MIFF is Coming, MIFF is Coming!
Are you looking for a cool place — both literally and figuratively — to escape July’s heat? Do you want to watch the finest in new foreign and domestic movies? Or maybe you just have a hankering for “the best popcorn in the known universe?”
Look no further than the 27th annual Maine International Film Festival. Organized by the Maine Film Center, MIFF will present over 100 films (features + shorts) during its ten-day run, July 12 — 21, in downtown Waterville. This year’s MIFF will premiere a wide range of independent films from Maine, the rest of the United States, and beyond. The festival will also present films by its two Achievement Award winners, and a few select older classics from other directors.
The festival has always promoted Maine filmmaking and Maine filmmakers. This year, MIFF will present three feature-length films that were made right here in the Pine Tree State: Carlo…and His Merry Band of Artists, a documentary about the late painter Carlo Pittore, as remembered by his friends and colleagues; The Ghost Trap, a drama about a young lobsterman whose happy life is in danger of coming undone when his girlfriend suffers a severe head injury and a rival lobstering crew becomes more menacing; and The Ruse, a thriller about a young woman who takes a job as live-in caregiver for elderly woman in a secluded seaside manse that may be haunted.
In addition, MIFF will also offer the world premiere of a movie based on a true Maine story but produced elsewhere. Lost on a Mountain in Maine is a dramatization of 12-year-old Donn Fendler’s nine-day struggle for survival after getting lost on Mt. Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain, in 1939. One of the producers on the film is Waterville native Ryan Cook.
Besides the four Maine features, MIFF will also show three compilations of Maine shorts: Narrative, Documentary, and Music. Comprising 19 films altogether, the shorts range from 6 to 45 minutes long. Several of them deal with Central Maine: Narrative Short “The Boat Inspector” is set at a boat launch on North Pond in Smithfield; Documentary Short “The Comeback Mill” chronicles the transformation of a former paper mill in Madison into a producer of wood fiber insulation; and Music Short “Surrounded by Woods” profiles a former Floridian who opens a guitar store in Waterville.
This year, MIFF is pleased to present, not one, but two Achievement Awards: a Lifetime award to Dutch Jos Stelling and a Midlife award to Canadian director Mary Harron. This will actually be Stelling’s second “Lifetime” award from MIFF: when MIFF gave him his first award in 1999, he joked that it was really more of “midlife” honor — he was in his mid-50s at the time. Indeed, in most years since, the award has been presented as a “Midlife Achievement Award.” At the festival, Stelling will present the North American premiere of Natasja’s Dance, his self-proclaimed cinematic swan song in which a former ballerina persuades a lonely man to travel with her to her native Russia.
Mary Harron, called by festival programmer Ken Eisen “a distinctive and major voice in the American independent cinema world, whose films touch on characters, often from real life…, who live on the edge,” will receive her award at a screening of her latest film, Daliland (2022), which stars Ben Kingsley as iconoclastic painter Salvador Dali. MIFF will also present her Charlie Says (2018), which presents “an unflinching profile of the women under Charles Manson’s sway;” The Moth Diaries (2011), which offers “an unorthodox twist on a vampire story set in a girls’ boarding school;” and cult classic American Psycho (2000), which stars “an unhinged Christian Bale in a tour de force role.” (The quotes in the preceding sentence all come from a MIFF press release.)
Each festival includes a selection of “rediscoveries,” critically acclaimed films — some enduringly popular, others largely forgotten — from cinema’s storied past. All are worthy of a fresh look, and some have been newly restored. By far the best known of this year’s rediscoveries is Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster flick, Goodfellas, which is widely considered his greatest film. Among the other rediscoveries are America — Everything You Ever Dreamed Of, a compilation of documentary shorts from the early 1970s by Rhody Streeter and Tony Ganz; Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (France, 1967), a French film noir shot in color; and Victims of Sin (Mexico, 1951), a colorful spectacle shot in black and white about a cabaret dancer who takes in an abandoned child and then has to protect him when his murderous father is released from prison.
Finally, This year’s festival includes a special focus on new films from Rwanda. The international reputation of MIFF and the Maine Film Center has grown steadily over the years, such that in 2023, MFC Executive Director Mike Perreault was chosen a juror at the Mashariki African Film Festival in Kigali, Rwanda. As a result of the contacts he made there, MIFF will welcome Rwandan filmmakers Yuhi Amuli and Myriam Birara to give the Maine premieres of their films Citizen Kwame and The Bride, respectively. Both features will be shown with a short from a different director.
We will describe many of the abovementioned films in greater detail in next week’s article, but for now, we encourage you to visit the MIFF website to learn more about them, get screening times, and buy tickets and festival passes. You can also pick up a copy of the festival’s glossy, 68-page program book, at the festival’s primary venue, the Paul J. Schupf Art Center at 93 Main Street in Waterville, and at various other locations around Central Maine.
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