Reel Stars

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Outside Newport’s Jane Pickens Theater,

a line is forming. It stretches down Touro Street, past a bed and breakfast and a tilting 1801 green clapboard house, to the corner. Inside, the theater is like something from another time. A soaring archway with elaborately decorated molding frames the stage, which is fronted by a pipe organ. But when the lights go down, and that unmistakable clack-clack-clack of a film reel starts up, you know exactly where you are. You’re at the movies.

This warm June evening in 2006 is the opening night of the ninth annual Newport International Film Festival. The house is sold out, and the audience is chattering with excitement. The opening night film, Quinceañera, won both the audience award and the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and tonight’s showing is the New England premiere. The directors are here, as is one of the actors. Later, they will answer audience members’ questions about the making of the movie. But right now they’re hunkered down in their green-upholstered chairs like everyone else, waiting for the curtain to rise.

The first reason that most festival attendees are here is for films like this: films by independent filmmakers, films too quirky or off-beat for widespread distribution, films you can’t see anywhere else. The second reason is far more basic. The people here just love movies. “I’ve been going since I was eight years old,” says Jane Dyer, a compact silver-haired woman with bright eyes and rimless glasses who is in the audience with her daughter and a small army of friends. “I saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarves when it first came out in 1937.” Dyer says that during the festival she sometimes closes her downtown Newport shop, Cadeaux du Monde, earlier than planned in order to attend up to three films a day. “Then I can’t take it anymore,” she adds with a laugh.

Film festivals serve many purposes. For independent movie-makers, they are important opportunities to make connections, share their work and gain name recognition. For those in the industry, they are a chance to cherry-pick the hottest new movies to distribute and the brightest new talent to finance.

The big name venues, known as market festivals, are primarily a way for filmmakers and distributors to connect. What gets lost in their mad rush of hobnobbing and cocktail schmoozing is the everyday audience member, the film-lover who drops everything to take in that foreign flick or those series of animated shorts.

At Newport, it’s different. “I think the essence of this festival is bringing the people of Newport together with the film community,” says Ryan Harrington, who runs A&E IndieFilms and is a juror at the 2006 festival. Laurie Kirby, the festival’s
executive director, agrees: “Our mission is not to be a market festival. Our mission is to be an audience-based festival.”


Quinceañera turns out to be a lovely film. Following the life of a fourteen-year-old girl from L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood through the travails preceding the coming-of-age ceremony that will mark her fifteenth birthday, it’s also about the impact of gentrification on working-class communities, acceptance, forgiveness and family. And though Sony Pictures Classics will distribute the film to art-house theaters later in the season, those in the audience tonight will have seen it here first. Plus those in the audience will have heard the filmmakers’ stories about how the movie was shot (in their houses and those of their neighbors), cast (their cleaning lady and her family are all featured in the film; filmmaker Richard Glatzer says of Emily Rios, who plays the lead, “the top of her resume was that she had played Cleopatra in her school play”), and vaulted to success (filmmaker Wash Westmoreland says, “We never imagined we’d win both the audience award and the grand jury prize. It was better than sex, the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”)

“The audience felt like a warm embrace,” Glatzer says later, at the opening night party at the Newport Colony House. “You really do make your film to be seen. It’s nice to see it with a different audience that isn’t L.A. It’s really a nice festival.”

Geographically speaking, the Newport  International Film Festival is largely based in Newport’s Washington Square. The event’s two main venues, the Jane Pickens and the Opera House theaters, are both on Touro Street. The panels, parties and events, held at places like the Newport Art Museum and the Newport Blues Café, are all a short walk away.

The 2006 festival features ninety-six films that fall into one of three categories: narrative features, documentaries and short films (shorts, which run anywhere from three to twenty-eight minutes, are shown either in clusters at a single screening, or individually, preceding a full-length film). The selections cover a wide range of genres, from comedy to drama to anime to mockumentary, from films about family to films about love, about small towns, the environment, immigration.

Some two dozen films play each day at different venues. Tickets for most screenings and events cost $10 (festival passes range from $50 for five screenings to $300 for twenty, plus three event vouchers and various goodies). Most films run on two separate occasions, and executive director Laurie Kirby estimates about 75 percent of them are followed by a question and answer session with the filmmaker, a cast member or director. “That makes it so much more of a rewarding and interactive experience,” she says. “It’s the icing on the cake, to see an incredible movie and then get to ask the director about it. It’s such a treat.”

Each day there are also panels and events. For filmmakers, there are how-tos, like “Get it Made the Legal Way,” and “The Distribution Game”; for audience members, there are events like “Live Comedy Improv,” featuring cast members from “Saturday Night Live.”

Most of the feature-length movies are culled from other festivals. Programming director David Nugent attends upwards of a dozen each year, picking out the ones he likes best and lobbying the filmmakers and production companies to bring them to Newport. Many of the name-brand, glitterati festivals, such as Sundance and Cannes, require what is known in the industry as premiere status. They only show a film if it’s the world premiere or the national premiere. This helps to create buzz, but it’s less important here in Newport.

“It’s a local community audience,” says Nugent. “They don’t care if they’re seeing the premiere of the film; they just want a good film… . So what I’ve done for this festival is, in addition to getting some premieres, I’ve found what I think are the best films that have been playing at these festivals, and I’ve brought them here.”

About 10 percent of the feature-length films shown, as well as almost all of the shorts, were submitted directly to the festival by independent filmmakers. In 2006, that totaled more than 700 films. In the months before the festival, Nugent assembled a screening committee of about a dozen people in the industry. Committee members watch ten to twelve films each week, enter their reviews into a database and meet once a week to discuss what they saw. Then they whittle down the pool to about 150 finalists. Nugent watches every one of these, and then makes the final decisions. There were a few films that didn’t make the cut, which Nugent says he agonized over, including one called Colma: The Musical, an Asian-American teen musical romantic comedy.

Given its, um, underwhelming premise, he expected to be disappointed. Instead he grew quite attached to it. “There are a lot of factors that go into [the decision-making process],” he says. “It’s not just going to be all of my favorite films. There’s a lot of things I’m trying to serve –– different audiences, different ages.”