40 Films in Four Days in Kent
Posted by: Dan Shaw
Posted on: Monday, March 24, 2008
Comments
My first job in NYC was working at Maysles Films. When I first moved to the city, I knew no one and somehow ended up staying with the Maysles family for a month at the Dakota apartments. What a surreal experience. At the Maysles’ penthouse loft office, my desk was next to Al’s—he used to sleep under his desk at lunch. It was an interesting place to say the least—trapped in the 70’s. One day, one of the directors came in in a panic saying that one of the Christo paintings that was on the wall was missing (potentially a $75,000 loss). We found it 2 weeks later…it had fallen behind the couch. About a month ago, I went to my first Maysles Alumni Reunion get together (which has been happening for years) at a bar in NY. The amount of people that showed up was amazing after all these years. Something holds them together. I haven’t seen Al in almost 20 years, but part of me wants to head down to Kent say hi this weekend.
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Full Article
You’d think that a town without a proper movie theater would have a tough time pulling off a serious film festival, but the arts community of Kent, CT, does not let that inconvenient detail get in its way. “It requires a lot of imagination,” says Frank Galterio, who founded the festival three years ago. “We’re still wondering how we’ve we done it. The first year we had two six-by-eight screens. Now, we have one that is nine-by-twelve and one that is ten-by-sixteen, plus three other screening rooms.”
Beginning on Thursday, March 27, Kent will show 40 films in four-days, and host panels and workshops for anyone who loves movies. The festival kicks off with a screening of Doughboy [trailer below], the story of two brothers and their family’s bakery in the Bronx, which was directed by Louis Lombardi, who played federal agent Skip Lipari on The Sopranos.
One of the festival’s highlights is a master class on Saturday afternoon with Albert Maysles, the dean of American documentarians, whose films include Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter.“There are only a few tickets left for that,” says Galterio. 
And on Friday night, the premier of A.D. Calvo’s The Other Side of the Tracks will be followed by a Q&A with Tony- and Emmy-award winning actress Shirley Knight, who is in the film. Saturday night’s big film is Josseph Merhi’s Oranges, a drama about five families who each have a ten-year-old son on the same soccer team; the cast of Oranges includes Heather Locklear, Jill Hennessy, Orson Bean and Tom Arnold.
Galterio, who had a film in the first festival, no longer has time to make movies himself. “This has become a full-time job for me,” he says. “As soon as this one is over, I have to start organizing next year’s.”
Tickets are $8 for individual films; a full-day pass for Saturday or Sunday is $35; for $195, you can purchase a pass that gets you into all screenings, workshops, panels, and parties. Click here for the complete lineup.
