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 Arts
Arizona International Film Festival Returns for 14th Season
by Gene Armstrong
 elieve it or not, the world of movies doesn’t revolve solely around “Chicago” and “Million Dollar Baby,” or even “Sideways.” The big studio pictures ultimately couldn’t exist without the creativity and innovation of small, independent features.
Such as those screened, and celebrated, by the Arizona International Film Festival, which begins its 14th season April 14 with a 10-day slate of dozens of feature films, shorts and videos.
Screenings will be held at a variety of locations all over town, including the Downtown festival hub, The Screening Room, 127 E. Congress St. The festival headquarters is here Downtown, too, at 108 E. Congress. Stop in to just hang out, talk film or shop at the Festival Merchandise Store.
Other screening sites are: The Loft, 3233 East Speedway; Crossroads Festival, 4811 E. Grant; Reader’s Oasis, 3400 E. Speedway; and Grand View Cinemas 4, 265 W. Valencia Road. Panel discussions will be held various locations on the University of Arizona campus.
For the most complete and up-to-date list of films and screenings, as well as a run-down of all ticket prices, go to www.azmac.org/festival. This site will be updated regularly.
The festival is being presented by the Arizona Media Arts Center, with the help of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Tucson-Pima Arts Council, the UA College of Fine Arts and Department of Media Arts.
And it’s no small affair. Last year’s festival was attended by more than 8,000 patrons, showcasing 128 works from 25 countries. It included 90 Arizona premieres and 19 world premieres, according to Dannielle Wheeler, the festival’s publicist.
The Arizona International Film Festival in the past has often been a destination for the premieres of independent movies that went on to greater acclaim. Some of these have included such familiar, and sometimes award-winning, movies as “Mi Vida Loca,” “Visions of Light,” “Mi Familia,” “Georgia,” “Caught,” “A Place Called Chiapas” and “Spellbound.”
The director of the festival, as usual, is Giulio Scalinger of the Arizona Media Arts Center. Patty Weiss, a longtime KVOA-TV news anchor, will serve as the honorary chair for the 2005 festival.
Among the festival’s numerous highlights will be “How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer” the first film directed by UA alumna Georgina Garcia Riedel. Having debuted at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, it will be showcased April 15 at The Loft.
A comic drama about three generations of women in a Mexican-American family, “How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer” stars Elizabeth Peña, Blanca Garcia and Dona Genoveva. It was shot on 35mm film in Somerton, Arizona.
“How the Garcia Girls …” also is part of the festival’s Cine Chicano series, which presents seven new works by emerging filmmakers contributing to the growth of Chicano cinema.
Other mini-series in the festival will include Indigenous Cinema, documentary and fiction works from around the world; and Cinema Without Borders/Cine Sin Fronteras, screenings and panel discussions examining the issues of international borders, immigration and communities.
Don’t neglect, either, other programs such as Movies at Midnight, edgy fare for the late-night crowd; IndieVision, independent works shown on Access Tucson, the local cable access TV station; From the Archives, restored and newly discovered films from the past; and Serving Independents, those information panel discussions and workshops.
Topics for Serving Independents sessions will include new technologies in narrative filmmaking, producing personal documentaries and navigating film festivals.
As usual, the festival boasts The Reel Frontier, a film and video competition designed to celebrate and reward excellence and invention in independent media arts expression. The finalists’ work will be screened during the festival and include 17 world premieres, seven American premieres and 35 Arizona premieres, according to Wheeler.
The Reel Frontier has a distinctly international flavor. It will include entries from Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Palestine, Poland, Singapore and Spain. Winners will be announced April, with a “Best of the Fest” schedule of screenings on the festival’s final day, April 24.
Along with the organizations mentioned above, sponsors also include Cox Communications, the Tucson Citizen, the KUAT Communications Group, the Tucson Film Office, C&C Adventures, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Simply Bits, the Wilde Playhouse and this newspaper in your hands.
For more information, call The Screening Room, 622-2262, or the festival office, 628-1737.
Bravo!
by Gene Armstrong
 ot only is “Macbeth” William Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest play, but it definitely is in the running for the Bard’s work with the most memorable quotations and imagery. It’s got ghosts and witches, curses and prophetic visions, naked political ambition, bloody business, strange inventions and heat-oppressed brains.
Check out these staples of our cultural consciousness: “Something wicked this way comes;” “Double, double, toil and trouble / Fire burn and cauldron bubble;” “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” There’s the moving of Birnam Wood, and riddles about a man not born of woman. Macbeth’s soliloquy full of hallucinations of daggers is a staple of high-school drama classes. Of course, Lady Macbeth’s exhortation, “Out, damned spot!” has become an icon for madness.
And Stephen Wrentmore, director of Arizona Theatre Company’s new production of “Macbeth,” understands its ageless appeal.
“Well, it’s a real rip-roarer of a story isn’t it? There’s some really fantastic energy of the play, which is probably partly because it’s his shortest play. But it’s also got a single plot line for the audience to follow and easily get hooked into. It’s purely a study in evil, and there’s something absolutely hypnotic about that.”
The murderous Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have become emblems for bloody ambition. “It’s astonishing how the themes in the play keep repeating themselves throughout history whether it’s a year ago or 10 years ago or 400 years ago,” says wrentmore, who also happens to be the artistic director of the 72-year-old Byre Theatre in St. Andrews, Scotland.
Wrentmore, who also helmed ATC’s production of Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” in 2003, has directed many Shakespeare plays, but never before had he worked on the “Scottish play.”
Unfortunately, the timeless nature of the themes in “Macbeth” means that we are never far from evil. Says Wrentmore: “The play gives us something to deal with, a vehicle through which we can explore the idea what it’s like to abuse power. Whether you’re Milosevic or Stalin or Hitler or Mussolini or Pinochet, all of them used and manipulated power. It’s a story that goes back as far even as Genghis Khan or Caligula. Macbeth was actually a real king, but Shakespeare uses him as fictitious character to interpret and apply an understanding of these figures.”
To emphasize this point, Wrentmore has staged this “Macbeth” in a nearly contemporary setting – the years between the World Wars.
“That time was so rife with the rise of a number of dictatorships. I think what’s also the really interesting thing with the time is that it was also the Evelyn Waugh period of (the movie) “Bright Young Things” and all the conspicuous partying of the time. It was the time of the birth of the mass media as we now understand in it, as well.”
So ATC patrons can expect to see sumptious costumes and sets inspired by the 1920s and 1930s, on-stage film projections and a musical score of minimalist percussion and rhythmic soundscapes.
What about the so-called “Macbeth” curse that superstitious theater types claim follows this play. Wrentmore is having none of that.
“I don’t believe in it. If you want the truth, I haven’t even thought about it. It’s one of those things that gets perpetuated time and time again, and I think it’s time we killed it. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful or useful.”
Preview performances of “Macbeth” run Saturday, April 9, through Thursday, April 14. Opening night is tax day, April 15. The show continues its Tucson run at various times through April 30 in the Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave. Tickets range in price from $26 to $44; call 622-2823 to buy them or for more information.
Speaking of all that jazz-age razzmatazz, Broadway in Tucson will entertain local theater mavens with considerably lighter fare when it presents a touring version of the 2002 Tony Award-winning musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie” eight times from April 26 through May 1 in the Music Hall at the Tucson Convention Center, 260 S. Church Ave.
The show features a combination of songs from the 1967 movie that inspired it, 1920s-era standards and new tunes composed for the Broadway show by Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan. Tickets for the classic flapper-fest range from $24 to $60. Call 903-2929 for more information. To charge tickets by phone, call 877-206-8177.
The TCC Music Hall also will be the venue for the Tucson Symphony Orchestra’s performance of another work associated with early decades the last century – Igor Stravinsky’s score for the once-scandalous 1912 fertility ballet “The Rite of Spring.” A landmark achievement, this piece helped set the tone for avant-garde composition – touching on atonality, rhythmic ambiguity and freedom of form – during the 20th century.
George Hanson will conduct the orchestra during this concert, which also will feature a performance of Anton Dvorák’s Cello Concerto, featuring guest artist Alban Gerhardt on cello.
Hear these immortal works at 8 p.m. April 7, 8 and 10. If you don’t subscribe to the TSO’s Classic Series, you can get individual tickets for anywhere from $16 to $45. Call 882-8585 for further details. You may buy tickets through Ticketmaster at 321-1000.
The University of Arizona’s Dance Division, one of the finest collegiate dance programs in the country, will continue its Looking Glass II concert series with the “Spring Collection,” a showcase of faculty and student talent that will include a staging of Paul Taylor’s classic modern-dance work “Esplanade,” April 28 through May 1 in the Stevie Eller Dance Theater on the east end of the UA Mall.
These performances also will include George Balanchine’s ballet masterpiece “Concerto Barocco,” which has been set on the company by Leslie Peck, who also staged Balanchine’s “Serenade” for the UA program last year. Tickets cost $10, $13 and $16 and are available at the UA Fine Arts Box Office, the number for which is 621-1162.
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