Virginia Film Festival Opens Today in Charlottesville with ‘Loving’
Academy Award-winning actor Colin Firth and Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe will be on hand tonight to launch the 29th annual Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville with a screening of Loving, a narrative feature film telling the story of Caroline County’s Mildred and Richard Loving, whose mixed-race marriage led to their arrest and imprisonment and eventually a Supreme Court decision that ruled prohibitions on such marriages unconstitutional.
Loving v. Virginia was the case in which the trial judge in Virginia, Leon Bazile, ruled that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws in 1967.
Firth is one of the producers of Loving, and a post-screening discussion will feature director Jeff Nichols and actor Ruth Negga, who portrays Mildred Loving. Other members of the cast include Joel Edgerton as Richard Loving, Nick Kroll as attorney and future House of Delegates member Bernie Cohen, Michael Shannon as photographer Grey Villet, and David Jensen as Judge Bazile. The Lovings’ story has already been the subject of a well-received 2011 documentary film, as well as a TV movie 20 years ago. This feature, screening at 7 p.m. at the historic Paramount Theater, is expected to gain a lot of critical attention during movie awards season.
Films with political import will be sprinkled throughout the festival, including The War Room, a documentary about the 1992 presidential election campaign by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. The two filmmakers will take part in a discussion moderated by Larry Sabato of the UVA Center for Politics, along with political consultant and pundit Paul Begala, who is featured in the film along with George Stephanopoulos and James Carville (then with hair), who were part of the campaign team that brought Bill Clinton to the White House. The War Room will be shown at 6 p.m. on Saturday at the Culbreth Theater on the UVA Grounds.
The Miller Center will sponsor a screening of All the Way, the Pulitzer-prize winning drama about Lyndon Johnson’s first year in office and his efforts to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed into law. Playwright and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan will talk about All the Way, which starred Bryan Cranston both on Broadway and in the HBO film. Schenkkan built his script from transcripts of recordings of LBJ’s Oval Office and telephone conversations with major political players of the day, including Georgia Senator Richard Russell and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Those transcripts have been curated by UVA’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. All the Way will screen on Sunday at 1 p.m. in UVA’s Newcomb Hall. The Miller Center’s Guian McKee will moderate the discussion.
In an interview with Virginia Film Festival director Jody Kielbasa, he pointed out to me that a recurring theme of the festival over the past several years has been a focus on films – both documentaries and narrative features – about civil rights issues.
This is “something that never really goes away entirely in our society, sadly enough, so we’re going to continue screening films that deal with this subject matter, civil rights, because it’s pertinent, topical, and unfortunately, in the news all the time,” he said, noting Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, a 1981 documentary about a SNCC leader called the “godmother” of the early civil rights movement, and I Am Not Your Negro, based on a book that novelist James Baldwin was working on at the time of his death, focusing on the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.
In addition to Loving, there will be other movies made in or about Virginia, including Hot Air, a comedy by Charlottesville filmmakers Derek Sieg and Jeremy Goldstein; A Late Style of Fire, a documentary about poet Larry Levis, who spent his last years in Richmond; and the American premiere of The Promise, a German-made documentary about convicted murderer and former UVA Echols Scholar Jens Soering, which purports to reveal new evidence that proves Soering’s innocence of the infamous double murder that brought worldwide attention to Central Virginia (the first of too many such cases).
The festival will also feature audience-participation conversations with Academy Award winning actress Shirley MacLaine (born in Richmond, raised in Arlington), Academy Award nominee and frequent collaborator with Ingmar Bergman Liv Ullman, and German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who will also screen his new documentary, Into the Inferno, an exploration of Earth’s volcanos. A “family day” screening of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast will feature a conversation with voice artist Paige O’Hara (“Belle”) and producer Don Hahn.
With over 130 films, it may be impossible for a moviegoer to decide definitively which ones to see. The War Room overlaps with The Promise. The much-touted drama Lion is at the same time as the more-touted musical La La Land and Hot Air. What to choose?
I know, however, where I’ll be at the very end of the festival. The Vinegar Hill cinema will be showing A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan’s 1957 feature starring Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith, who plays a TV entertainer who transmutes his celebrity into politics, only to be revealed as a cad and a fraud. Sound familiar?
