Alex Kingston (L) and Clive Owen in Croupier (1998), the film that will be shown at the presentation of Owen’s Mid-Life Achievement Award, Tuesday, July 15, 7:00, at the Waterville Opera House.
by Gregor Smith
In just a week, the Maine International Film Festival will return to downtown Waterville. The festival will present a wide selection of feature films and shorts, both documentaries and narrative, from independent producers in Maine, elsewhere in the United States, and the rest of the world.
While most of the festival’s 100+ offerings will be premieres of some sort (Maine, New England, United States, World), MIFF will also present retrospectives of the works of esteemed filmmakers who come to MIFF as its special guests.
The festival will open Friday evening, July 11, and will run for nine more days. All screenings will take place at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center and the adjoining Waterville Opera House.
With over 100 films to choose from, it’s hard to know what to watch, but here at Summertime in the Belgrades, we have studied the program guide and produced this curated list of highlights:
The Librarians, the documentary that opens the festival, which lauds local librarians, those steadfast defenders of freedom of expression who now face increasing challenges from groups who seek to ban books on LBGTQ+ and racial themes;
A Mid-Life Achievement Award for British actor Clive Owen and screenings of six of his films: I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003), Children of Men (2006), Closer (2004), Croupier (1998), Gosford Park (2001), and Duplicity (2009);
A Lifetime Achievement Award for Ken Eisen, co-founder of both Railroad Square Cinema and the Maine International Film Festival, festival programmer, and president of Shadow Distribution, a Waterville-based distributor of independent films;
The Negotiator, MIFF’s Centerpiece Film, a new documentary from the United Kingdom about Waterville native George Mitchell, whose many accomplishments include negotiating an end to the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland in 1998;
Four Made-in-Maine Feature Films, three of which are documentaries (about a sailor who survived 76 days in adrift in a life raft on the high seas, about Houlton, Me., the easternmost U.S. town in the path of the April 2024 total solar eclipse, and about the homelessness crisis in Bangor), and the fourth, Sight Unseen, a fictional thriller filmed in a camp on Great Pond;
Three Compilations of Short Films: the Maine Narrative Shorts (fiction), the Maine Documentary Shorts (nonfiction), and the “Kaleidoscope Shorts,” with eight films, some fiction and some not, from elsewhere in the U.S. and beyond;
The Maine Student Film and Video Festival, a competition featuring the best short films from Maine filmmakers in grades K-12;
Dead River Rough Cut, a newly restored 1976 documentary about two men living life on their own terms in Maine’s North Woods, which will be shown with a new, shorter, fictional film, “The Constituent,” written and directed by Ernest Thompson (On Golden Pond) and starring Thompson and NYPD Blue’s Gordon Clapp;
A retrospective on the work of mononymous Mainer Huey, including his Wilderness and Spirit: A Mountain Called Katahdin (2002), a meditative homage to Maine’s highest mountain the people who revere it, and a separate program of five of his shorts on various subjects, all made between 1977 and 1983;
George Segal as The Terminal Man (1974), one of this year's “rediscoveries.”Eight other newly restored classics, ranging from Phantom Lady, a black and white, 1944 film noir, to Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour Fou (“Crazy Love”), an over-four-hour opus from 1969 about a stormy romance between a theater director and his leading lady, to David Lynch’s 2001 thriller Mulholland Drive; and finally
World Cinema Spotlights, which will present new and recent films from Nigeria, Cambodia, and Israel — the Israeli films all being works of Avigail Sperber.
We’ll talk more about many of these screenings in the next two issues of Summertime, but for now, we encourage you to explore the MIFF website or to pick up a free copy of the festival’s glossy, 68-page, program booklet at the Schupf Center or at many other businesses around town. We’ll see you at the movies!
