Film festival gets off to a bizarre and insane start
New England premieres and works by regional filmmakers dominate the sixth annual Boston Underground Film Festival, which opens Thursday at 7:45 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre with an eclectic program of shorts titled "Festival of the Bizarre and the Insane: Introduction to the Boston Underground Film Festival."
These shorts from local filmmakers include David Hudacek's "Diary of an Ordinary Man," Alice Stone's "Dog Eat Dog," and Andrew Kennedy's "Oak Dresser." David Fickas's "Deliverance: The Musical," which played at the Slamdance Film Festival, will also make its New England premiere.
Screening at 9:45 p.m. is "Jim Jarmusch's Favorite Shorts," curated by the director of "Stranger Than Paradise." Short films in this program include rarely seen works such as "They Caught the Fury," by Carl Dreyer, from 1948, and "Towers Open Fire," directed by William S. Burroughs and Brian Gyson. Also included is a rarely seen short directed by Jarmusch, "Int. Trailer. Night.," from 2002.
BUFF runs from Thursday to May 10 at various locations throughout Boston and Cambridge. Among the special events will be an appearance by George Romero, director of the horror classic "Night of the Living Dead."
For more information, visit www.bostonundergroundfilm
festival.com.WATCH THEM WORK: Anyone who has ever wanted to visit a filmmaker's studio and view aspects of the film/video production process will have an opportunity today. It's the last day for Filmmakers Open Studios, now in its fifth year, with venues in Newton, Watertown, and Waltham open to the public free of charge from 1 to 5 p.m. Among the participants are Pulse Media, Documentary Education Resources, Women in Film and Video, Handcranked Films, and Moody Street Pictures.
Many of the filmmakers affiliated with these companies will be on hand to meet visitors, talk about projects, and screen new work. (Also tonight, the Handcranked Film Collaborative of Waltham is featured in a segment of "Art Close-Up" on WGBH. It will air at about 10:45 p.m.)
New this year is the Filmmakers Information Night, May 12 from 5 to 10 p.m. at Northeastern University. Aspiring and established filmmakers can attend panels and workshops on all aspects of the business. Among the guest panelists are Kelly DeVine of the Independent Film Channel; Lyda Kuth of the LEF Moving Image Fund; Peter White, a film and television editor; and Louise Rosen, a producer's agent. Admission is $10.
For a full schedule of events, go to www.filmmakerscollab.org.
NEW WAVE MASTER: A touring series on one of the most prominent voices of Czech cinema of the 1960s comes to the Museum of Fine Arts May 8 to 23. "Pavel Juracek: Czech New Wave Master Rediscovered" presents the two films that Juracek directed: his feature debut, "Every Young Man" (1965), starring his friend Vaclav Havel, and "A Case for a Rookie Hangman" (1969).
Juracek also wrote the screenplays for films seminal to the Czech new wave, such as the 1963 short film "Joseph Kilian," a Kafkaesque vision of Stalinist bureaucracy. Juracek, who died in 1989, was head of the creative group Juracek-Kucera at Barrandov Film Studios from 1968-70 but eventually was forced to leave Czechoslovakia after the Russian invasion and subsequent communist purges.
For more information, call 617-369-3907 or visit www.mfa
.org/film.ART ON FILM: One of the world's great modern sculptors and artists, the late Isamu Noguchi, is the focus of two documentaries that will screen free at the MFA on Wednesday at 4 p.m. Charlotte Zwerin's 1995 documentary "Isamu Noguchi: The Sculpture of Spaces" explores the sculptor's life and art; "Isamu Noguchi: Stones & Paper," by Hiro Narita (1997), looks at the artist's cultural background and his connection to both Japan and the United States. A lecture on his work by Louise Cort, specialist on Japanese ceramics, and Bruce Altshuler, former director of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, follows the screenings.
SCREENS AROUND TOWN: "A Time to Dance: The Life and Work of Norma Canner" traces Cambridge resident Canner's career from Broadway in the 1930s to her groundbreaking work as a dance therapist. Now in her 80s, Canner, who is still dancing, and filmmaker Ian Brownell will be present for a post-screening discussion. This is the final documentary in the free film series curated by the Boston Jewish Film Festival for the Jewish Women's Archive. It screens Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Boston Public Library, Rabb Auditorium.
Producer Ted Hope, whose company This Is That released "21 Grams," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and the upcoming "Door in the Floor," appears today at noon at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway in Davis Square, Somerville, in a conversation with Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston.
Loren King can be reached at loren.king@comcast.net.
