The 2019 Berkshire International Film Festival: A Lineup Of Legends and Local Subjects
This year's festival honors acclaimed director Martin Scorsese, and gives "Museum Town" its Berkshires debut.
Director Martin Scorsese will be honored on Saturday, June 1.
Much like music lovers wait impatiently for the summer lineup to be announced at Tanglewood, and theatergoers are giddy to know the big names who will appear at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, film buffs look forward to finding out which movies will be screened and who will be honored at the annual Berkshire International Film Festival.
Well, BIFF’s 2019 lineup has been announced and this year’s honoree is none other than legendary director Martin Scorsese, who will appear in conversation with director Kent Jones at the Mahaiwe on Saturday, June 1 at 7:30 p.m. The discussion will be followed by a screening of Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence, starring Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver.
BIFF Founder and Artistic Director Kelley Vickery is, of course, excited about the entire roster of events at this year’s fest, which runs from Thursday, May 30 to Sunday, June 2 at The Triplex and The Mahaiwe in Great Barrington and The Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield, but she picked out a handful of highlights to share with us.
This year there will be four Tea Talks, which are a chance for audiences to hear from those involved with the film or the film’s subject matter, post screening. A showing of The Biggest Little Farm, on Friday, May 31, will be followed by a panel discussion with its filmmaker, Bonnie Hawthorne, along with Margaret Moulton of Berkshire Grown, and local farmers Will Conklin, Jen Salinetti, Sean Stanton and Dicken Crane. Also screening on Friday is Weed the People, which tells the stories of families around the country struggling to obtain cannabis oil to help their children who are suffering from cancer. Filmmaker Abby Epstein will join Theory Wellness CEO Brandon Pollock for a talk following the film. On Saturday, June 1, the documentary This Changes Everything, which tackles gender disparity in the entertainment industry, will be followed by a panel discussion featuring women from the film and TV industry. On the final day of the festival, Director Andrew Slater and Executive Producer Dan Braun will be at the Mahaiwe to talk about their film, Echo in the Canyon, which takes a look back at the abundance of singer/songwriters of the mid 1960s who called Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon home.
Opening night and closing night, both held at the Mahaiwe, will be local-centric bookends to this homegrown festival. Opening the fest is What She Said, which tells the story of longtime New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. Kael, says Vickery, revolutionized film criticism and was a real force as a women in a very male-dominated world. “People really wanted to know what she thought,” says Vickery. “She was a real champion of the genre.” In her later years, Kael made her home in Great Barrington and her movie theater of choice was the very place her documentary will screen, the Mahaiwe. Director Rob Garver, and writers Craig Seligman and Stephanie Zacharek will all be in attendance for a Q&A session following the film.
Closing night focuses on a topic of enormous significance to northern Berkshire County — the creation of MASS MoCA. Museum Town is directed by current Hancock Shaker Village executive director and CEO, and former MASS MoCA public relations head, Jennifer Trainer. This will be the Berkshire premiere of the film, which was screened at SXSW in March and the Sarasota Film Festival just last month.
“I’ve been wanting to make this film for 11 years,” says Trainer when asked if Museum Town was meant to coincide with the museum’s 20th anniversary this year. “I’d been working on it since 2015, but films take a long time,” she says. This is Trainer’s first foray into directing and taking on the biography of the largest contemporary art museum in the country, even one with which you’ve been intimately involved, is daunting.
“I wanted to tackle its history but also what the museum is today,” Trainer says. The actual filming of Museum Town coincided with the installation of artist Nick Cave’s Until, an exhibit Trainer calls “big, complicated and overwhelming.”
“It was really kismet that our timing coincided," she says. "We were so fortunate to be there when he first saw building 5 empty.” The museum’s largest gallery, Building 5 is the size of a football field and, for most artists, the largest space they’ve ever had to fill at that point in their careers.
The history of MASS MoCA has been told before, so Trainer focused on five characters that she says may seem unsuspecting, but that represent different parts of the museum’s history: artist Nick Cave, curator Denise Markonish, fabricator Richard Criddle, a woman who once worked at Sprague Electric then became a volunteer at the museum, and the buildings. “I felt strongly that the buildings were a character. It’s not a logical layout; what’s so beautiful is it’s really like a Medieval city. I tried to weave the timeline of an artist with the four other people and the historic footage in an unusual way.”
Former Mass. Governor Jane Swift, the film’s music supervisor John Stirratt, and Museum Town subject Richard Criddle will join Trainer for a post-screening discussion.
Berkshire International Film Festival
Thursday, May 30 – Sunday, June 2
Great Barrington and Pittsfield, MA
