July 18 – 24, 2025Vol. 27, No. 6

There’s More In Store in MIFF’s Last Three Days

A Moment in the Sun is one of three Maine movies to debut during MIFF’s closing weekend.a

by Gregor Smith

Soon the crowds in the Schupf Center and Waterville Opera House will dwindle, the admissions tent in Castonguay Square will be packed up and put away, and the pace of life in downtown Waterville will slow. But not just yet. The 28th annual Maine International Film Festival still has three more days to go, and those three days are packed with movies and celebrations.

Highlights of the festival’s closing days include an achievement award presentation, the debut of three Maine-made features and two collections of Maine-made shorts, the return of the Maine Student Film and Video Festival, screening of a few more rediscovered classics, and a closing night film with more award announcements.

On Friday, the festival will give its Lifetime Achievement Award to its chief programmer, Ken Eisen. Co-founder of Railroad Square Cinema in 1978 and of the festival itself twenty years later, the unassuming Eisen has been guiding Waterville to fine films for nearly half a century. His influence extends well beyond the Waterville area, however. In 1984, he co-founded Shadow Distribution, which has released over 30 international and independently produced films to theaters across the country.

The award presentation will accompany a screening of The Long Goodbye (1973), starring Elliott Gould as a latter-day version of wise-cracking private eye Philip Marlowe. The Long Goodbye will be the second movie from director Robert Altman, long a MIFF favorite, to be screened at this year’s festival. The first, Gosford Park, was shown in honor of this year’s other Achievement Award winner, Clive Owen.

Ken Eisen

The festival’s closing weekend will bring a bevy of Maine movies. Three of the four made-in-Maine feature films will have their premières: A Moment in the Sun, a documentary love letter to Houlton, Me., the easternmost U.S. town in the path of the April 2024 total solar eclipse; InhuMaine, a sober look at the homelessness crisis in Bangor; and Sight Unseen, a shot-in-Belgrade horror thriller, which will be discussed further in a separate article. (The fourth Maine feature, 76 Days Adrift, debuted on Thursday and will be shown again on Saturday, but the Saturday showing has already sold out. Check the MIFF website or program book for screening times and locations for the other three films.)

Additionally, as part of a retrospective on the work of Huey, the longtime Maine filmmaker who uses just one name, MIFF will present his Wilderness and Spirit: A Mountain Called Katahdin (2002), a meditative homage to Maine’s highest mountain the people who revere it. This screening will take place Saturday at 7:00 in the Opera House.

Moreover, both compilations of Maine shorts will have their first and last screenings during the festival’s last three days. The ten Maine Documentary Shorts will screen at 4:00 on Friday and at 1:00 on Saturday, and the eight Maine Narrative (Fictional) Shorts will be shown at 4:00 on both Saturday and Sunday. All of these screenings will take place in the Opera House.

Finally, the Maine Student Film and Video Festival returns to MIFF’s second Saturday, after an absence of several years. The student festival presents the best short films, no more than 10 minutes each, from Maine’s youngest filmmakers, grades K-12. Submissions will be divided into three categories — Narrative, Documentary, and Creative — and judged by a panel of educators, other media arts professionals, and past festival participants. Prizes will include filmmaking equipment and a grand prize of $500. The student festival, which has free admission, will take place from 12:00 to 1:30 in Cinema 1.

While the festival has historically crammed its screenings of Maine features and shorts into its final weekend, there are plenty of non-Maine movies to watch as well. For example, the two longest movies in this year’s festival, both rediscovered classics, will each have their only screenings. L’Amour Fou (“Crazy Love”) is a 4⅕ hour, 1969 drama from Jacques Rivette about a stormy romance between a theater director and his leading lady, and Batang West Side (2001) is a 5¼-hour epic, in which a Jersey City, N.J. police detective is forced to confront his own demons while investigating the murder of a Filipino-American teen, the city’s Filipino gangs, and the impact of crystal meth on the city’s youth. The former film will screen on Friday at 6:40, and the latter on Sunday at 12:40. Both screenings will be held in Cinema 2.

Making its Eastern U.S. première, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) will close this year’s festival.

MIFF’s final film will be Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), to be presented Sunday at 7:00 in the Opera House. Set on a fictional lake, the film interweaves stories of its denizens, including a girl learning to sail, a musician aspiring to first chair, two sisters running an inn, and a fisherman in pursuit of “the big one” to, in the word of the MIFF site, “craft an engaging and heartfelt portrait of a place and this specific place’s effect on the people who call it home.”

At that screening, the winners of the Audience Favorite and Tourmaline Awards will be announced. Named after Maine’s state gem, the Tourmaline Prizes will be presented to the festival’s best Maine feature and best Maine short shown. All eighteen of the Narrative and Documentary shorts are eligible, as are the four new Maine-made feature films described above. The features winner gets $5,000, and the shorts winner, $2,500.

While a three-person jury of film industry professionals chooses the Tourmaline winners, filmgoers themselves choose the Audience Favorite, as the name of the award implies. After watching any new film at the festival — not just those from Maine — attendees can rate the film, and the film with the highest average rating wins. The winning filmmaker receives neither a trophy nor cash, just bragging rights.

Except the student video festival, tickets to any festival screening cost $15. If you have a pass, you can reserve a seat for any screening until three hours before the screening starts. You can reserve seats online at www.miff.org, over the phone at 873‑7000, or in person at the box office. Even with a reservation, you should arrive at least 15 minutes early, lest your seat be released to another patron.

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