By Steven Snyder
If there’s one thing New York City isn’t lacking, it’s arts festivals. Love music? The CMJ Music Marathon just rolled through town. Love movies? This month alone has seen a seamless segue from the New York Film Festival to the Israel Film Festival. Love theater? The Fringe Festival eats up an entire month every summer.
Needless to say: It takes an awful lot for a festival to wow your average New Yorker — much less a new festival that invites audiences to see music, theater and film in the course of one evening.
Yet that is precisely what the Crown Point Festival, which runs from Oct. 27 to Nov. 17, aims to do. Held once before in 2004, at venues spread out across Downtown, the 2007 incarnation of Crown Point will bring 22 evenings of activity to a single stage at the Abrons Art Center, near the Williamsburg Bridge.
More than anything, it’s Crown Point’s focus on mixing media that will catch audiences by surprise: Every evening, a team of Crown Point curators has assembled a three-tiered event, mixing together a theatrical performance, a musical concert and a film screening. One ticket will admit a visitor to all three performances, all carefully matched and mixed.
“The idea is that we set out to orchestrate an evening for people sick of going to bad movies, bad theater or bad bands,” said Naftali Beane Rutter, one of this year’s Crown Point organizers. “Instead, we want to give people an evening that has all three of these in one, and three fantastic performances at that — 22 evenings where everything happens on the same stage, where you walk into a theater and walk into a complete environment that we’ve meticulously designed.”
Charged with managing one of each evening’s third component, Rutter served as the producer of the Crown Point film schedule, working in conjunction with three film curators to pour through more than 300 accepted submissions, and hundreds more films seen at festivals and received from filmmakers who weren’t specifically asked to submit. The final result is a film program comprised of 23 short films and five features, all pulled from a wide swath of genres, subjects and styles.
Rutter said this year’s festival leans heavily on short films because they fit more concisely, and directly, into the three-act Crown Point format. “Short films aren’t trying to open up a thousand different topics, they are very focused and concise, and because of that they fit more naturally into our nightly format,” he said. “In some ways, we’re trying to make a complete musical performance for you — by using plays, music and films, we’re designing these evenings with a ryhtmic process, with each film, each play and each band serving as a different drumbeat. Because of this, short films — particularly the animated films — are ideal because they can serve as just that perfect accent to the larger feeling you’re trying to create.”
Naturally, after spending hundreds of hours and viewing hundreds of samples, Rutter has developed a strong passion for all 23 of the final chosen short films. But standing out among the pack are the animated works of Helen Hill, a New Orleans filmmaker murdered in January, whose experimental animations Rutter hails as works that “characterize the ultimate goal of at least my own life as a filmmaker.
Her works delve as deeply as possible into her own universe, and try as hard as they can, in their own way, to create a new world unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.” Hill’s “Mouseholes” screens Nov. 1 and Nov. 7.
From Rutter’s perspective, standing alongside Hill’s works is the distinctive “Death to the Tinman,” a film by Ray Tintori that Rutter describes as “comic book-esque, and very distinctively made by a man….I don’t know why, but it reminds me of the best possible cinematic equivalent of modern rock and roll — even though there isn’t much rock in it.” A dark spin on the classic “Wizard of Oz” story, “Death” is based on a L. Frank Baum story, about how the Tin Man lost everything he cared about, and screens Oct. 27 and Nov. 9.
Given the time constraints involved, the festival chose very few feature films to serve as headliners for Cover Point evenings — and Rutter said each of the five chosen feature-length entries had to wow the curators that much more. As they stand here, the handful of finalists each offer something notably different to the feel and pulse of their respective evenings.
Here’s a breakdown of the five chosen finalists:
“Blackballed” (Oct. 29)
The funniest of the festival’s feature entries, “Blackballed” won the audience award at the South by Southwest Film Festival, and stars Rob Cordry, of “Daily Show” fame, as the world’s best paintball competitor, banned from the sport for a decade from cheating and returning to reclaim his rightful title.
“Encounter Point” (Nov. 4)
A sobering celebration of peace, “Encounter Point” is a 2006 documentary about the coming-together of a former Palestinian prisoner, a grieving Israeli mother and a wounded Palestinein brother, who all risk everything — safety and reputation — to launch a grassroots peace movement in the heart of the Holy Land.
“Kamp Katrina” (Nov. 10)
The most overtly political feature film of the Crown Point Festival, “Kamp Katrina” follows the story of one New Orleans couple who open up their home to the displaced and the homeless, setting up a makeshift “Kamp Katrina” in the backyard, and watching the difficulties faced by those who are trying to survive in an ailing, impoverished city.
“Melon Route” (Nov. 11)
Described by Rutter as the one true fictional narrative work of the festival, “Melon Route” tells the story of a Chinese woman who abandons her homeland in hopes of discovering a better place to live, joined by an array of fellow Chinese travelers as they are aided by foreign strangers spread out across Europe, all working together to smuggle human beings to a better future.
“Made in Secret” (Nov. 16)
A surrealistic blending of fact and fiction, a mix of documentary and narrative, “Made In Secret” is a film made over the course of three years by a group of eager filmmakers, determined to film the life of a feminist porn collective — who, upon discovering that no such collective existed, founded one themselves.
