Independent cinema seems to be popping up everywhere, even in an uncompleted park that remains Orange County's largest public works project.
Witness the weekly Independent & Inspired Film Series, which debuts this evening at the Orange County Great Park, skips a Thursday (Oct. 11) and then picks up every Thursday through Nov. 15.
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See also:
SoCal Film Festival Continues Online Through Oct. 7
Ernest Borgnine's Last Flick (and NBFF Fave) is Theater-Bound; Festival Accepting Submissions
The park's Palm Court Arts Complex is hosting award-winning short films each evening of the run, through the curating prowess of the Irvine International Film Festival. Recommended for
high school students or older, the programs include people involved in the making of the films participating in discussions with the audience.
While it's free (so is parking!), seating is limited and you need a pass distributed at 6:30 p.m. before the first short rolls a half hour later to guarantee you'll have a place to sit.
Here is the program:
Good Men Trailer from brian connors on Vimeo.
TONIGHT: Deep Blue Breath,
winner of Best Short Film at the 2011 New York Independent
International Film and Video Festival. Directed by Patricia Cardoso, it follows a boy named Clay deep inside his
body to an animated dream world where he engages in battle against the
Evil Lord Vater and his army of Kuk-nuks. Meanwhile, in the waking
world, a medical team struggles to save Clay's life; Good Men, directed
by Brian Connors, which focuses on elderly men (Ed
Asner and Mark Rydell) who get into a serious argument over the
circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attacks on The World Trade Center; 6 Gun,
directed by Hebron Simckes-Joffe, which is about a man who seeks revenge from a former friend and gubernatorial candidate who kidnapped his child and murdered his wife. Cardoso, Connors and Simckes-Joffe are scheduled to participate in the post-screening Q&A.
OCT. 18: To Rest in Peace, from director Fawaz Al-Matrouk, is about a Kuwaiti man who passes two bodies left unburied during the Iraqi Invasion of 1990. Unable to fit his head around why the bodies have been left in the open to rot, he buries them himself; Mossadegh, directed by Roozbeh Dadvand, is named after democratic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who was overthrown in a CIA-orchestrated coup. Still under house arrest six years later, in 1959, Mossadegh must decide whether to trust a brilliant American physician sent to treat him; Love at First Sight, directed by Michael Davies, is a U.K. import that delves into whether Arthur (John Hurt) really has experienced the titular phenomenon when it comes to Ruth (Phyllida Law); The Potential Wives of Norman Mao, directed by
Derek Nguyen, follows the desperate parents of an overweight and socially awkward junior
businessman from Hong Kong taking their 33-year-old son on an
international junket to find a worthy Chinese wife. Al-Matrouk and Dadvand are expected for the Q&A.
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The Maker – Trailer from Zealous Creative on Vimeo.
OCT. 25: The Maker, directed by Christopher Kezelos, is about a strange creature racing against time; The Burying Beetle, directed by Dave Rock, has a
boy coping with his father's impending death and befriending a pastor who convinces him that his dad must be baptized to save
his soul. Too bad daddy's an avowed atheist . . .; Nanuq, directed by Jill Jones, follows a young girl plagued by illness in a cold, unforgiving land until help arrives. Your Q&A guests: Kezelos and Rock.
NOV. 1: The Desperate,, directed by Ben Hur Sepehr, has a Nazi general pleading with a condemned Jewish doctor at a concentration camp to save his only son who is dying; Walter, directed by Jonathan Browning, has a lonely widower, scorned by family and friends, finding companionship in an unlikely place; The Carrier, directed by Scott Schaeffer, follows a grieving mother dealing with the loss of her philandering son–and discovering a secret that gives her a new understanding of his behavior. Q&A'ing you are Sepehr, Browning and Schaeffer.
NOV. 8: Love, At Last, directed by Alexander Jeffery, has a celebrity couple in the late 1950s reflecting on their past; Lost Player, directed by Nicolas Alvarez of Canyon View Elementary School in Irvine, follows a young boy on a grand adventure to find his lost cleats; Test Subject B, directed by D.B. Hansen, has a 10-year-old boy genius building a time machine to avoid yet another family move; Shanghai Love Market, directed by Craig
Rosenthal, is a comedy centering on Shanghai's famous Peoples' Park, where parents
seek matches for their unwed children. Jeffery and Alvarez are to be on hand for the Q&A.
NOV. 15: It's not a short, it's the 107-minute Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, directed
by Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler and about the hella awesome band that rose in the Reagan era, fell hard and is now up dusting itself off. Anderson and Metzler are scheduled to be on hand for a special question and answer session.
For more information, visit www.ocgp.org or call 866.829.3829.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.
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