Since its inception in 1994, the Taos Talking Picture Festival has grown into one of the nation's premiere film festivals, showcasing a broad and spectacular array of local, national and international talent. And this year's festival was no exception.
Punctuated by an exceptionally brilliant group of artists and films, Taos was a giddy frenzy of traffic, box office lines, celebrity sightings and endless discussions.
Much of the talk this weekend centered on the appearance of Susan Sarandon and her latest film, "Moonlight Mile." Directed by Brad Silberling and also starring Dustin Hoffman, Holly Hunt and Jake Gyllenhaal, the film was screened as a work in progress, with the audience being the first to see the nearly complete version. It is about the events surrounding a young man living with the parents of his murdered fiancÇ and drew a standing ovation from the crowd upon its conclusion.
Numerous people praised the film for having both humor and honest portrayals of grief. Silberling, who also compiled the screenplay, said that he wrote Sarandon's role of JoJo Floss - the fiancÇ's grieving mother - specifically for Sarandon.
"It is so rare that you have people who want to tell stories that they feel passionate about," Sarandon said of working with Silberling.
And on a lighter note, when asked about her stance on the legalization of marijuana, Sarandon replied, "I'm too stoned to answer."
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Other notable feature films included "The Zookeeper," directed by Ralph Ziman. The film, which also won the Taos Land Grant Award, is a poignant, difficult, but ultimately uplifting, story of a zoo custodian who, after the war-torn Eastern European city he lives in is evacuated, stays to take care of the animals. Also, the Uruguayan/Argentinian "25 Watts" is the slice of life of three aimless Uruguayan teenagers struggling with girls, dull jobs and periodic schoolwork. Similar in tone and style to Kevin Smith's "Clerks" and Richard Linklater's "Slacker," the film is a funny glimpse into the workings of apathetic male adolescence.
In between many full-length feature films and other celebrity talks, several programs of short films managed to capture the attention of festival-goers.
The program Low-Tech Hijinks featured a collection of inventive, humorous and thought provoking shorts. The film, "The Horribly Stupid Stunt (Which has Resulted in His Untimely Death)," is the hilarious chronicle of a man pretending to be a spokesman for the World Trade Organization at a European economic conference.
A behind the scenes documentary about how he and his group of friends got involved in their predicament, the film feels like a cerebral version of the MTV show "Jackass." Other notable shorts in the program included V†clav Svankmajer's "The Test" - a surreal and horrid role reversal between a man and a band of crash test dummies - and Vanessa Renwick's "Richart," the story of artist Richard Tracy, a truly unique and eclectic sculpture and painter.
An Historic Survey: UNM Media Arts Student Film and Video Work 1993-2001 was a collection of various student short film projects. Ben Rogerson's "Coffee Bean," a genre-bending spoof of the conventional western with a powerhouse '80s rock soundtrack will also be playing at FlickerFest, a student film festival in Chicago.
"Minced Meet," by John Donalds and Katrina Drabkin, shot in grainy 16mm film, deals with the objectification of women by interspersing images of female mannequins with obscure shots of meat cooking. Johan Wiberg's "Laundromat" uses a split screen technique that thoughtfully shows the routinization of cleanliness.
As an added bonus to the entire festival, many of the filmmaker panel discussions provided an educational behind-the-scenes glimpse into the filmmaking process and philosophy.
The "Working-Class Movie Panel," moderated by David Barsamian, included writer and director John Sayles, cinematographer Haskell Wexler and documentarian Kristi Jacobson. The panel was a provocative and insightful discussion on the portrayal of the working class and its struggles for unionization in cinema past and present.
Wexler, who was the cinematographer for Sayles' "Matewan," a film that deals with a 1920s West Virginia miner's strike, said, "When I heard John was going to make 'Matewan,' I jumped at the opportunity. And to this day, after seeing the film again, it is one of the most important things personally that I've ever done."
Wexler continued to say that one of the strongest things that films offer is a sense of unity - something that also is the basis of unionization.
Sayles, who also won the Taos Storyteller Award with Maggie Renzi, proved to be incredibly informative about the issue of unionization, not only as part of United States' history, but its depiction in film.
"I don't think in America you can separate the idea of labor or working people from class," he said. "American movies have kind of shadowed this idea that we are a classless society - which we are not. Hollywood movies have dealt with class in the kind of ways where June Allyson would be the heiress and she'd fall in love with the chauffeur. But the chauffeur would be Cary Grant."
Sayles also said that unlike Great Britain - where class is addressed as a prominent theme in society - class warfare in the United States has been discouraged and sidestepped.
What separates the Taos Talking Picture Festival from the slew of others around the globe is its continual attention to the range of amazing films that fall outside the pale of mainstream cinema.
Although obscure, many of the featured films lack nothing in richness, authenticity and vitality - making the festival a consistently exciting venue to chart the evolution of cinematic art.
"The organization was founded to encourage people to develop critical viewing skills - to help them more carefully consider their media environments. Between film, video and educational programs, we hope that they will leave a little wiser about the media works," said Jason Silverman, the festival's artistic director.
