Charlyne Yi stars with Michael Cera in “Paper Heart,” a festival entry that will be released in theaters.
The Sacramento Film & Music Festival, which starts tonight at the Crest Theatre, will showcase a psychological thriller with terrific production values, a documentary tribute to a time when Northern California rivers ran rich with salmon, and a modern noir about a group of fringe dwellers in San Francisco.
The feature-length films “Sensored,” “Rivers of a Lost Coast” and “Nightbeats” all were made by Sacramento filmmakers. They also illustrate the explosion of filmmaking possibilities during the 10 years the Sac Film & Music Festival has existed.
“These aren’t films you would have seen 10 years ago from this (local) filmmaking community,” said festival co-director Tony Sheppard. Though early festivals featured nifty short films by local directors, the community lacked the infrastructure – and the technology – to produce the kind of feature-length films the festival is showing this year.
“Ten years ago, if you were making your own film on your own (small) budget – even if you were the best filmmaker out there – you still ended up with a product that was clearly made inexpensively on video,” Sheppard said.
These days, widespread use of high-definition video means that even films from one’s (actual) backyard can attain a high gloss. Just as crucial, however, has been the growth of the local film community. It’s a community that the Sac Film & Music Festival and the closely aligned Capital Film Arts Alliance, headed by festival co-director Laurie Pederson (who also works in classified advertising at The Bee), has helped cultivate.
“I think one outlet enhances the other,” said Kevin Haskin, 40, writer and co-producer of “Sensored,” which stars Robert Picardo of “Star Trek Voyager” and “Stargate SG-1,” and opens the 10-day festival. With the CFAA filmmaking network and the annual festival, Haskin said, “you can help people who make the movies and have a place to show them as well.”
Haskin and his wife and producer, Jo, 39, perhaps the nicest-looking Roseville couple ever to make a film with torture scenes, showed their short films at past festivals, finding crews with the help of the CFAA. The exceptional visuals of “Sensored” (8 tonight) come courtesy of another local source: Folsom’s Silverado Systems, which provided the Haskins with an ultra-high-resolution Red One camera.
Pederson, Sheppard and festival co-founder and co-director Nathan Schemel have worked on short films with the Haskins. Schemel and Sheppard are associate producers on “Sensored,” one reason why the movie is playing out of competition as a special screening.
The opening-night festivities will honor everyone involved with “Sensored,” Jo Haskin says. And that easily could extend to everyone involved with the festival, since the making of “Sensored” could double as a game of “One Degree of the Sac Film & Music Festival.”
“We couldn’t afford to have a cast party, and because of our relationship with the festival, we are making (opening night) a reunion party for our cast and crew,” Jo Haskin said. Picardo will be among the guests at the after party at the Cosmo Café across the street from the Crest.
Palmer Taylor and Justin Coupe, who met at UC Santa Cruz and directed “Lost Coast” (11 a.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. Aug. 1) together, arrived on the Sacramento film scene more recently than the Haskins. But the festival is embracing them as if they were veterans.
” ‘Rivers of a Lost Coast’ is a beautiful film,” Sheppard says of Taylor and Coupe’s cinematic history lesson on the California fly-fishing subculture. The festival decided to show “Rivers” twice even though it already had a run at the Crest (see sidebar) earlier this year.
“Nightbeats” director Mike Carroll, 53, who is also a camera operator at Channel 3 (KCRA), is more of a solo act than most of his filmmaking colleagues. Carroll wrote, shot and edited “Nightbeats” (8 p.m. Wednesday), an unsparing film meant for mature audiences, for just $12,000.
He had help from his wife and producer, Bonnie Bennett, and Bennett’s daughter, Lori Foxworth, who appear on screen as a lounge singer and disaffected stripper, respectively. (Carroll says he always shot with a photographer’s artistic eye, avoiding any awkwardness during the 41-year-old Foxworth’s pole-dancing scenes.)
“He’s a huge advocate for minimalist filmmaking,” Schemel says of Carroll, noting that although Carroll shot the film over an extended period of time, “Nightbeats” contains none of the continuity gaps (changes in actor’s looks, etc.) that can plague such projects.
Foxworth is based in New York, but the familiarity of most of the rest of the cast to Sacramento audiences only underscores the deep ties to the local community of even a one-man filmmaking band like Carroll. Among actors with prominent roles in “Nightbeats” are Anthony D’Juan, from Capital Stage’s “Every Christmas Story Ever Told,” and Kelly Nixon, so memorable in “Rachel,” a short in last year’s festival.
Carroll was the cinematographer on “Rachel,” directed by Chris King, a producer for the promotions department at KCRA. King returns this year with the period short “The Killing of Mary Surratt,” (6 p.m. Wednesday, 2 p.m. Aug. 2) a sympathetic, impressionistic look at a woman hanged as a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination.
“Surratt” further demonstrates the maturity of the local filmmaking scene, Sheppard says, since indie filmmakers lean toward scenes of people talking in rooms.
“Heavy costume dramas or space battles or cars exploding – it would cost more to shoot one scene than a whole film,” Sheppard says. “So it’s noteworthy when you see someone like Chris come out, even in a short, and shoot a fairly authentic period costume drama.”
Though the local aspect of the festival is vital to its success, much of its programming comes from elsewhere, with Schemel and Sheppard, the event’s chief programmers, fielding hundreds of submissions each year. The festival’s reputation has grown to the extent that the powers behind the new Michael Cera film “Paper Heart” approached Schemel and Sheppard about showing the film.
A sort-of documentary in which comedian Charlyne Yi starts out making a film about love and in the process falls for nerdy heartthrob Cera (as himself), “Paper Heart” plays at 7 p.m. July 31 as an official festival entry in advance of its theatrical release.
“It was kind of fun for us, because it was the first submission we got to see on 35 millimeter,” said Schemel, who usually screens submissions on DVD.
Possibly Related Posts:
