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THE REEL DEAL
Who needs Hollywood ? Who needs New York ? Charlottesville ’s filmmaking scene is busting out.
By Paul Henderson
feature@c-ville.com

In American Motel, a short film by local writer and director Alexandria Searls, a man uses a piece of string to illustrate for a young woman the various connections, or "lines," in life. Gently, he wraps the string around her neck, her feet, a lamp on the wall, etc. Then he tugs. "Pull on one line," he says, "and we have confirmation of another."

That’s not unlike Charlottesville ’s burgeoning filmmaking scene. An ever-growing group of artists is using the City’s available resources, increasingly affordable technology and each other to make diverse, interesting films at an unprecedented rate. Local filmmakers are shooting features, avant-garde shorts, computer-animated films and documentaries on topics ranging from the Presidential inauguration to neighborhoods in town. While most of these filmmakers are true independents, the connections between them have established a kind of filmmaking community. Pull on one of these artists, and you have confirmation of another. And another, and another, and another.

The most obvious (and, as it happens, most timely) of the factors leading to this state of affairs is the Virginia Film Festival, specifically the efforts of its director, Richard Herskowitz. Through the programs the festival offers, the people it brings to town and the tantalizing goal it provides—i.e., exhibition to a wider audience—the festival is the backbone of the City’s filmmaking infrastructure. Searls, for instance, an experimental filmmaker, considers the Virginia Film Festival’s contribution to her work invaluable.

"The Virginia Film Festival is a huge resource, because once a year some of the top people in experimental filmmaking come," she says. "So meeting the top people in these genres through the festival, it really opens you up. I mean, I’ve gotten incredible connections there."

One of Searls’ most recent films, Buy Nothing Day, was accepted in the festival this year, and will show October 25. Getting into the festival has inspired her to work on other projects, she says.

It’s those sorts of sentiments that give Herskowitz great satisfaction. "I guess the thing I take pride in the most is that this program is really a model outreach program," he says, calling the festival the UVA program people feel "most fond of" in the community.

Since its inception in the early 1980s, the annual weekend-long October festival has always posited itself as a partnership between the University and the community. All the better to, as Herskowitz puts it, "promote Virginia as a filmmaking destination." And under Herskowitz, who took over in 1994 after 12 years as the director of the Ithaca, New York-based Cornell Cinema film society, the festival has increasingly been presented as a City, rather than a University, event.

To that end, in 1996 the festival’s "center of gravity" shifted to Downtown, with local movie houses like Vinegar Hill Theatre and Regal Cinema becoming involved in festival screenings and presentations. Herskowitz calls the recent move of film festival headquarters to W. Main Street from the University campus symbolic of the urban evolution.

In the mid-’90s, Herskowitz founded the Virginia Film Festival Film Society, a screening program conducted under festival auspices. The film society presents cinema that would not make its way to town otherwise (like the recent series devoted to famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s collaboration with his favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune), as well as question-and-answer sessions and presentations by directors and writers.

According to longtime Vinegar Hill manager Reid Oechslin, a filmmaker himself, the society contributes to local film literacy and provides another networking opportunity for movie buffs/makers outside of the festival itself.

Through society events, "you accumulate some sort of context—what movies are, what they can do, what the language is," he says. Society members attend events and "see other people beginning to know [the language], and talk with them."

Herskowitz and the festival’s connections to the City also extend to Light House, a Downtown-based nonprofit media education center for teenagers, and another key ingredient in the City’s growing filmmaking infrastructure. The board, on which Herskowitz sits, includes local filmmakers, who invite other local lensmen to act as mentors and instructors to Charlottesville ’s youth.

Paul Wagner, an Academy Award-winning director and a Light House founder and board member, says the organization takes up where the festival leaves off, keeping those in the business in a sort of loop, however informal.

"Richard and the festival, and the screening programs Richard does, are the focus, sort of, on the west side of town," he says. "So like with a lot of things in Charlottesville , there is sort of that center of activity, and then Downtown. And if you’re just looking at Downtown, I do think Light House is a center to it. It’s sort of ironic, because it’s not for adult filmmakers, it’s for kids."

Light House’s mission emphasizes the responsibility of filmmakers to the larger community. In the words of Wagner, the program is "not just about helping young people become good filmmakers, but trying to play a role in the community and showing those filmmakers how the use of film and video can be a community-based project."

Similarly, Johnny St. Ours’ "guerrilla filmmaking" efforts also seek to intertwine film with ideas of community. Participants in his guerilla film boot camp are given a general topic, then two weeks to make a film. At the end of the session, the films are screened and the group gives feedback.

St. Ours is trying to democratize film, to bring the medium to the masses as a way of expressing the voice of "the folk." According to him, "film has become the vernacular of basic, modern communication."

St. Ours believes we’ve all seen too many of the wrong sorts of movies.

"I remember watching a fight when I was in junior high school, the kids made punching sounds when they swung at each other. George Lucas lives in their souls," he says. "There are some problems I have with that. George Lucas and his Hollywood pals don’t walk the streets, they’ve never heard a word out of those junior high school kids’ mouths, they can’t possibly represent us as the storytellers of our culture. We have to represent ourselves. Film needs to be in the hands of the people because it seems to be the only thing that the people listen to."

Others in town have worked to reinforce the ties between artists and the community, and, if you will, create a latter of the former. To that end, five years ago Searls founded the Vinegar Hill Film Festival, designed to showcase the work of local artists.

Searls had just finished work on American Motel, a film inspired by the Mount Vernon Hotel on Route 29, which was recently demolished. Searls describes the film as "the portrait of a young woman who feels trapped and wants to escape both her home and town. The motel represents American society as a whole—transient, presenting opportunities for shallow and immediate intimacies." It was a project in which she’d enlisted the help and advice of many of the area’s filmmakers, including Oechslin and Wagner.

"Basically, as a way to thank the community, I knew that a lot of us were finishing up our films, short films in particular, so I decided to organize their showing over at Vinegar Hill," she says. "At that point I didn’t make a call for submissions, I just chose the people I knew who were working in film." Since then, Searls has expanded the format, opening the festival up and making it a state-wide competition. Through the festival, she’s expanded the scope of her own activities, and encouraged other local artists to try their hand at film.

"By running the festival, I’ve ended up being a producer more than I thought," she says. "Some years when I didn’t have exactly what I was looking for, I would approach someone and say, ‘Hey, it’s easy to make a film, why don’t you make one?’"

Pull on the string of Wagner, St. Ours, Oechslin, Searls, etc., and numerous other local filmmakers pull back. There’s Mark Edwards and Mary Michaud, for instance, a couple living in Belmont who made a film, Still Life With Donuts, about their neighborhood and the people in it. The film was shown at last year’s Vinegar Hill Film Festival, has aired at a benefit for the Virginia Historical Society and will premiere on Charlottesville/Richmond public television November 25 at 9pm .

After moving to Charlottesville from San Francisco , they were surprised at the diversity of the local population. "We were used to seeing a lot of people on the street" back in San Francisco , Michaud says. "You got to know these characters, and they become a part of your life." In Belmont , they found "there were so many characters and really funny goings-on."

They began the film in 1999, finishing last year. The effort, both say, brought them closer to the neighbors and, in the words of Edwards, taught them to have "a lot greater respect for people in general.

"I see these people and they open up and they tell us these wonderful things. It’s incredible," he says. Edwards was particularly amazed to learn that each person had a real philosophy that they based their life on, or "rules to live by." And despite their different backgrounds, "they have this overlapping belief and love of the neighborhood."

Or there is Kent Ayyildiz, a film school-educated documentary filmmaker. Ayyildiz, originally from Roanoke , has a masters of fine arts from Columbia College in Chicago . He came back to Charlottesville after school with his wife and son in 1997.

A Turkish American (his name means "moon star," and MoonStar Films is the name of his production company), Ayyildiz got interested in filmmaking while studying Turkish history at Bogazici University, a prestigious school on the Bosphorous in Istanbul.

"I was corresponding with friends, and many of them were very ignorant of what the Turkish experience was about," he says. "Kidding, they would joke—am I riding camels, and stuff—but to some degree that was their notion of what Istanbul was about."

To Ayyildiz, "that ignorance was so profound that I felt like my calling was to educate through film. Because I felt that visually I could tell the story historically of the city, and of any subject, better than going the traditional academic route and teaching from the pulpit."

As it turns out, the film about Istanbul didn’t get made. But others did. One of these was 1999’s Homedaddy, about Ayyildiz’s experiences as a stay-at-home dad. Ayyildiz, in the course of making the film, met other people in the community, and discovered—and explored in the piece—a national movement for stay-at-home dads. There was also The Polyface Farm Video, shot in 2001, about one of the world’s leading organic livestock farms.

Ayyildiz draws his inspiration from personal experiences, which he then expounds on to explore larger themes. "I have always felt that personal stories are more interesting," he says. If he can show how "my experience as one individual reflects a societal issue, than that’s a good thing."

In line with that philosophy, Ayyildiz has two projects currently underway. One is an hour-long project called The Lawn, inspired by his own disgusted efforts at mowing his three-acre plot, or as he calls it, grass farming.

"I’m going to change my landscape over the next three to four years," he says. "I’ve already begun, and I’m filming the process, documenting how to change your lawn to be something other than a fossil-fuel based design. I want to have a sustainable, vibrant, indigenous [environment]…with a good deal being edible for me and wildlife."

Another film in the works is titled Spaces, which explores more "environmentally and economically progressive" building techniques and documents Ayyildiz’s attempt to build a studio from straw bales, using permaculture design methods.

From Ayyildiz, it’s but a short step to his friend Russell Richards, an artist and avant-garde filmmaker who has also shown at the Vinegar Hill Film Festival. Richards spent a year at the School of Visual Arts in New York and primarily works in print, but has started stepping up his filmmaking efforts.

Richards thus far has specialized in ironic, pointed short films with a neat little twist at the end. A classic example is A Tale of Two Siblings, a story of two Siamese twins linked in a most unfortunate place.

Though his pieces are generally only a few minutes long, Richards meticulously plans and executes each step.

"It took me four days to shoot the main footage for A Tale of Two Siblings, minus a few insert shots and music, but only because I had the shoot planned down to the last detail," he says. "I was in pre-production on the film for about two months, and I edited the film in a little over a week. I storyboarded the whole thing—it is usually the case that I have been thinking about a film for quite some time before ever setting out to do it, so that by the time I am ready to shoot I know exactly what I am going to film."

Richards is now working on a feature film, Lust of the Monster, "about a creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon type monster who follows a girl he is obsessed with to Hollywood where he inadvertently becomes a movie star."

Also working on a feature is Charlottesville resident Dave Stewart, who got much of his film education doing movies for Virginia Tech Television while at college. "Acting, directing—you name it, we did it," he says. "Really super micro-budget movies, shot on video."

Stewart recently completed a family film, Return of the Cheyenne Kid, a collaboration with local musician and filmmaker Mitch Toney, but is now working on something with a much harder edge, a thriller titled Confinement.

"The general plot is this guy, he’s got his regular life and everything like that and one day he wakes up and he’s dressed totally different and he’s in the middle of the woods and he comes to find out that he’s been kidnapped and put into this gaming zone where basically rich eccentric people come along and hunt him for sport," he explains. "The first scene is him just walking down the streets of Charlottesville going home, and then he wakes up and he’s in the woods and he doesn’t know what’s going on."

With local filmmaking comes local difficulties. Stewart’s production has been held up by the weather. "We were going to be shooting this inside-of-a-cave scene, and we were going to shoot that first, because that was the most difficult part of the shoot…and of course when we went out there to go do it, because of all the rain the cave was flooded."

Edwards, Michaud, Richards, Stewart, Ayyildiz, et al. are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s Jane Barnes, a successful author (her works include the novel I, Krupskaya, about Lenin’s wife) and filmmaker who is working with producer Cabell Smith on a documentary about the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Cabell. There’s Melissa Shore , working on a piece about the history of the African-American community in the Ivy Depot area. Or Fernando Catta-Preta, working in digital animation from his home on Hydraulic Road . And more every day.

Perhaps the most significant component to the upswing in filmmaking activity in the City is not unique to Charlottesville . The advent of digital video technology, and its relative affordability, has perhaps done more than anything else to open creative doors.

Searls teaches digital filmmaking at UVA, and both shoots and edits with digital equipment. "Pretty much I was a purist when I started this process," she says. "I thought I was never going to shoot on anything but film…I thought film was just so much better and I was not going to accept anything else. And I remember having a conversation with Richard Herskowitz, and he says, ‘No, you cannot be like that. You have to let in digital video.’ So I became a convert."

Adds Ayyildiz, "Because we live in the digital revolution we can do this thing easier than ever before. You’re talking to a person where today I can shoot, I can edit, I can direct, I can light, I can rig the sound… I have the capability to make a film on my own. At no other time in history has that been possible, and it’s getting easier and easier with the DV revolution."

For Michaud and Edwards, who squeezed their filmmaking in between full-time jobs, without digital video Still Life With Donuts wouldn’t have happened. "You could really be a one-man band, or a two-man band in this case," Michaud says.

Veteran filmmakers, while supporting and using the new technology, hope that the aesthetic component isn’t lost in the commotion.

"Of course, the trick is to use a cheap tool with great taste and skill and knowledge," Wagner says.

There is another element to Charlottesville ’s filmmaking activity, though it is the hardest to define—the City’s appeal to artists of all stripes, and, perhaps, some sort of shared sensibility. Very few of the filmmakers in town ended up here by accident.

It could, of course, just be the scenery.

"I’ve been in Virginia for most of my life, and the region between Roanoke , Richmond and Charlottesville in my opinion is the most beautiful area that Virginia has to offer, and aesthetically, there are those of us who [gravitate] to areas that are geographically special," Ayyildiz says.

It’s also a university town, and there is money here, points out Richards. "I would theorize that anywhere where there is an abundance of intelligent people, there will be artists. Film is an expensive medium—though less so with the advent of digital video technology—so I would guess that a degree of affluence is necessary for a filmmaking community to develop as well. Both of those traits describe Charlottesville , I would argue."

But perhaps there is something more. Wagner says he hopes his current project, Anjlz, a feature film shot in Charlottesville with a local cast and crew, reflects "the Charlottesville aesthetic."

Asked to explain further, he laughs.

"I was afraid you’d ask that, because it’s difficult to say. But I do have a sense that—part of it is just doing it in Charlottesville and having all the people involved be from Charlottesville—that there’s just sort of a vibe about the film that is a natural outgrowth of the creative community here," he says.

Whatever the nature of that "vibe," what is undeniable is that Charlottesville is taking on its own filmmaking identity, defined by the people who work here and the work they do. When it comes to making movies, the City has become the sort of place that filmmakers, when they begin pulling the strings of their difficult, demanding craft, can expect to feel more and more tugs on the other end of the line.

American Motel’s armchair philosopher muses, "There are all kinds of lines, dividing, connecting, but you can’t see them." Well, now you can. And maybe one day, at a theater near you.