silverstein and Richard Searls, added almost a half-hour of new footage to the original cut of the film, which also will be re-released this year on video and DVD by Maine’s own Northeast Historic Film.

“We recently ransacked our archives – this is like from 30 years past – and added footage which didn’t make it into the original cut for one reason or another,” said Silverstein. “So what people will see at the film festival is 100 percent the original version.”

While the overall quality, diversity and depth of the films scheduled is impressive, features by Maine filmmakers are admittedly in short supply. In addition to “Dead River Rough Cut,” the fictional film “Liberty, Maine” and the documentary “Fish Out of Water” are the few and the proud. Eight Maine-made shorts also will be shown.

“There are not that many made; we certainly try to emphasize Maine filmmaking, it’s one of our missions,” Eisen said. “There really aren’t all that many out there.”

The problem is usually financial rather than creative for filmmakers in the state, and those from outside Maine are interested in filming here.

“Certainly Maine is a great location for filmmaking and people know that,” Eisen said. “But the issue is always an economic one. Sometimes its cheaper, in fact it’s almost always cheaper, to shoot in Canada and so we’ve lost a lot of production to Canada.”

Held in conjunction with the Maine International Film Festival, the Public Screening and Awards Presentation of the 25th Maine Student Film and Video Festival is heartening to the eyes and to the state of filmmaking in Maine. It will take place at the Waterville Opera House at 1 p.m. July 13.

Open to Maine students age 19 and under, the Maine Student Film and Video Festival selects winners based on content, style and originality of films among three different age divisions. This year’s grand prize-winning film is “Wind Bird” by Tina Vermette. A member of the Penobscot Nation, Vermette’s film is a Claymation adaptation of a Penobscot Gluscap legend. The 19-minute film will be shown in its entirety along with excerpts of all winning entries from the other age divisions.

“We really are a festival that is here for Maine, not trying to become a Sundance or a place that jet-setters come to,” Eisen stressed.

Although many festivals have become little more than opportunities to gawk and schmooze, some also have proven that great filmmaking doesn’t just exist outside the Hollywood studio system, it thrives.

“My favorite part is the films,” Eisen said.

“For some people, film festivals are about parties, meeting famous people and so forth, and I don’t think that’s what it’s about. I think its about the excitement of being able to see films that wouldn’t otherwise be seen that are terrific and interesting and sometimes off the beaten track that sometimes have more to say to us than films that are much more popular.”

For more information on the Maine International Film Festival, go to www.miff.org.