For many years, filmmaker and UVA film professor Kevin Jerome Everson has figured prominently in Charlottesville’s moviemaking community. His experimental films have continually bypassed cinematic conventions in favor of “formal exercises,” he explains. A regular Virginia Film Festival guest, Everson will screen nine shorts on Friday, “all shot this calendar year,” he notes, and marked […]
For many years, filmmaker and UVA film professor Kevin Jerome Everson has figured prominently in Charlottesville’s moviemaking community. His experimental films have continually bypassed cinematic conventions in favor of “formal exercises,” he explains. A regular Virginia Film Festival guest, Everson will screen nine shorts on Friday, “all shot this calendar year,” he notes, and marked […]
Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner arrived at the University of Virginia more than 60 years ago to begin his tenure as the first writer-in-residence. During his time in Charlottesville, Faulkner visited English classes, kept office hours, worked on his novel The Mansion, and left a lasting impact on the area’s literary, and wine, scene (His […]
This year’s Virginia Film Festival features Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a new documentary that chronicles the life, work, and enduring legacy of the titular poet. Going to Mars has already garnered much buzz: At its Sundance premiere earlier this year, the film received the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary award. Produced and […]
Things have changed a lot since Ricardo Preve arrived at the bus station in Charlottesville in 1977 without money or a passport. There weren’t many Latinos in town then, and he found the locals welcoming, if ignorant about Latin America. “It was so easy to become a citizen in the ’80s,” recalls Preve. When he […]
A decade-spanning love story, a curmudgeonly prep school teacher’s Christmas break, a musical documentary—the 2023 Virginia Film Festival features a variety of moving, lyrical, and laugh-out-loud cinema across its 120-plus programs. The festival takes place from October 25–29 at various theaters around Charlottesville, opening with Bradley Cooper’s highly-anticipated Maestro, which focuses on the relationship between […]
Writer/director/producer Dustin Lance Black’s films and television work—including his Academy Award-winning Milk script—are frequently outspoken about LGBTQ+ issues. The Mormon Church also resurfaces throughout his work, as in the hit FX series “Under the Banner of Heaven.” The two topics merge in director Laurent Bouzereau’s new documentary Mama’s Boy, which focuses on Black and his […]
With a prime-time Virginia film fest screening at the Paramount Theater, the movie Stay Awake has made longtime Charlottesville resident Jamie Sisley an indie-festival darling again. Sisley first produced Stay Awake, which chronicles a family’s struggles with a mother’s addiction, in 2015 as an award-winning short. After securing Best Narrative Short honors at the Slamdance […]
The first use of a black panther in the Black power movement didn’t start in Oakland, California. The symbol came from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, where 80 percent of the population was Black and none were registered to vote, a place nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes.” Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, […]
Joyce Chopra, known for her documentary, television, and filmmaking career, recounts her experiences in a new no-holds-barred memoir,Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and Beyond. But it wasn’t until she read her book’s promo blurbs that Chopra says she understood she had completed “a history of how hard it was for women to ever get […]
Descendant The United States outlawed international slave trade in 1808, but more than a half century later a ship called the Cotilda smuggled a group of enslaved Africans into Mobile, Alabama. The expedition was illegally chartered by a plantation owner named Timothy Meaher, who ordered the Cotilda be burned and sunk to hide all evidence […]