With a lineup of nearly 100 features and shorts, the 12th edition of the Independent Film Festival Boston opens today and runs through April 30. In the Boston Globe, Ty Burr and Peter Keough have written up eighteen capsule previews and note that the “opening-night movie, Beneath the Harvest Sky, is a stark drama, set on the border of Maine and Canada, about two friends running drugs and harvesting potatoes as they struggle to make ends meet. Seven days later, the festival concludes with Mood Indigo, an effervescent romantic comedy-drama starring Audrey Tautou (Amelie) and directed by Michel Gondry… Executive director Brian Tamm and program director Nancy Campbell have cherry-picked high-profile movies from Sundance, Toronto, SXSW, and other festivals and mixed them with the best films and filmmakers from the Northeast.”
Also in the Globe, Loren King talks with Meghan O’Hara and Mike Attie about In Country, “their documentary about Vietnam War re-enactors, many of them veterans who fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, who stage elaborate weekend battle re-enactments in Oregon.”
Erin Trahan‘s put together a solid preview of the shorts program for WBUR, where Andrea Shea reports that the painter who’s the subject of Jon Imber’s Left Hand passed away last week. Richard Kane’s documentary is about Imber’s struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
As more IFFBoston news and reviews appear, I’ll be making note of them there.
Update, 4/27: “Suggesting an early David Gordon Green coming-of-age film relocated from the deep South to the Maine-Canada border, Beneath the Harvest Sky is set over the course of a week in which a five-day school break and the annual harvest of blue potatoes indigenous to the area converge,” writes Nick Prigge at Slant. “Atmosphere and soundtrack do much of the heavy lifting throughout Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly’s feature. The film is most compellingly defined by its sense of place, aptly captured by the handheld cinematography, which repeatedly frames the story’s characters jovially interacting beneath the sky of the vaguely lyrical title, as if the future is merely meant for gabbing about and will never come to pass.”
Update, 4/30: “Fight Church looks at the intersection of Christianity and mixed martial arts, and how pastors training fighters can reconcile their faith with a violent sport.” At Filmmaker, Michael Murie has five questions for co-director and editor Bryan Storkel.
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