Happy Valley, the festival’s opening-night film, 7:30 p.m. May 12, Ron Robinson Theater; filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev (My Kid Could Paint That, The Fighter, The Tillman Story) is special guest.
This film takes a look at Happy Valley, an area whose heartland is State College, Pa., where Pennsylvania State University is located. “Its iconic figure for more than 40 years, Joe Paterno, the head coach of the school’s football team, took on mythic national stature as ‘Saint Joe,’” according to the synopsis on the festival website. “But in November 2011, everything came crashing down when former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was charged with child sex abuse.” Bar-Lev filmed the documentary over the course of the year following Sandusky’s arrest. The movie is free to Gold Pass Holders. Other pass holders need a separate ticket. Alimited number of individual tickets are available for $35 which includes an after party.
“Amir is one of the top documentary filmmakers working and somebody we have always wanted to bring to Little Rock,” says festival co-founder Brent Renaud. He says the film “also celebrates what is great about college football. There are a lot of things in this film that Razorback fans will really relate to,both good and bad.”
Manakamana, winner of a 2013 Golden Leopard Award, Cinema of the Present category, Locarno Film Festival.
Directors Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s film follows pilgrims making a journey by cable car (in which the film was shot) to worship at Nepal’s Manakamana temple. The film is a part of the festival’s new Cinematic Non-Fiction event and emerges from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, source ofthe award-winning Leviathan.
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (In English and Japanese with English subtitles), winner of a U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Musical Score at the 2014 Sundance Festival.
Directed by Austin, Texas-based filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner, the movie is about an office worker who, on her own time, “obsessively watches a well-known American film [Fargo] on a weathered VHS tape,” maps out the location of stashed treasure depicted in the film and sets out for Minnesota to find it.
Little Accidents, whose world premiere was at Sundance. Directed by Sara Colangelo and starring Arkansas native Jacob Lofland, it focuses on three residents of an Appalachian coal mining town whose lives become “inexplicably tangled in a web of secrets” after a tragic mining accident. Lofland is tentatively scheduled to attend the May 13 screening at Arkansas Repertory Theatre.
Rich Hill, winner of the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance, is “an examination of challenges, hopes and dreams of the young residents of a rural American town,” according to the film website. It is produced and directed by Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo.
Devil’s Knot (closing night film), 8:30 p.m. May 18, Ron Robinson Theater; limited number of tickets at $15 each available to non-festival pass holders. Starring Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth, Devil’s Knot is based on the nonfiction book by Arkansas author Mara Leveritt. The film looks at the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis and explores the subsequent investigation and trials through the eyes of an investigator and the mother of one of the victims. Devil’s Knot is directed by Academy Award nominee Atom Egoyan.
Style, Pages 54 on 05/04/2014