April 2002

Reprinted from the Boston Film and Video Foundation's Inter-Visions

The 10th Providence Festival of New Latin-American Cinema, April 19 - 27, aims to showcase the best of the best in Latin-American Cinema. And the festival’s director, Marcos Antonio, isn’t shy about telling you that.

"It’s going to be the event of the year," says Antonio, who has been with the non-profit organization since 1998. "Everyone is welcome and everyone will have an amazing time."

Anyone who took a wrong turn in the Berkshires and ended up in the North Adams, Massachusetts, of ten years ago would have found a run-down old factory town, with 70 percent of Main Street’s storefronts empty and boarded up warehouses galore, broken windows and all. But if you’ve visited the town lately, the first thing you might see is the new Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) located in a rehabbed, grand old factory, its entrance adorned with an installation of upside-down trees suspended in midair.

Writer/director Holly Angell Hardman is currently screening "Besotted," her first feature, and her first 35mm film. On screen, she also plays a sorceress cum matchmaker who manipulates the lives and loves of a handful of characters in a small New England town.

"Besotted" is a modern love story, as Hardman’s alter ego and her two accomplices cynically proclaim. More to the point, it’s a story about power, manipulation, and the tragedy that can result.

Until recently, the luck of the Irish has largely bypassed its film industry. After an auspicious start, Irish cinema was left to languish by a conservative Irish state that viewed popular culture with suspicion. However, while the government offered little support to its indigenous industry, it was happy to open its doors to foreign production. As a result, cinematic Ireland has largely been defined by non-Irish filmmakers, drawn to the easy clichés of green fields, stone cottages, and flame-haired colleens exemplified in John Ford’s read more...

Open doors are traditionally rare in the movie business, but each spring Boston-area residents and filmmakers get an inside look at the inner workings of the local film industry through the groundbreaking collaborative effort of the Filmmakers Open Studios organizers.

Cinematography, like any other creative craft, is a discipline of study, and a discipline of vision, persistence, and openness to experimentation.

First, let’s discuss what a cinematographer does. Obviously, a cinematographer operates a motion picture camera to capture moving images. That is only part of what they do, but it is a cinematographer’s most fundamental task. Most anyone with a few hours of training can produce motion picture images that are reasonably well-focused and satisfactory in exposure.

The recent re-release of "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" sparked a torrent of critical re-examination of the film, largely revolving around the theme of a quest for home. On a more modest screen, Ravi Jain, a 2001 graduate of MassArt and a Boston-based conceptual artist, has developed what he calls an "Internet-friendly" sitcom, "Three-Abreast." The action is centered in the Jamaica Plain home Jain created with roommates Sarah Shreeves and Brian Pearson.

Juan Mandelbaum founded Massachusetts’s first independent Latino media company, Geovision, Inc., in 1989. Mandelbaum, who has worked in media production for over twenty years, says that he wanted to utilize his "knowledge of different cultures to create effective and entertaining messages." He succeeded by specializing in multilingual and multicultural production.