Descriptions of other highlights of the CIFF slate can be found below. Tickets for the festival are just $8.50 per film, or $65 or $100 for festival passes. A full schedule can be found atwww.camdenfilmfest.org.
 GROWING UP IN RURAL BRAZIL Because We Were Born is both bleak and beautiful. |
CONVENTION For more on the opening-night film, see our interview with director AJ Schnack.
THE RIVALS Kirk Wolfinger's winning take on the high school football rivalry between Cape Elizabeth and Mountain Valley High School, which premiered to great fanfare at this summer's Maine International Film Festival, gets another Maine screening.
OCTOBER COUNTRY Michael Palmieri and photographer Daniel Mosher collaborated on this harrowing drama, about Mosher's struggling family. Set in a town in New York's Mohawk Valley, whose economy relies almost exclusively on a munitions factory (and, therefore, continuing wars), the film devastatingly portrays a painful cycle of regrettable mistakes and circumstances -- abusive relationships, young motherhood, chain smoking -- passed down from one generation to the next. The women of the Mosher family examine the limitations life has handed them as supernatural elements take over October Country's fringes -- the film begins on one Halloween and runs through the next -- suggesting the Moshers are as haunted by their past as they are unable to escape it.
BECAUSE WE WERE BORN (PUISQUE NOUS SOMMES NES) Another bleak and beautiful examination of life on society's fringes, Jean Pierre Duret and Andrea Santana's quiet, vérité-style film -- receiving its United States premiere here -- follows two teenagers in rural Brazil scrounging for money any way they can: assisting vendors at a local gas station, herding animals, carting groceries, producing bricks, and occasionally begging. Perhaps inspired by Brazil's homegrown president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the boys persist in dreams of becoming truck drivers as their hometown presents them with zero opportunities. Duret and Santana's hands-off approach allows their struggling protagonists to tell their gorgeously-photographed story in blunt but bracingly eloquent terms.
RACING DREAMS Three pre-teens, two boys and a girl, take to the racetracks in hopes of ultimately joining the NASCAR circuit in Marshall Curry's film. As the kids navigate puberty and impending young-adulthood, their parents struggle to meet the financial demands of their children's lofty ambitions. Racing Dreams breezily touches on issues of religion, ego, sexism, and preconceptions about fans of racing as Curry's swift and appealing narrative hurtles along.
THE PHILOSOPHER KINGS Good-natured but ultimately lacking in narrative thrust, Patrick Shen's documentary looks to the custodians of eight American universities for wisdom. There are a few moments of great humor and insight in Shen's handsome, agreeable film, but its apparent thesis -- that the marginalized members of society have as much to teach us as storied professors -- is too cheery and insubstantial to support a feature's length.
INVISIBLE GIRLFRIEND Joan of Arc is the title character of Ashley Sabin and David Redmon's film, about a possibly schizophrenic man riding his bike 400 miles to meet his muse. If she's not embodied in the figure of a New Orleans bartender, as he suspects, she remains a redeeming, life-saving presence for him.
CRUDE Recently released in New York City, Joe Berlinger's (Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) universally acclaimed film examines an environmental degradation lawsuit against Texaco, accused of systematically polluting a massive area of land around Ecuador, with the energy of a legal thriller.
Christopher Gray can be reached at cgray@thephoenix.com.
