More Movies Than Ever Before
Come one, come all! The 28th annual Maine International Film Festival opens tonight, Friday, July 11, and will run for ten days. Not only a chance to watch movies, the festival allows you to discuss the films not only with other movie lovers but also with the moviemakers and to travel the world without leaving the comfort of a padded, reclining seat in an air-conditioned theater.
Each year, MIFF presents a wide array of new feature films and shorts, both fiction and nonfiction, from independent producers in Maine and far beyond. The festival also hosts various filmmakers and holds retrospectives of their work.
Festival organizers boast that this year’s MIFF has more movies than ever before, due in part to their having received more submissions this year than ever before. While most of the 100+ films will be premieres of some sort (e.g. Maine, New England, United States, World), the festival will also offer a sprinkling of newly restored editions of classic films.
All screenings will take place in the three cinemas on the second floor of the Paul J. Schupf Art Center at 93 Main Street in downtown Waterville and in the adjoining, 123-year-old Waterville Opera House. Except where otherwise noted, the screenings described below will take place in the 800-seat Opera House and will start at 7:00 p.m. All quotes are from the festival’s website.
The festival will open at 6:30 with The Librarians, a documentary lauding those stalwart public servants and defenders of freedom of expression who now find themselves conscripted to fight on the front lines of the culture wars against groups who seek to ban books on LBGTQ+ and Black themes. “Simultaneously infuriating and invigorating,…*The Librarians* speaks directly to our current reality and one which advocates unabashedly for the rights and freedoms vital to a healthy democracy.”
On Sunday at 4:00, you can watch a newly restored Dead River Rough Cut, the first Maine movie to screen during this year’s festival. Filmed in 1975 by Richard Searls and Railroad Square Cinema co-founder Stu Silverstein, this documentary chronicles a year in the lives of Walter Lane and Bob Wagg, two woodsmen enjoying their solitary lives hunting, trapping, fishing, and logging. In the film, they talk about “friendship, women, money, the lone life, and death. Amusing, insightful, sometimes outrageous, their observations and stories pull few punches.”
That 68-minute documentary will be paired with “The Constituent,” a new, 37-minute dramatic “short” directed by and starring Ernest Thompson. Best known as the playwright who crafted On Golden Pond, Thompson adapted “The Constituent” from his one-act play of the same name. Set and shot in New Hampshire, the film also stars Gordon Clapp, who is best known as Detective Greg Medavoy from the 1990s police drama NYPD Blue.
(On Saturday, July 12, Thompson will talk about the film, and he and Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of the bestselling memoir She’s Not There, will each read from their latest works from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. at the 7 Lakes Alliance in Belgrade Lakes. Although admission is free, space is limited and reservations encouraged. Click for more information.)
On Tuesday, July 15, MIFF will present its Mid-Life Achievement Award to British actor Clive Owen after a screening of Croupier (1998), in which Owen portrays a struggling writer who takes a job in a casino and is solicited to take part in a risky robbery. MIFF will also show five of Owen’s other films:* Gosford Park* (2001), I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003), Closer (2004), Children of Men (2006), and Duplicity (2009). Except for Sleep, which will screen on Monday at 3:00 p.m. in Cinema 1, the Clive Owen movies all screen on either Tuesday or Wednesday in the Opera House. Check the festival’s program guide or website for times. Each film will be shown only once.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, MIFF will cast a spotlight on movies from Cambodia and Israel. From Cambodia comes Diamond Island (2016), a drama about the mass migration of the nation’s youth from the countryside to work in the capital’s construction sites, and Last Night I Saw You Smiling (2019), a documentary which follows three families during their last days in their beloved, but dilapidated, apartment complex before it is torn down.
The three Israeli films are all works of director, producer, and cinematographer Avigail Sperber: The Three of Us is a documentary feature about a young couple’s attempts to integrate their autistic son into a society that does not readily accept the neurodivergent; If You Let Me Go is a documentary about a 1990s pathbreaking, female, punk rocker who died young; and “Gevald,” a narrative short to be shown with If You Let Me Go, follows an LGBTQ+ activist who challenges Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox establishment.
All of the screenings described in the previous two paragraphs take place in the three cinemas in the Schupf Center. Check the MIFF program book or website for times and locations.
On Wednesday evening, MIFF will present its Centerpiece Film. The Negotiator is a new documentary from the United Kingdom about Waterville native and former U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who, among his many other accomplishments, negotiated an end to the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland in 1998. Directed by Trevor Birney, who produced last year’s Closing Night Film Kneecap, The Negotiator is a “timely, contemporary, and deeply personal film [that] poses provocative questions about positive United States engagement with the wider world, and how Senator Mitchell — with his inexhaustible patience — turned the apparently impossible into the possible.”
On Thursday, you can attend the world premiere of the documentary 76 Days Adrift, the first of the four, new, made-in-Maine feature films to screen during MIFF. (The other three, documentaries InhuMaine and A Moment in the Sun and thriller Sight Unseen, will not debut until the festival’s closing weekend, so we’ll save them for next week.)
In 76 Days, we hear the harrowing tale of Steven Callahan, a solo sailor who, after losing his boat six days into a trans-Atlantic crossing, survived for a month and a half aboard an inflatable life raft before being rescued. The film “explores not just physical endurance, but the transformative power of isolation and the profound bond between human and nature. It’s more than a tale of survival — it’s a meditation on what keeps us going when all hope seems lost.”
Throughout each festival, MIFF presents diverse “rediscoveries,” i.e. unfairly neglected, but recently restored, classic films. Besides Dead River Rough Cut, described earlier, there are nine more such features this year, as well as a collection of shorts from the late ’70s and early ’80s by mononymous Maine moviemaker Huey. (This collection will have its one and only screening Thursday at 3:00 in Cinema 1.)
Two of the rediscoveries will be presented in honor of filmmakers who died earlier this year: Night Moves (1975), in which the late Gene Hackman portrays a football player turned private eye, and late director David Lynch’s thriller Mulholland Drive (2001), where a young woman loses her memory after a traffic accident and is befriended by an aspiring actress. Check the program book or website for titles, screening times, and locations for all of this year’s rediscoveries.
As in previous years, MIFF will offer two types of passes: For $250, you can buy a Full Festival Pass, which allows you attend as many movies as you want. For only $125, you can buy a “10-Pass,” which is good for ten admissions, one or two people per screening. You can also buy individual tickets for $15 each.
If you buy a pass, you can reserve a seat for any screening until three hours before it starts. You can reserve seats on the MIFF website, over the phone at 873‑7000, or in person at the box office. Be sure to arrive at the screening at least 15 minutes early, or your seat may be released to another patron. We strongly urge you to reserve seats, as screenings can sell out, especially those scheduled for the two smallest screening rooms, Cinema 2 (43 seats) and Cinema 3 (22 seats).
You can buy passes and tickets either online at www.miff.org or in person at the festival box office on the first floor of the Schupf Center. You can find the complete schedule for the festival and descriptions of the films on the MIFF website and in the the festival’s glossy, 68-page program book, which is available at the Schupf Center and many other places around Central Maine.
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