VISIONFEST – the other festival
June 23 – 27,New York City

Originating as the Guerilla Film & Video Festival, Vision fest is now in its fourth annual edition providing a platform for emerging independents. It remains the sole East Coast Festival in the United States that showcases only productions made by US producers and directors. It launches independents rather than cherry picking them from the programs of other established festivals. Thus numerous productions and film makers first screened by the comparatively small VISIONFEST during its brief history continued their careers into established festivals and programming venues such as Sundance (FITS AND SHORT, WHOA), PBS (SHOWBIZ IS MY LIFE), IFC, the Independent Film Channel (PASSING STONES), cable TV channels ( THE NYC HANDBALL DOCUMENTARY) or received award nominations. Thus the 2003 VISIONFEST feature drama ANNE B. REAL received two Independent Spirit Award nominations.

Though there is an abundance of film festivals in the United States, that window is getting smaller for independent productions. An increasing number of festivals fill their schedules with Hollywood or Sundance Indies, that is well funded features with an ‘independent’ sales label and sizable marketing budgets or independent productions which were first screened at the Sundance film and marketing festival. Close collaboration between large festivals like Sundance and the Berlinale and associations representing independent productions, such as the Independent Feature Project (IFP) has ironically reduced venues for unattached independents. As Mark Doyle, as Visionfest’s programming director put it “Many film festivals seem to be programming many of the films that Sundance shows….In the last month I saw the program for three film festivals and the bulk of the films premiered at Sundance”. The same tendency holds for IFP’s selection of indies for the 2004 Berlinale, the slate had to be narrowed to create room for Sundance Indies, which are productions shown before at the Sundance Festival. In its selection of feature, shorts, documentaries, experimental and works-in progress productions Visionfest sticks to its original credo, to only show what has not been presented before on the East Coast thus “bringing you tomorrow’s vision today”.

Apart from the refusal to recycle festival films, Visionfest has another unique
program feature, the FIVE X FIVE NEW YORK STATE OF MIND DV PROJECT. Five fairly established New York-based film directors are selected and provided with the tools necessary to create within five days five digital shorts focusing on one New York incident. In the 2004 round the ‘2003 Black Out’ provided the guiding theme. The ‘world premiere’ of these productions by Jeff Mazzola, Eli Kabillio, Ilya Chaiken, Ethan Spigland and Tom Ellisu coincided with the closing ceremony of the festival. Similar to the pressure cooked creativity of New York’s RIP (Raw Impression Project) productions reviewed by filmfestivals.com last month, the five shorts presented at Visionfest were rather original and sometimes surpassed the quality of those selected for the main program.

From about four hundred submissions, fifty productions were selected and programmed during the festivals in fifteen thematic blocks of about two hors each, an unusual but appealing method. By and large was a good selection with some outstanding films and few of, well, of sophomoric film school graduation quality. Yet Visionfest lived up to its promise of helping to discover outstanding new talent and productions.

The best features films were FIGHT NIGHT, a film world premiering at the Visionfest, followed by the others discussed here (www.fightnitethemovie.com). FIGHT NITE presented ‘blood broken bones and scars’ from illegal underground fights organized by two bookies from their internet gambling website. Without exaggerating the film profiles the fighters with their ordinary motivations and families while depicting the bookie promoters as relating to them only as cheap and expendable commodities. This feature by directors Eli Kabillio (also executive producer) and Derek Wyburn was produced so well in a gritty documentary fashion that many spectators mistook this fiction film for a feature length documentary feature. Evidently this unusual approach, no matter how well realized, is now creating some distribution problems, though the film was already sold in a far east territory.. Vincent Stasola’s black and white feature film THE FORGOTTEN intermixed with color flash backs presents the insanity of war through the odyssey of some lost American soldiers and their tanks in the Korean war searching for their troops and killing each other in the process (www.theforgottenmovie.com). Without stereotypifications the interpersonal drama of despair, disorientation and hate is accentuated by the scarcity of props. Apart from the distracting flash backs into the main protagonist past, two tanks, and some forest sections and meadows suffice. Boris Undorff’s feature SONATA, another premiere, is a superbly acted and staged mental drama of the possessive interaction between a single mother of former literary fame for fairy tales and her artistically inclined sole adolescent daughter (www.sonatamovie.com) Living together in a large mansion, they drive each other to disintegration, blurring the lines between reality and make believe worlds, between truth and deception. As the film evolves, dialogues and visual representations diffuse for the viewers the border between the real and the imaginary. Unfortunately, the director ends the film in the most concrete fashion. Daughter poisons mother and mother, crawling on the floor, kills daughter with a gun just before rigor mortis sets in. Undorff should have followed the maxim that less is more and that understatements are more desirable than crude exaggerations. In terms of photography, acting, sets, dialog, and pacing. in short the essentials of film making, the feature CLEAN by Nyle Cavazos Garcia which concluded the Visionfest, had few if any flaws (www.nightfirefilms.com). Yet whereas the others reviewed here had a ‘mental aftermath’ prompting reflection about the guiding concept (FIGHT NIGHT), the impact of extraordinary stress (THE FORGOTTEN) and the mind’s interior landscapes (SONATA), CLEAN left no such traces, it was just enjoyable.

Claus Mueller, New York City
cmueller@hunter.cuny.edu