Story by Chris Graham 

The Virginia Film Festival is getting ready for what will be its 20th annual event. Which means Richard Herskowitz has some planning to do.

“We’re really wanting to make this year’s festival spectacular,” said Herskowitz, a University of Virginia professor who has served as the director of the film festival since 1994.

The festival has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception in 1988. The 2006 festival drew nearly 15,000 theatergoers - and featured special appearances by actors Morgan Freeman and Robert Duvall and actor-director Liev Schreiber, among others.

The film festival has seen steady growth in spite of the fact that its home base on Grounds at UVa. in Charlottesville “isn’t the easiest place in the world to get to,” Herskowitz said.

“It’s not like film festivals that are in New York and Toronto and L.A. that are easy to get to,” Herskowitz said. “What we have as our calling card has been this reputation that’s grown that audiences here are extremely intelligent, that the discussions are fantastic, and that the filmmakers who come really come away feeling kind of inspired and re-energized.”

The film festival was focused from the start at inspiring and energizing the growth of the state’s fledgling film industry and at the same time the University’s fledgling media-studies department.

“From the university’s standpoint, what was offered here was really an original concept for a film festival that was going to be more of a mix of education and entertainment. The concept was that each year, the festival would choose a theme - and create kind of a massive four-day course on that theme with a variety of premieres and classics and documentaries and experimental films, and lots of guest speakers,” Herskowitz said.

“One thing that would do is it would really fill a vacuum at UVa., which at the time didn’t have much of a film-studies program. But also what it would do is it would really create a kind of unique retreat here for the people in the film industry, and entice them to come for this kind of reflection on the purposes of filmmaking,” Herskowitz said.

The annual get-together has served, as intended, as a springboard for the Virginia Film Office to try to attract moviemakers to the Old Dominion.

“Sydney Pollack, who came a few years ago, flew in himself in his plane. And while he was here, the Virginia Film Office escorted him around - he was looking for locations to shoot his film, ‘Cold Mountain,’ and of course a good bit of that film ended up being shot here. That is sort of the standard operating procedure. Whenever there is a filmmaker who is coming who has productions in the pipeline, the Virginia Film Office will frequently escort them and introduce them to the area while they’re at the festival,” Herskowitz said.

The festival has also benefited the University.

“We’re now affiliated with the media-studies program at the university - and over the last couple of years, we’ve introduced these new classes that students can take in the supplemental offerings that the university has,” said Herskowitz, noting the creation in 2004 of the Adrenaline Film Project, in which students have the opportunity to participate in a three-day film-production workshop led by director Jeff Wadlow and his producing and writing partner Beau Bauman in which they work together to write a film on the first day, shoot it on the second day and edit it on the third day, and then screen the film on the final day of the film festival.

“What we’re trying to do is use the way the festival, which is such an attraction to film professionals, to make their talents available to students at the university,” Herskowitz said.

Those educational benefits are also beginning to benefit the Charlottesville-Albemarle community at large.

“We’re encouraging audiences not just to pay attention to the latest type of productions - but to think and reflect about the sources of contemporary film, the approaches from different foreign cinemas,” Herskowitz said. “We really do think that we’re sort of bucking the trend of a lot of the film festivals around the country, which are entirely devoted to premieres. We really try to both produce a more sophisticated audience, and also produce filmmakers with a kind of a richer heritage.

“If you look at the most important and innovative filmmakers in the U.S. in recent years, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino and others, they really have a rich knowledge of film history - and they bring to bear their knowledge of foreign films and classic films, and that’s what leads them to innovate their American films,” Herskowitz said.

“People who have been involved with this film festival always have believed that - that filmmakers need to be exposed to other traditions just so that they can get new ideas and perspectives to kind of shake up the norms and the conventions of American filmmaking. And in fact it’s been these kind of crosscultural intersections that have really revitalized American film many times through its history,” Herskowitz said.

Filed under: 8-January 2007 Issue