Lights, camera, action and community
A couple years ago, the Northampton Film Festival got a reboot, with organizers saying they wanted to break away from the traditional format of people passively viewing movies. The goal was to look at the different means of storytelling in the digital age and throw in some community-themed events: a filmmaking class, virtual reality experiences, short films and other features.
That format remains in place this weekend as the 2018 Northampton Film Festival returns with multiple events at different downtown venues, including The Parlor Room and the Community Arts Trust building at 33 Hawley Street. The festival, which opened Thursday evening, offers 15 different events and dozens of films from Friday, Nov. 16 through Sunday, Nov. 18.
On Friday, you can delve into history with “Josiah,” an acclaimed documentary about Josiah Henson, who was born into slavery in Maryland in 1789 but escaped to Canada in 1830 to become an author, abolitionist and minister. The free screening will be followed by a Q&A with the film’s director, Jared Brock.
The 2018 festival, organized by Valley filmmakers, Northampton Community Television, movie fans and others, has put particular emphasis on short films, animated clips, experimental work and films that cross genres, such as a Sunday showing at 33 Hawley Street of “Field of Repose,” which mixes documentary filmmaking and sci-fi elements to examine overlooked environmental devastation in Iowa.
Along more straightforward lines, there’s “Shoplifters,” a new film from Japan that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year. The story follows a poor Japanese family that sometimes shoplifts to make ends meet, but which also takes in a homeless girl who shows signs of having been abused.
What else? You can check out a local music video party, the filmmaking class or a late-night screening of “Repo Man,” the 1984 cult film that starred Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton. Tickets are $10 for one day of films or $25 for the whole weekend, and $90 for the filmmaking workshop; visit northamptonfilmfestival.com to purchase them or for additional information.
A different kind of storytelling
It’s no secret that farming isn’t easy. But it also has tremendous appeal to the people who do it, and it’s pretty vital for feeding the vast majority of us who don’t.
You can hear directly from some area farmers and others who work with food on Sunday, Nov. 18 at Northampton’s Academy of Music. At “Field Notes,” a 2 p.m. show put together by CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture), 10 farmers, cooks and local food activists will talk about how their lives have been shaped by growing up on a farm or making food production a center of their raison d’être.
Phil Korman, CISA’s executive director, says the organization has worked with the presenters to help shape their stories, which will each be about five minutes long. These aren’t performance pieces, Korman notes, but neither are they “dry reports” from people’s lives: rather they’re very personal stories that can have an emotional wallop.
“For example,” Korman noted in an email, “one of the farmers is going to be telling a story about growing up on a dairy farm in Western Mass and how in the 1980s they had to stand by and watch as the bank took away the herd.”
Then there’s Nan Parati’s tale. The former New Orleans resident lost her house and almost all she owned in Hurricane Katrina in 2005; she ended up in Ashfield, where she turned a vacant, 19th-century country store into the popular Elmers, a cafe, gathering place and sometimes music venue — but only after “winning the trust of neighbors and farmers,” Korman notes.
Tickets for “Field Notes,” which will be hosted by Monte Belmonte from WRSI The River, are $15 and can be purchased online at www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1749269 or by calling the academy box office at (413) 584-9032, ext. 105.
— Steve Pfarrer