The Magazine

Talk About Movies

Watching and listening at the Virginia Film Festival.

Nov 26, 2007, Vol. 13, No. 11 • By SONNY BUNCH
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Charlottesville, Virginia

Logistically speaking, I was expecting this year's Virginia Film Festival to be a nightmare. Tucked in between the rolling hills of central Virginia and the sprawling horse farms of Albemarle County, Charlottesville played host to some 60 events in a half-dozen locations sprinkled throughout a city with increasingly congested thoroughfares and minimal public transportation. Not to mention the tens of thousands of football fans expected to roll into town on that first November weekend to see the 23rd-ranked University of Virginia Cavaliers take on the 24th-ranked Wake Forest Demon Deacons.

But I was pleasantly surprised, both by the ease of movement around the university and its environs and by the impressive program that the organizers had thrown together. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the Virginia Film Festival pulled off its usual trick of mixing classics and new releases to create a filmgoing experience at which any cinephile can find something to enjoy.

"We are absolutely unique," the festival's artistic director, Richard Herskowitz, explains. "There is no other film festival that has our particular kind of intellectual and educational emphasis." Unlike Tribeca or Cannes, film festivals in which the art of procuring a big distribution deal is just as important as the art projected onto the screen, Herskowitz's festival is all about the movies.

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