Behind the screen

A talk with Maud Chilton

As the Newport International Film Festival heads into its third year, co-founders Christine Schomer and Nancy Donahoe along with programming director Maud Chilton are spilling over with enthusiasm about the slate of films they have chosen for the six-day event. The 75 screenings will include 10 feature films, 10 documentaries and 25 shorts in a juried competition; three jazz documentaries, with a tip of the hat to Newport's long-standing JVC Jazz Festival; an open-air showing of Young Frankenstein at the International Tennis Hall of Fame; "special screenings" of five films not in the competition; a salute to the first presidential election in the new millennium with four campaign films; and two specials selected for opening and closing nights -- a Canadian film, The Five Senses, directed by Jeremy Podeswa, to cap the festival and Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labours Lost to kick it off.

"For opening night I try to choose something festive with beautiful production values and something that is accessible to everyone," Chilton stressed, in a phone conversation from her New York apartment last week. "This one's Shakespeare, it's Kenneth Branagh and Nathan Lane, it's a musical and Branagh uses Cole Porter's famous songs, the standards. It's very bright and upbeat."

Yale graduate Chilton worked as a production assistant and a line producer on several films (including one with Molly Ringwald, who will appear in the world premiere of Michael Rauch's In the Weeds in Newport's feature competition) before producing documentaries and short films of her own. Two of her documentaries went to the Sundance Film Festival, but she stopped producing when she had her first daughter two-and-a-half years ago and became the programming director for the Newport film fest (she now has a second daughter, six months old).

Chilton remarked that making the choices of films for the festival was harder than ever this year because of the volume of submissions-more than 400 films. In addition, she and five other people attended at least six film festivals worldwide (Toronto, Berlin, Sundance, Los Angeles, Palm Springs and JenART in New York City) to see films that might not have been submitted. Chilton also uses a committee of 10 people to watch the ones in the submission pool.

"Of all the films that we see," Chilton explained, "I try to get three people to see each one to get a consensus, so that no film will be rejected just by one person's opinion. Then we take the list of the good ones and try to balance the program. We want a mix of American and foreign, a mix of film-making styles. For example, we got quite a few shot on digital and then transferred to film. It's so much less expensive, I think that it's an important development, but I only wanted to pick one or two in that vein."

"Also, I wanted to get as many countries represented as possible," she continued. "There are so many films out there that are a young boy coming of age, seeing his culture through his eyes. I just picked one of those, Butterfly, from Spain, for a special screening, and there's another one, quite different, George Washington, in the juried competition."

She was also thrilled to have the rare opportunity to select two films that are in Portuguese, which she hopes will be of particular interest to many Rhode Island Portuguese-speaking residents. Both films are from Brazil: a feature, Oriundi, starring Anthony Quinn speaking only Portuguese and Italian, in a performance Variety has hailed as "career-capping"; and a documentary, The Charcoal People, about the terrible conditions faced by itinerant laborers who are sent in to pull down the trees in the rainforest.

"Because of the growing credibility of our festival, I had much more to choose from this year," Chilton noted. "That did also make it harder to choose. If there are six billion people on the planet, at least two billion want to make movies. There are so many personal views, so many stories they want to tell."

Chilton swung into cascading descriptions of many of the feature films, each one seeming even more interesting than its predecessor. There will be a world premiere of North Beach, about a twenty-something San Francisco dude who cheats on his girlfriend and expends a lot of energy trying to win her back; the North American premiere of Witchcraft, a moral tale of a priest sent to a small town in Iceland to replace a priest who has died and ends up inheriting his widow and children; a B-movie sci-fi spoof with Campbell Scott out of Canada called Top of the Food Chain; a Norwegian film, The Prompter, about a woman who does prompting at the opera, in this case for Aida; a Montana setting for a young man coming to terms with his family life and trying to save the farm in What Happened to Tully?

Chilton was particularly taken with a U.S. entry in the feature competition called Stanley's Gig, in which William Sanderson plays a down-and-out ukelele player who works as a recreation director in a home for the elderly, where he tries to draw out a former jazz singer (Marla Gibbs), urged on by Faye Dunaway as his mentor.

On the documentary front, Chilton wanted to mention the North American premiere of an Argentinian film about the 1976 military regime, when children were abducted and people were "disappeared." Spoils of War includes interviews with adults who were among those children. She also found fascinating an American film called Smoke and Mirrors, a look at the history of the tobacco industry and the way in which advertising took over the promotion of smoking as "the thing to do."

One of the most intriguing documentaries will be the U.S. premiere of Arlene Donnelly's Naked States, an examination of the photographer Spencer Tunick and his subjects, naked people, whom he locates and places in many different locations for photos -- 100 people in Times Square; only one in Fargo, North Dakota; 1000 at a Phish concert. Tunick will invite people to show up for a dawn picture in Newport, hoping for 50 to 100 nude people, and the Friday morning (June 9) photo will be shown at the second screening of the film on Friday evening.

"It's all about who he can convince to do it," Chilton remarked. "It's offbeat, quite provocative."

And in the short film category, the local entry is from Jamestowners Kae and Stephen Geller. Filmed in Jamestown, Narragansett, Kingston and Providence, Cuppa Cabby, Piece o' Pie is directed by Tom Danon. Stephen Geller is an award-winning screenplay writer, with 1972's Slaughterhouse-Five to his credit.

Does Chilton see any trends in the hundreds of films she watched this past year?

"Just how many more people are involved in filmmaking," she replied. "The variety of personal stories that are going to get made is so rich."

With film festivals popping up like mushrooms after a good rain (there are currently 350 in the United States alone, with more than half that number appearing in the last decade), it's comforting to know that Little Rhody is right up there, with a half dozen of its own. And for sheer volume, star power and range of films, the Newport International Film Festival is a good one to catch.

-- Johnette Rodriguez

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