Sayles to headline Film Festival

Virginia Film Festival director Richard Herskowitz announced this morning that Academy Award-nominated writer and director John Sayles will headline opening night of this year's celebration. The man behind such acclaimed movies as Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Lone Star will be screening his latest, Honeydripper– a story starring Danny Glover about a blues club in rural Alabama in the 1950s– at the Paramount Theater on November 1. The 7pm show is one of this year's 70 films with the family-focused theme, "Kin Flicks."

Sayles is one of eight directors who will get the "Focus On" treatment at this year's festival, a new program looking at the entire careers of certain filmmakers, usually with screenings of multiple films. Among the filmmakers who will be making featured appearances are

-Charles Burnett, a MacArthur Fellow whose focus on African-American culture has led him to make such groundbreaking films as Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding, both of which will be shown at the festival.

-Tamara Jenkins, who won critical and audience praise for her 1998 dark family comedy, Slums of Beverly Hills. Jenkins will exhibit her latest, The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, which has already generated talk of Oscar consideration.

-Nick Broomfield, the documentary filmmaker who made Kurt and Courtney and Aileen Wuornos: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer (which inspired Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning turn in Monster), and who has recently turned to making feature films in the cinema verité style. He will show his two experiments in that genre, Ghosts, about Chinese immigrant workers in England, and The Battle for Haditha, about the Iraq war.

At this morning's press conference, Herskowitz said he chose the "Kin Flicks" theme in part because of the amendment Virginians voted into the state constitution last November, defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. "The law and the legislature is a realm of certitude on what constitutes a family," he explained. "Film is a realm of uncertainty. Films ask questions, including, 'What is a family?'"

Additionally, Herskowitz expressed his excitement about securing screenings of such as-yet-unreleased films as The Savages, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, directed by Sidney Lumet), and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (a French film directed by painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel). Herskowitz says these will give festival-goers plenty of "I saw it when" stories.

"People are going to see the films that are going to be the big Oscar contenders over the next year; we've got most of them," he said.

Although Robert Duvall and Morgan Freeman graced last year's festival, so far there are no equally famous names in this year's lineup. But Herskowitz doesn't think the lack of name recognition will dampen attendance at the scheduled films. "I'm exposing people to these artists, but this is a very sophisticated, educated town," he said.

Still, at the end of his press conference, Herskowitz made sure to note, "We're not done with all our announcements yet."

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