Friday, May 7th
1 PM – Panel: WHY MAKE A SHORT?
Coffee and Refreshments provided by Tapas Teatro
Moderator: Gabe Wardell is the
host of Cinema Sundays at The Charles. He is also a film programmer
for the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring,
MD. He is an advisory board member for the Maryland Film Festival,
Utah’a Slamdance Film Festival, and Alabama’s Sidewalk
Moving Picture Festival. In the past, he has worked as a Programming
Consultant for the Maryland Film Festival, the Festival Coordinator
for the Atlanta Film Festival, and the Festival Producer for AFI
& Discovery Channel’s documentary film festival, Silverdocs.
Panelists:
Baltimore filmmaker Eric Dyer uses digital and
alternative processes to turn cinema inside-out and upside-down.
His films and videos have translated music into motion pictures,
converted space into time, and revealed the motion hidden in stillness.
His award-winning works have screened at numerous festivals at
home and abroad, including the Black Maria Film Festival, the
Ann Arbor Film Festival, MicroCineFest, and Sundance. His commercial
projects have aired on MTV, PBS Kids, and the Discovery Channel.
Collaborations with other artists have produced works which have
shown at Transmediale, P.S. 1, and the Whitney. He is currently
finishing his MFA at the Mount Royal School of Art and begins
teaching animation at UMBC in the fall. A trilogy of his latest
work is screening in this festival.
Morocco Omari is the writer, producer and star
of the short film The Male Groupie, and also appears in Andre
Royo's Big Scene – both films screening in this festival.
Television credits include recurring characters on Joan of Arcadia,
Dragnet, and Girlfriends., plus Frazier, the District, Crossing
Jordan, Judging Amy, 24, and Angel. Other film credits include
Hope, A Song For Jade, Momentum, and Shakedown.
Kelly Williams has produced numerous award-winning
short films, including Perils in Nude Modeling and Occam’s
Razor: The Great Dialogues of Mindy. He also produced the feature
length documentary Cadence. Recently, he wrote and directed the
short film Richard (showing in this festival). He is a graduate
of the film program at the University of Texas at Austin, and
currently, he is the Film Program Director at the Austin Film
Festival.
Rebecca Yenawine is the founder and Director
of Kids on the Hill, a community-based organization devoted to
building and supporting relationships with youth and families.
The program creatively engages young people in artistic and educational
experiences that enable them to explore their potential while
confronting and diminishing barriers of race, class, gender and
age. She oversees middle school young people and has created many
public art projects with neighborhood young people. Some projects
include self-portrait paintings on the boarded windows and doors
of abandoned buildings, a neighborhood sculpture garden that addresses
issues of power and class, and numerous video projects that talk
about difference. Her background is in painting and writing.
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Saturday, May 8th
10 AM – Panel: MOVING FROM FESTIVALS
INTO THE MARKETPLACE
Coffee and Refreshments provided by Tapas Teatro
Moderator: Steve Yeager is well known for his
two documentaries examining the career of filmmaker John Waters:
Divine Trash, which won the Filmmaker’s Trophy at the 1999
Sundance Film Festival; and In Bad Taste, which premiered on the
Independent Film Channel. His other features include On The Block
(1991), starring the late Howard Rollins, and The Connection (2001)
which premiered at the Maryland Film Festival. He has directed
many reenactment segments for Fox Television’s America’s
Most Wanted, and co-authored the Divine biography, My Son Divine.
Udy Epstein co-founded Seventh Art Releasing,
which is noted for its releases of award-winning documentaries
such as The Farm and American Pimp. Seventh Art’s Word Wars
screens in this festival.
Stephen Israel executive produced the cult hit
Swimming With Sharks starring Kevin Spacey, and produced two features
showing in this festival: Dan Mirvish’s Open House and Kevin
DiNovis’ Death & Texas. He has worked for American Cybercast,
Turner Broadcasting, Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures, and
Warner Bros.
Dan Mirvish is perhaps best known for co-founding
the Slamdance Film Festival. His first feature, Omaha (the movie),
was screened at over 30 film festivals (including the Maryland
Film Festival), and was successfully self-distributed before being
shown on cable television and released on DVD. He has also written
feature material for Twentieth Century Fox, NuImage, Phoenician
Films and Primary Pictures, and was a Washington-based speechwriter
for U.S. Senator Tom Harkin as well as a freelance journalist
for such publications as The Washington Monthly and The New York
Times. His latest feature, Open House, screens in this festival.
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3:30 PM – 4:30 PM BOOK SIGNING
Join Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
for a book signing celebrating his latest book, Essential
Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, which has just been
released by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Sunday, May 9th
1 PM – THE ART OF THE DOC
Coffee and Refreshments provided by Tapas Teatro
Moderator: Steve Yeager is well known for his
two documentaries examining the career of filmmaker John Waters:
Divine Trash, which won the Filmmaker’s Trophy at the 1999
Sundance Film Festival; and In Bad Taste, which premiered on the
Independent Film Channel. His other features include On The Block
(1991), starring the late Howard Rollins, and The Connection (2001)
which premiered at the Maryland Film Festival. He has directed
many reenactment segments for Fox Television’s America’s
Most Wanted, and co-authored the Divine biography, My Son Divine.
Allen Moore graduated from Harvard University
in the Visual Arts Program, where his senior thesis film, Humus,
was graded Summa Cum Laude. He has since made several long and
short documentaries including The Shepherds of Berneray, Food
on Hand, Black Water, A Sheepherder’s Homecoming, and The
Pursuit of Truth: 200 Years at Middlebury College, picking up
many awards along the way. He also served as director of photography
for several of Ken Burns’ historical films, including The
Civil War, Thomas Jefferson, and Baseball. He has received two
Primetime Emmy Award nominations for cinematography – one
for Ken Burns’ Baseball and one for Ric Burns’ American
Experience series New York. He co-directed Albert Alcalay: Self
Portraits, which is showing in this festival.
From 1990 to 1996, Peter Neff was film critic
for the NPR affiliate WPLN in Nashville, Tennessee, his home since
1979. In 1996, he wrote and directed his first short film, Bartender's
Soliloquy which screened at a number of festivals including The
Sinking Creek Film Festival, The Telluride Independent Film Festival
and at the 5th Video Tusculum Festival where it won a cash award.
He has completed three short films since then, Dear Mr. Goodlife,
The Scar, and Me and My Old Voice: Billie Holiday in Her Own Words,
the latter is included in this year’s festival.
Paul Santomenna is the founder of Megaphone
Project, a nonprofit production company that amplifies voices
for social and economic justice in Baltimore. He directed Sharp-Leadenhall:
A Promise to Keep, a short doc included in this year's festival.
Rob Tranchin graduated Magna Cum Laude from
Harvard University and holds an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New
York University. He is currently a senior producer, writer and
director of documentaries and outreach specials for KERA. Most
recently he wrote, produced, and directed Roy Bedichek’s
Vanishing Frontier that aired nationally on PBS in April 2003.
Other national PBS productions include Wildcatter (for “The
American Experience”), Who Cares about Kids? (with Maya
Angelou), For a Deaf Son, and Peacemaker. In 1999 Tranchin won
a national Emmy Award as writer and co-producer of the four part
series The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) and in 2000 he was nominated
for another national Emmy for Matisse & Picasso. He co-directed
Albert Alcalay: Self Portraits, which is showing in this festival.
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3 - 6 PM – Born Into Brothels Art
Sale and Exhibition
Photographs created by the children of the Calcutta Brothels under
the guidance of photojournalist Zana Briski.
