January 2003

Email news to news@newenglandfilm.com. 

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival will run January 23-30, 2003 in Boston, MA. The festival screens fiction, documentary, and animated films and videos with a distinctive Human Rights theme. For more information please visit www.hrw.org/iff/2003/index.html. 

While Johanna Dery was a film student at the Rhode Island School of Design, she was bothered that so little work by women was screened in her classes. "There was a real lack of scope in the films I was shown," she says.

Dery decided to take matters into her own hands and programmed a women’s film series, showing 20 films each semester. Now Dery has brought her idea to a broader audience, as the founder and director of the Providence Women’s Film Festival (PWFF).

"Imagine a world without sound... Imagine a world without sight... Now put those two worlds together," begins the documentary "Touching Lives: Portraits of Deaf-Blind People." Narrated by deaf-blind advocate, Susan Hajjar, who wrote and produced the film with Myles Gordon, "Touching Lives" invites hearing-sighted audiences to share the experiences of members one of the most mysterious and misunderstood cultures in Boston -- the culture of the hearing and vision impaired. The breakthrough documentary makes a read more...

With four films under her belt and a list of honors that includes a Student Academy Award, Laura Dunn has built up an impressive résumé for someone who never "in her wildest dreams" planned on making movies. In fact, the 27 year-old ecological filmmaker thought her work lay on the other side of the camera; "what I did was acting," Dunn explains, her clear, expressive voice suggesting her skill as a thespian. But having attended Yale to study drama, she gradually found her aspirations diverted by New Haven’s jarring economic disparities.

Whether replicating every last detail of the ocean liner in "Titanic"; bringing a fantasy world to life in "The Lord of The Rings"; conveying a mood of drab workplace dreariness in "The Apartment"; or inventing a vision of the future in "2001: A Space Odyssey" all these films share something in common. Each of their distinct looks blossomed forth from inside the mind of a production designer. Do you like spending an entire day wandering through flea markets looking for that perfect read more...

"Last Just Man"

Director Laurel Chiten says that she "keeps making the same film over and over again." Of course, the parallels between Chiten’s stories of alien abductees, individuals with Tourette’s Syndrome, and a Jewish writer and group of rabbis on a trip to meet the Dalai Lama may not seem obvious, but each is driven by the search for a sense of connection, Chiten explains.