Little big fest

Convergence XI focuses on film and video

by Bill Rodriguez

"Going Nomad," by Art Jones

It may have started out as a last-minute addition to Convergence X last year, but this year the 2nd Annual Convergence Film and Video Festival has everybody's attention.

Over the course of 10 days at four sites, the event is a fairly ambitious flight of fancy for such a fledgling festival. Eighty-two screenings of independent films are on the agenda, 10 of them feature-length and ranging down to experimental films a minute or two long. There are 34 films, plus five animations and the rest are videos. Thirty-four are classified as narratives, 23 as documentary and 21 as experimental.

Ninety submissions were made for the festival, which was open to independent film and video makers who have lived in New England.

Five awards will be handed out, in the above categories, with separate awards for short and full-length narratives, plus Best of Show.

"We had a tough time making choices," said Laura Mullen, who chaired the selection committee of some dozen local filmmakers, film-buffs and academics.

"We chose heavily from the documentary pool this year," she noted. "There were some outstanding documentaries that were submitted to the festival." Highlights include Dearfield, The Road Less Traveled, by Donnie L. Betts, an award-winning Emmy nominee about an all-black town in Colorado. Another award-winner is There Are No Saints In Exeter, by Danny Leo, an autobiographical film that gets into local vampire mythology. An exotic entry is Hello Photo, Nina Davenport's excursion to India and the Bombay film industry.

"Saturday night we picked to include some of the more humorous, some of the more outrageous selections," Mullen said. "Serial Killing for Dummies [by Wayne Beswick] is a hilarious film. Lisa Loeb is in it, and it's sort of a black comedy. Some of the shorter films that are paired with that are also extremely strong."

So too are other features. Jay Craven's A Stranger In the Kingdom, which won an award at the New England Film Festival, focuses on a black pastor facing murder charges in a small Vermont town. Other themes of the longer entries range from a blizzard-bound horror tale filmed in South County, Night of the Beast, by Bruce J. Haas, to an examination of a family's past sparked by a fugitive uncle showing up, in Joseph Siciliano's A Question of Trust.

"The night of experimental film at RISD will be very compelling," Mullen said about the Tuesday program.

Before last year's opening night the estimate was that perhaps three dozen viewers would attend. At least 100 showed up, and four evenings later there was standing room only.

Festival coordinator Carolyn Testa remembers the first night well. "The audience swelled and it was sweltering. It was really hot that week."

But neither she nor the six other volunteers were complaining about the response to the 37 works screened at AS220. This year the $5000 budget has quadrupled, and the volunteer staff may expand to more than 100 by the time everyone has signed up to help at the four venues. Non-juried selections will be shown at AS220 -- adhering to the art space's presentation policy -- and others will be screened at the Rhode Island School of Design Auditorium, Brown University's List Auditorium and Cable Car Cinema.

Plans for last year's festival began only in March, when Convergence director Bob Rizzo suggested the idea. Volunteer Testa, who says she "grew up on foreign films," was tapped to make it happen by the film commission of the mayor's office. A retired teacher of French and Italian at Hope and Classical high schools in Providence, her interest in film is so extensive that she took a sabbatical in 1986-87 to study film in a program that took her to England, Italy and Japan.

"Leaving the Harbour," by Walter Ungerer

"I sometimes go to Paris for a month and just go crazy seeing films there," she said.

The Providence Film Commission was established in August of 1995, after Michael Corrente shot American Buffalo in Pawtucket rather than in the state capital. Since then, the city has seen the number of feature films shot on location here go from one in 1996 to eight last year. This year, there will be at least nine.

The mayor's policy aide Paul Campbell was tapped to head the commission. With no office in Los Angeles, he says that the city has had to rely on a network of L.A.-Providence connections, with former natives and others who have gone to college here. Last year, the commission got out a 104-page full-color production guide touting the town. So far the city has hosted two annual Rhode Island Nights in Los Angeles, the last one attracting more than 300 industry people.

"That resulted in a number of contacts that we've been able to establish, which in turn led to some film deals," Campbell said.

He and his staff are still basking in the glow of a network green-light for the first 13 episodes of an hour-long drama called Providence, coming to the small screen in January.

"The enormousness of getting something like that is still sinking in," he said. "You take, for example, Miami Vice, which was filmed for five years down there between '84 and '89. The film commission down there did an economic survey of the impact of Miami Vice on the local economy. And they found that the annual economic impact exceeded $100 million on an annual basis."

Rhode Island is such a small state that local film activity reflects helpfully on the entire area, whether Dustin Hoffman is making a movie in Pawtucket or Newport is holding its recent film festival. Campbell points out that his office has been working closely with the Newport Visitors' Bureau to promote the area as a whole. And he is always swapping leads with the film office of the state Economic Development Corporation.

As Steven Spielberg indicated by shooting Amistad in Newport last year, the area has a lot to offer as a film location. Word's getting out, Campbell said. "I've talked to a half-dozen [film production] people in the past few months who have moved back to Rhode Island from other areas, because they sensed an opportunity here and they want to be a part of it."

The 2nd Annual Convergence Film and Video Festival will run June 12 through 21 at Brown University's List Auditorium, the Cable Car Cinema, AS220, and the RISD Auditorium. See "Film" listings on page 26 for details. Call 751-1177.

A discussion will be held on Thursday, June 18 at 7:30 p.m. at List Auditorium. Robert Downey Sr., director of Putney Swope, will participate, with Arthur Barron of Emerson College, Amy Kravitz of RISD, and Sheri Wills of the University of Rhode Island, Providence filmmaker Laura Colella and Boston documentary filmmaker Josua Seftel. The topic: "The Agony and the Ecstasy: Independent Filmmaking."