Also this issue:

Truth Hurts
Steve James talks about turning the camera on himself.
-Sam Adams

Tomorrow Today
Justin Lin on Better Luck Tomorrow’s stereotype subversion.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

April 24-30, 2003

movies

Boom Time

A banner year for the Philadelphia Film Festival.

by Sam Adams

They’re not as slick about it as Dick Cheney’s Bechtel pals, but Artistic Director Ray Murray admits the Philadelphia Film Festival might have done some inadvertent war profiteering of its own. While the war in/on Iraq took its toll on stateside cinemagoing, the effect had clearly waned by the time the PFF kicked off on April 3.

"The timing was good," Murray admits. "It's kind of shallow or selfish thinking, but when [the war] started two weeks before us, we thought, good -- people'll get tired of it and flock back to the cinema."

Flock they did, as the numbers released on Friday clearly show. Total attendance this year is a shade over 57,500, up more than 12,000 from last year, and a 200-percent increase from 2000's catastrophic low.

Not surprisingly, war-themed films drew poorly across the board with the exception of Bahman Ghobadi's Marooned in Iraq, which sold out twice. Confessional documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey was the fest's hottest ticket, selling out three screenings and drawing over 800 viewers. Also in the fest's 800-plus club were opening night's Confidence, the papally admonished Magdalene Sisters and Festival of Independents opener Invisible Mountains. Despite a change in programmers, documentaries continued to dominate the audience ratings (six of the top 10), while the new Italian Cinema Today section proved a surprising draw as well.

Always a strong seller, the festival's Danger After Dark segment came into its own, boasting two double-sellouts (Dark Water and 2LDK) and nabbing two of the fest's top prizes: Best Feature Film for Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Best Director for 2LDK. Fancy Dancing took Best First Film, while Steve James' Stevie (which opens theatrically this week -- see interview on p. 30) nabbed Best Documentary. Audience faves were the singing, dancing Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, My Architect and short subject The Freak. FestIndies trophies went to Mark Moskowitz's Stone Reader (also opening this week), Nathalie Applewhite's Picture Me an Enemy, Sean McBride's Dreamscapes, Mary Sweeney's Phototropism and Nathan Caswell and Jeremiah Zagar's The Unbelievable Truth.

Low points, by Murray's accounts: the botched screening of Neil Jordan's The Good Thief (local entry R.T. Herwig's The Good Thief unspooled instead, to a sold-out but none-too-happy house) and the experimental "Beyond the Frame" section, which was both modestly attended and low-rated. (It won't return next year.) Organizational snafus were minor but cumulative; on the fest's second Saturday, consecutive Q&As had to be awkwardly moved into the hallway when egregiously late start times left no room between screenings. And after he'd spent several days entertaining audiences with his presence, it was a shame that Phantasmagoria Award recipient Alex de la Iglesia finally took the stage after midnight on a Sunday, ensuring that most of the audience filed out before hearing him describe his films as "an absurd paella." (The fact that the Q&A followed the dreadful 800 Bullets didn't help.)

Murray says the fest hopes to engage an operations director next year to help streamline ticketing and crowd control, but those are his only major complaints. For everyone who went (and wasn't, say, stuck backstage at the FestIndies awards ceremony), last Tuesday's outdoor screening on Broad Street was the fest's highlight; 24 hours later at the closing-night party, employees were still giddy over its success (or maybe it was those delicious mini-martinis). But it's the little things that seem to please Murray most. "When we sold out a Tuesday matinee, you knew something was different," he says.