Screen gems

By The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

LITTLE ROCK — The eighth annual Ozark Foothills FilmFest, taking place March 25-29 in Batesville, will feature the premiere of The River Within

,

a drama shot along the Spring River with a largely Arkansas cast and crew. Director and Arkansas native Zac Heath will join members of the cast and crew for the screening.

Other Arkansas filmmakers and their work include Margaret LeJeune, a Lyon College art teacher, who will present Bottle of Wine, a short comedy about a dinner invitation that leads to a wine shopping nightmare; University of Central Arkansas film teacher Mike Gunter (Memories of Viola); and Jacksonville filmmaker Levi Agee (What Happened to My Brother). Woodpecker, a narrative feature inspired by the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, was filmed in and around Brinkley.

The festival will screen several music documentaries including Johnny Cash's America by music historian Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, and Throw Down Your Heart, which follows banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck on a musical odyssey to Africa in search of his instrument's African roots.

Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans takes a tour of the neighborhood where jazz was born. Narrator and co-director Lolis Eric Elie, a columnist for New Orleans' Times-Picayune, will attend the screening with singer/songwriter John Boutte, whose "Treme Song" closes the film. A seventhgeneration Creole, Boutte will perform at Independence Hall on March 28.

Israeli filmmaker Pola Zen will attend to present her short family drama Dolls and Houses.

Also offered are Organic Frederick and Fridays at the Farm, two documentaries about the farm to table food movement;

the second annual Screenwriting Competition awards; a panel on the future of newspaper film critics with Philip Martin of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Noel Murray of the online Onion A-V Club and Rob Grace of Arkansas Weekly; and receptions and social gatherings.

For more information visit www.ozarkfoothillsfi lmfest.

org or call (870) 251-1189.

The Buffalo Flows, a documentary by Fayetteville filmmaker Larry Foley, is the featured film of the eighth annual University of Arkansas at Monticello Documentary Film Festival, March 11-12.

The festival, which will showcase 12 films, is free and open to the pubic as part of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute's outreach program to make fine films available to a wider viewing audience. Films will be shown from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the auditorium of the Memorial Classroom Building.

Other films include Is You Is: A Louis Jordan Story on the life of the musician and Brinkley native; No End in Sight, which examines the war in Iraq nearly five years after President George W. Bush declared an end to combat; La Couracion, narratives from Ecuador; Bending Space, featuring a French artist who transforms downtown Durham, N.C.; Montana deLuz, the story of Honduran orphans;

Charles' Farm, which follows a suburban kid who moves to a farm to live off the land; Stairway to Heaven, how the loss of an ancient work of sacred art shook the art world; I Can Tell the World, about an interracial choir committed to the preservation and performance of music born in slavery; Two Worlds-One Planet, which examines how children with Asperger's syndrome and autism learn; Return to Sender, a short about Cubans returned to Fort Chaffee as a result of the 1980 Cuban Muriel Boat Lift; and Crawford, the story of what happened to the residents of Crawford, Texas, when President George W. Bush moved to town.

For more information call the UAM School of Arts and Humanities at (870) 460-1078.

MovieStyle, Pages 37 on 02/27/2009