The morning after the Sonoma International Film Festival passed out its awards, the venues were still being cleaned up and the Backlot Tent was a distant memory, but attendees of the 18th annual festival had the celluloid dreams of 104 films – check that, 103 – playing on their retinas.
“It’s like I woke up from a dream, with a hoarse voice!” said festival director Kevin McNeely on Monday morning. “But it was a big success on a variety of different levels – attendance was up, we could tell by the ballot numbers – and the parties were better attended!”
McNeely said that more than 700 people may have shown up for the Saturday night Backlot event – the Vamos al Cine party.
The expansive Backlot Tent, scene of nightly revelry on a variety of themes, went up on Wednesday morning and was gone before midnight on Sunday.
“I know sometimes the residents feel like the circus has come to town, but I think Sonomans really got into Sonomawood this year,” he said. “The shopkeepers, the restaurants, the lodgings – more people think it’s a good thing. And our filmmakers do, too.”
While most of the movies sold well, the inability of the festival to screen the eagerly-awaited “The Search” put a damper on the finale. The film came in a DCP hard drive – a “digital cinema package” – as many films are now distributed for projecting. But the key-code to unlock it did not arrive with the film on Saturday, and frantic efforts to track it down over the weekend proved futile.
So the finale was instead a reprise of “The Connection,” one of the festival’s most popular films, though not an award-winner. The French thriller, based on the same drug smuggling operation that drove the celebrated 1971 classic “The French Connection,” starred Academy Award-winner Jean Dujardin (“The Artist”).
At least one movie with star power pulled in an award: “Sold,” a film about teenage prostitution in Nepal. Actor David Arquette was in town for the Friday evening showing at the Sebastiani Theatre, graciously chatting with whomever recognized him at the Ledson Hotel. Director Jeffrey Brown, from nearby Marin, also showed up for the festival.
“Sold” won the coveted Best World Cinema Award, voted by the audiences at the first two screenings – it screened an unscheduled third time on Sunday night at the Vintage House, while the awards were being issued at the Sonoma Community Center. Each audience-award-winning film received a $1,000 cash prize, but invaluable prestige comes with the six juried awards, three for features and three more for shorts.
One major prize, the juried Best American Indie award, went to “The Young Kieslowski,” a film about two young misfits who have twins. Producer Seth Caplan was ebullient even before the film screened, since the movie had just been picked up by a distributor for wide release later this summer.
Caplan’s earlier films include “Flatland” and “Sphereland,” both popular selections in earlier SIFFs. “The Young Kieslowski” has already scored big this year, he told the Index-Tribune at a filmmaker mixer at Hopmonk on Friday, winning audience awards at film festivals in Mill Valley, Los Angeles and Bend, Oregon.
Best World Feature came from first-time director Afia Nathaniel. “Dukhtar” follows a 10-year-old girl fleeing with her mother from an arranged marriage; both are pursued by tribal chieftains through the mountainous landscape of Pakistan. At the festival’s opening night party, producer Shirhari Aathe, was enthusiastic about Sonoma’s film culture, but puzzled by the unseasonably warm weather. “I read that California only has a year of water left? Is that possible?”
Another international film that won big was “Far From Home” from the director/producer duo of Phil Hessler and Galen Knowles. Only Knowles was in town for the showing, since the film was also screening at festivals in Phoenix and Cleveland. That didn’t stop the feel-good documentary – about Africa’s first snowboard Olympian, Uganda’s Brolin Mawejjé – from being selected the juried Best Documentary Film pick in Sonoma.
Two other audience awards for features were issued, with the Stolman Audience Award for best American Independent Feature going to “The Week.” Co-directed by John W. Mann and Jon Gunn, the “personal vision quest” follows a washed-up TV host (Rick Gomez) who spends his 10th wedding anniversary in the Sonoma wine country by himself – his wife having left him the day before the long-planned vacation began. Sort of like “Sideways,” but solo.
The final audience award, for best documentary, went to “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret,” from Kip Andersen and Keehan Kuhn. It blows the lid off the false choice of range-fed or grass-fed beef, pointing out that the real problem is over-reliance on big bovines for our protein, and the devastating environmental impact of animal agriculture.
Short films are a popular way for budding filmmakers to hone their craft, but some feature filmmakers have also turned to shorts for the easier acceptance to festivals. So told us director Leo Claussen of the short “Lethe,” who admitted, “It’s a money thing. It’s easier to interest people in shorter films.” His short about the targeted erasure of memory unfortunately did not win an award.
The three short-film winners – all juried awards – were “God’s Got His Head in the Clouds,” directed by Gianluca Sodaro – who came all the way from Sicily to attend the SIFF – as best narrative short, concerning an elderly priest’s conversation with an angelic young girl; “Fish Out of Water,” about Italian designer Paola Navone, directed by Cindy Allen as best documentary short; and best animated short went to “Wire Cutters,” directed by Jack Anderson, where a chance encounter proves fateful for two robots mining on a desolate planet. Shades of “Wall-E.”
Another A-list movie was ineligible for an award, the opening night selection “A Little Chaos” with Kate Winslet, directed by Alan Rickman. While neither was able to attend the festival in the flesh, the film was extremely well received by the Sebastiani audience and hailed as an impressive directorial debut for Rickman, star of the locally-filmed “Bottle Shock.”
After the festival, McNeely said, “I think we are getting a higher quality films in – surprisingly, many are coming from outside the U.S., from Europe and Latin America and even Iran.” He said they had between 600 and 700 submissions this year, with only a handful over a hundred making the cut.
About that lost opportunity to screen “The Search”: McNeely was still scrambling to get the key-code, and approval for a special screening for the many volunteers who helped pull together the 18th annual Sonoma International Film Festival. It would be a fitting reward for a job well done.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: