by Walter Chaw It's bittersweet: my first time covering the Denver International Film Festival (DIFF) in a press capacity and the world was falling down around my ears. Personal epiphanies and collective calamities. Miramax decided to pull Piñero from the Festival because they rescheduled its theatrical release for sometime next year; In The Bedroom, another Miramax property–and my favourite film of 2001, thus far–didn't make it, period. The "mini-major" bought In the Bedroom, I am told, to foster a closer relationship with Ang Lee's production company–there's a lot of behind the scenes politicking going on about which I knew nothing prior to getting the ear of insiders and access to the proverbial horses' mouths.
Benjamin Bratt, scheduled to introduce what has been called his breakthrough performance in Piñero, no longer had a reason to attend the DIFF, so he didn't. We learned that Debra Winger was spooked enough by the developing anthrax scare that she decided to skip out on the event as well–I wondered vaguely if my tickets for the now-phantom "Debra Winger Reception" were going to be worth something on eBay. Truth be told, I was a little relieved that Ms. Winger wasn't coming: I was scheduled to interview her in relation to husband Arliss Howard's auteur-turn Big Bad Love, and I fretted that she would ask me what I thought of the film.
Opening night began with a reception, progressed through a showing of the Australian film Lantana, and concluded with more schmoozing and boozing at Denver's lovely Temple Buell theatre. Anthony LaPaglia, now afraid of flying, couldn't come. The choice for opening night presentation had been contested, I guess, with many preferring a more light-hearted presentation. To my mind, Lantana, with its dark honesty, tapped into our zeitgeist perfectly. It's time to leave the things of childhood behind and if the Film Festival was to continue, let it continue with a sober respect for how we had changed as a people–for our status as media and media critics, in bold relief now thanks to the weight of current events.
That was Thursday. On Friday, I had two interviews: one with documentarian Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown & Z-Boys won the audience award at Sundance (and, as it turns out, at Denver as well), the other with director Patrick Stettner. Stettner's entry, The Business of Strangers, is a sharply-written character study that might garner Oscar consideration for the inimitable Stockard Channing.
Stacy Peralta and I spent the first 15 minutes of a session discussing terrorism and how our lives had changed because of it. We discarded the distance that we were supposed to keep from one another as uneasy symbiotic antagonists–critic to artist. It was a different world, after all, and different rules applied. The interview itself felt like a formality, something we had to get through in order to talk about what was really on our minds. With Stettner, we spoke of his perspective as a native New Yorker, our favourite moments in Roman Polanski movies, and what it was like to promote a movie in an environment where everyone's at least a little distracted by the intrusion of reality.
"Are you having fun?" I asked.
"That's a hard question to answer," Patrick said.
On Saturday, I attended a seminar on Pauline Kael conducted by a panel of local print critics as well as Kenneth Turan of the L.A. TIMES. Stettner was also in attendance: he was Andrew Sarris's teaching assistant for a couple of his years during his undergraduate tenure at Columbia.
Patrick said, "I feel like I learned how to make movies from critics–from Manny Farber in particular, and from Sarris. When you write a review, what is your responsibility? Do you hope to help the filmmaker become a better filmmaker, or do you see yourself as a voice for the audience–or do you write for yourself?"
I said: "The truth is that my writing is my means of expression. From how I approach writing, the same question could be posed to you: what is your responsibility as a filmmaker? To your audience, to the critics, or to yourself?"
I made friends over the course of ten festive days, allies in public relations and contacts in the industry that I will value. I made a couple of enemies, too, including a prima donna unable to grasp that the publicity and copy she was receiving from FILM FREAK CENTRAL was probably kinder and of greater quantity than she could muster elsewhere. I got to see wonderful films, like the legendary Ousmane Sembene's Faat Kiné, the super-cheesy Brotherhood of the Wolf, and Montieth McCollum's brilliant Hybrid (none of which may ever reach Denver moviehouses in a general capacity), and witness firsthand the buzzmakers Waking Life, The Devil's Backbone, and Amélie.
The Denver International Film Festival awards a Mayor's Lifetime Achievement prize that went this year to Peter Bogdanovich. He accepted it from Mayor Wellington Webb before a packed post-screening shindig for his latest directorial achievement The Cat's Meow. The John Cassavetes Award for independent filmmaking went to Richard Linklater, and the Starz/Encore People's Choice awards went to Dogtown & Z-Boys for best documentary and Amélie for best feature. The DIFF's only juried prize–the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award for Best European Film–went to Robert Glinski's Hi! Tereska.
After ten days, thirty motion pictures, several receptions, and three interviews, I was beaten down and bleary-eyed. I was pleased that several of the press people and industry professionals I met had heard of the work that we're doing here at FFC, and Bill Chambers, my editor, was a rock, putting in overtime hours and going above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that I looked as if I was doing my job even when I felt hungover and found myself sliding into a Hunter Thompson-esque spiral of confused prosody and paranoia. Life during wartime: watching movies on a deadline, sick as a dog and having a blast.
The silver anniversary of the DIFF begins October 10, 2002.
