Quality of festival films on rise

“Art and Copy,” a study of pervasive popular advertising, hits West County screens only a month after it played at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. “Motherland,” a tale of six grieving mothers who journey to Africa, plays Sebastopol before it plays at the big South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin next week.

“This year we really made an effort to go after some of the big first-run films,” says program director Jason Perdue. “At that point, you start realizing the hierarchy in the film-festival world. We competed with some pretty big festivals for some films and we had to make some concessions like calling films ‘sneak previews.’”

Perdue likes to call the fledgling documentary film fest “an up-and-coming up-and-coming festival.”

“We know we’re small and not really on the map, but we’re doing what we can to create a real festival here.”

It means that he now has the freedom to pass on less polished homegrown docs, which cover very popular local topics and “would have sold out in five minutes, but they just weren’t as good as other films we were looking at.

“We were really careful about that. We wanted to create an environment for filmmakers to come and for the audience, and to show what really good documentary filmmaking is like and not just pander to what they might buy tickets to.”

Founded by San Francisco documentary filmmaker Eliza Hemenway, who moved to Sebastopol with a vision of bringing strong independent films to the West County, the festival sold about 70 percent of its screenings in its first year. Subjects like the organic food movement and music documentaries did well at the inaugural showing.

This year, it’s all over the map, from Alaska to Australia, with a Latino program, a thematic program honoring International Women’s Day and a special presentation by an Academy Award-winning documentary composer.

But no matter the topic, says Perdue, “the biggest difference between the films that are really good and the ones that don’t make the cut is the amount of time and care they spend with their subjects.”

The perfect example is the festival critics’ prize winner, “School Play,” a candid look at the trials and tribulations of a troupe of fifth graders staging “Wizard of Oz” in upstate New York. “You can tell there was so much time spent with the kids, without the cameras rolling, just hanging out with them and getting to know them,” says Perdue.

His sleeper pick of the festival is “Heavy Load,” the tale of a British punk band that includes several members who are developmentally disabled.

“It seems like the director spent like four years with this band,” Perdue says. “One of the guys, the drummer who has Down’s syndrome, is just one of the most engaging characters. As he starts to realize the limitations of his life and the things he wants to do and his dreams, it just becomes this amazing film.”

— John Beck