Providence Phoenix

June 12 - 19, 1997

[Art Reviews]

Cannes-on-the-Seekonk

by Bill Rodriguez
Homeboy director Michael Corrente has been talking for years about having a soundstage here, and now some Hollywood guys want to buy the Cranston Street Armory to set up one. And the annual Latin American Film Festival in Providence has been gaining an increasingly impressive reputation nationally and internationally. So it's not surprising that the Providence Film Commission has been talking about starting a Providence Film Festival, a suggestion that causes eager grins to spread over at the Rhode Island Film Commission.
With all that urgency and local buzz about the prospect of a Cannes-on-the-Seekonk, small wonder that some folks are jumping the gun. One component of Convergence X will be a Convergence Film Festival. Nothing too ambitious. Thirty-three films, mostly shorts, by 27 filmmakers from the neighborhood. Just enough to whet the cultural appetite for more. They will be screened at AS220 June 17-22, Tuesday to Sunday. The selections range from five-minute experimental videos to the 1990 feature film Complex World, from short animations by award-winners Steve Gentile and Amy Kravitz to a 188-minute documentary by a Rhode Island College film studies undergrad.

Convergence X

"Some of these films have cost $10 to make, some have cost $1 million to make. There's everything under the sun. For two bucks," says Rich Lupo.
Better known for running Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel, the music night spot he first opened in 1975, Lupo is also a member of the Providence Film Commission sub-committee that is organizing and promote the film and video fest.
"For a couple of weeks we were struggling to fill what we thought would be a five-day festival, and then it very quickly turned, as soon as we opened the flood gates," says Laura Mullen, sitting next to him at a Federal Hill coffeehouse. She's also been helping to make selections for the mini-festival. A '96 Brown University grad who studied film there, she was looking for ways to keep contributing to the local film scene. One of her former professors, Roger Mayer, suggested that she drop in on a meeting of the city film commission, which he sat on, and she has been volunteering ever since.
The sub-committee is diversely represented, says Lupo. "It's a pretty good group -- it combines academics, business and just people who love film. It's a pretty cool thing." Local actors Rob Hoffman and Barbara Blossom are also onboard.
The sub-committee as a whole curated the festival, drawing from film makers they were familiar with. Some proposed films were not invited in but, "not because of content," Lupo stresses. "If some film is like seven minutes and it's not the greatest, OK. But we couldn't allow some 40-minute film that was just so boring that no one could sit through it."
Most of the programs are screening several filmmakers work, with total running times adding up to a little more than three hours, at the longest. One exception is Friday's showing of Christian De Rezendes's Branches, a three-hour documentary about the North Smithfield Class of 1993.
Lupo says he is looking forward to Thursday evening's "Local Sightings Festival of the Bizarre and the Insane," by various filmmakers and compiled by David Klieler. Perhaps the most nostalgic local entry is Jim Wolpaw's Complex World, the feature filmed at Lupo's and which Rich Lupo raised most of the money for.
"Just for fun we'll also be showing his Bo Diddley documentary [Cobra Snake for a Necktie]," Lupo says. "As far as what he's doing now, he's going to show an excerpt of a work in progress. It's a documentary concerning the life and work of Emily Dickinson that he and Steve Gentile are working on." Laura also has some endorsements. "I think that Saturday night's program is pretty explosive. Emergency Broadcast Network are always good -- they do some experimental video work. There's some work by X-PREZ, which is a collaborative video group -- one of the guys in that is an adjunct professor at Brown, of video arts. That stuff is really good," she says and goes on to cite other favorites.
Another special inclusion will be four short films by Marjorie Keller, the professor of filmmaking at the University of Rhode Island who died in 1994. The chairperson of the festival sub-committee, Carolyn Testa, suggested them as experimental films that have gotten greater recognition elsewhere than locally. Several of Keller's films opened a 1993 forum on independent and avant-garde films at the Museum of Modern Art. But with all the talk of experimental and avant-garde, Lupo is concerned we might get the idea that the evenings won't be fun. "I don't want people to go to this thinking it's a scholastic exercise. It's films. They'll get over around 10 or 11 o'clock, and then anyone that wants to hang around and talk about the filmmaking process is certainly welcome to," he says. "I don't want to scare anyone away from this."
Soon, though, he thinks about the work he's seen screened and gets optimistic again. "It'll be an unbelievable accomplishment to have a suburban couple from Attleboro see some student work," he foresees with a glint in his eye.

Convergence X