LITTLE ROCK — A dark comedy starring Jack Black and a Sundance Film Festival award-winning surrealist film set in the Deep South are among the late additions to next week’s Little Rock Film Festival’s lineup.
Richard Linklater’s Bernie is based on the true story of East Texas mortician Bernie Tiede (Black). The film, which also stars Matthew McConaughey, Shirley MacLaine and the late Arkansas actor Rick Dial, will be shown at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Riverdale 10.
The festival has also added Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in January, and has lately been making waves at the Cannes Film Festival. The film focuses on a 6- year-old girl named Hushpuppy and her dying father in post-apocalyptic Louisiana bayou country. Beasts screens at 8:30 p.m. Thursday and again at 4:15 p.m. June 1 at Riverdale 10.
Another late addition to the festival lineup is an Arkansas Filmmakers Forum discussion — “Hip Pocket Pitches” — designed to help prepare filmmakers so they might be able to deliver a quick but effective precis of their prospective projects at a moment’s notice, at a party, restaurant, or even a film festival.
The Arkansas Filmmakers Forum was founded by New Jersey transplant Gerry Bruno, director of the Bloodstone Diaries Web series, and panelists will include The Last Ride producer Tim Jackson and Courtney Pledger, producer of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant and co-founder of Jigsaw Films.
The event starts at 6 p.m. Wednesday in the Filmmakers Lounge at Riverdale 10 and is free and open to the public. For more information about the event, you can go to the AFF Facebook page at facebook.com/arkansasfilmmakersforum.
At 4 p.m. June 2, a panel called “Crowd-Sourcing Independent Film” will be presented to discuss the new trend in fundraising film projects with sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Many films screening at the festival were fully or partially funded by these micro-budget campaigns. Several filmmakers from out of state as well as local filmmakers involved with Indiegogo or Kickstarter will be on the panel and an ambassador from Indiegogo is scheduled to attend. Artists, filmmakers and entrepreneurs are encouraged to attend the panel and find out about the newest form of raising money for your projects online.
Another panel, “Stories for the Web Screen,” to be hosted by yours truly, will examine how the Internet is changing independent films. Several local filmmakers with their own projects built for Web will speak, including Daniel Campbell (The Orderly) on his new Web series The Paralegal starring Zach D. Turner, Graham Gordy, Roger Scott and Joey Lauren Adams; Gerry Bruno on his experience with the Bloodstone Diaries series starring Katy Allen; and viral video guru Andrew McMurray, who will discuss his YouTube channel, where some videos have gotten more than a million views.
The panel will also feature the editor in chief of the YouTube subscription channel My Damn Channel, Maria Diokno. My Damn Channel features hundreds of videos showcasing famous comedic talent such as Josh Gad (Book of Mormon), David Wain (Role Models) and David Cross (Arrested Development). The panel is scheduled for 1 p.m. June 1 at the Riverdale 10 theater in the Filmmakers Lounge.
For more information on the festival, panels and films, visit littlerockfilmfestival. org.
Levi Agee is a programmer for the Little Rock Film Festival. E-mail him at:
levifilm@gmail.com
MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 05/25/2012