“Two Weeks”
Advance tickets for the 2016 New Hope Film Festival are now available online, as is the official 2016 Program Guide. This year’s festival runs July 22-31.
The festival received a record 591 entries during the 2015-16 submission season, and judges named 106 official selections, including 89 films from 11 countries, and 17 scripts. Many of the films are U.S. and world premieres. Countries represented include the U.S., Italy, Canada, Turkey, India, Australia, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Kuwait and Brazil.
Films will be screened in two venues: New Hope Arts Center at 2 Stockton Ave., and the Stephen J. Buck Memorial Theater at 180 West Bridge St. Filmmakers from around the world will attend the screenings and question-and-answer sessions following the films.
Here’s a few interesting selections, in no particular order, with synopses provided by the Festival:
“Two Weeks”
In this touching, socially relevant short film, Australian student director Dani Bowen focuses her perceptive eyes on a teenage girl, Liz, whose mother just dropped a bombshell on the family—she’s going to abandon them.
Liz is wounded and bewildered by the news, and her father is none too keen on the idea, but there’s little they can do, since neither is the catalyst for the decision. Mom simply has other things to do with her life, and has decided that leaving them will offer her a better chance for fulfillment.
Although the story is softly rendered and shows far more than it tells, Bowen reveals this dark aspect of the zeitgeist with remarkable intensity.
“The Birth of an Artist”
“The Birth of an Artist”
Cerebral palsy is a hard and relentless disease, but one filmmaker has captured an astounding response to the severe physical limitations it imposes. Dasha is a girl who paints with her feet. Despite her difficult circumstances, her mind’s eye sees nothing but life and beauty in the world, and her feet are enough under her control to render her visions into glorious artworks.
“The Birth of an Artist” is an astounding and unforgettable portrait of courage. Born in Ukraine and educated, in part, at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Graduate Film program, filmmaker Natasha Babenko is fascinated by duality, which in this case is her subject’s “physical hardships intertwined with the beauty she expresses from within.” But there is no duality for Babenko in terms of the merit of her film, because it is simply wonderful.
“Inertia”
In this discomforting adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Before the Law, a man stumbles upon a strange gate while hiking in the woods. The sentry standing guard won’t let him through, forcing the traveler to stay the night while waiting for permission to pass. The longer he waits, the harder the uncertainty weighs on his psyche, which gets more fragile by the second. And minute. And hour.
“Inertia”
How many days will he have to stay here? How many weeks? Months?
Years.
Director Brian Lederman leads you to the brink in this modern interpretation of a classic.
New Hope Film Festival, touted as “this emerging ‘Sundance East’” in a June 2012 article in The Huffington Post, was founded by D. F. Whipple, an author, screenwriter, and long-time resident of the New Hope area.
Have a TV pilot I directed in this year’s festival,
Little Champions Big Hero’s.
A must-see!