As one of the co-coordinators of the Oak Park International Film Festival, I’m offering this note of thanks to the supporters of the Second Annual Oak Park International Film Festival. More than 150 film fans streamed through on a beautiful late-summer Saturday to view works by local filmmakers and area cinema enthusiasts. Tied to the OaktoberFest, sponsored by Downtown Oak Park and the Oak Park Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, the film festival added cinematic flavor to the food and fun associated with OaktoberFest.
We had exquisite food at our festival, thanks to great vendors such as Pasaspiros Restaurant, Winberie’s, Avenue Alehouse, S-3 Kitchens, Dominick’s, and the charm of co-coordinator Donna “DW” Watts who not only cast the most visually stimulating film at the fest, The Forgotten West, but also remembered how very important hospitality is in making fans and filmmakers feel welcome. DW works with the Black Harvest Film Festival, so she brings loads of experience and contacts. No two people laid out the welcome mat, though, more than Debby Preiser and Jim Madigan of the Oak Park Public Library, who for the second year in a row gave us public space to make local cinema history.
Our first contributor this year was Columbia College marketing guru Ed Bunch, whose reel of commercial ads added flair to our event. Festival Co-coordinator Yves Hughes, Jr., who edited two of this year’s films-Our ‘Hood, produced by Angela Robinson and the South Shore Academy and Why Am I Waiting?, produced by (OPRF Class of ’02) Corelle Perry of Columbia College-also emceed two great panels, one on youth and one on local connections to international cinema. Writer Robin Green made a special trip to this year’s fest just to see Corelle’s film and said she was not disappointed.
Yves and I first thought about organizing this festival at a 2003 Cannes Film Festival workshop where we met Doreen Bartoni, a Columbia College dean of the School of Media Arts and director of A Common Flower, a lesbian love story written by Oak Park’s Karen Osborne. That film was the first one accepted in our September 2005 festival.
Meanwhile, we polished up our format last year at Sundance with winter workshops with both Native American, black and foreign filmmakers. Next month, Yves is in post-coup Thailand filming for a piece to be considered for 2007.
Big thanks goes to OPRF Principal Sue Bridge, film teacher John Condne, English teacher Brendan Lee and District 200 school board member Yasmin Ranney, who co-sponsored our festival with two hours worth of shorts, ads, features and music videos by cool dudes like Matt Michener and Alex Curtis and the one lone female, Joy Jones, whose touching piece on girl depression moved many, but none more than Dr. Pat Allen, a filmmaker and art therapist who has joined our committee to ensure that more works by women, youth and filmmakers of color come forward. Pat also touched me with a piece she and her daughter, Adina, directed, Art-Based Inquiry, perhaps the most poetic impressionist piece in the whole festival.
Another favorite was Karen Langan and Peter Vandenberg’s American Gas, a poignant, political film about “Jack,” a National Guardsman who returns from Iraq to discover life is a do-do ball. Did I forget to mention that “Jack” is a GI Joe doll?
Lastly, it is important to emphasize the educational theme woven throughout all of these works and others. No two families represented this educational aspect of the festival better than Jim and Ian Duigan’s Flight, a father-and-son reflection on 9/11, and Margot McMahon, whose teen son, Brendan Burke, directed How the Media Coverage of the Chicago 7 Trial Changed Society, which featured the riveting paintings of his grandfather, Franklyn McMahon, and his mom’s sculpture in another film, Sculpting John Egan.
The most important tribute should go to the audience, which included screenwriter Carol Cook, who heralded our international connections. She recently filmed in war-ravaged Bosnia. Oxford University presenter, Dr. Jay Ruby, who flew from Pennsylvania to screen his Val, stayed on all day to cheer the rest of us. Jay and I both do low-budget, high-impact digital documentaries that provoke audiences to change culturally oppressive structures. Some call it “video verite.”
Much inspiration goes to the Indian-born Sophia Kaushal, an actress, producer and director of former Fenwick Friar Jon Poindexter’s new rap video, Anomaly-Homily. Sophia starred in the new Norwegian feature, The Healer that we screened with subtitles as our sneak preview on a day that the Village of Oak Park proclaimed “Oak Park International Film Festival Day.”