15th Idyllwild film festival only a month away

The Idyllwild International Festival of Cinema (IIFC) returns to town at the Rustic Theatre Tuesday, March 5, and continues for five more days, until the evening of Sunday, March 10. And once again, 100 films from more than a dozen countries will be available for viewing.

All film screenings will be live and shown at the Rustic Theatre. While the COVID pandemic created a temporary online version of the IIFC, 2024 is totally live with features, featurettes, shorts, animation, seminars and more.

The virtual festivals did not please Director and Founder Stephan Savage, who vowed in 2022 that the live festival would return or no festival. “I’m done. It’s not fun. It can’t be virtual again,” he said. “I’m not interested. It’s disconcerting.”

More films will be shown this year as happened last year, too. Submissions are several hundred and growing. The popularity of the IIFC is demonstrated by its ability to maintain a six-day program. “Most festivals are only three days,” Savage noted. “We started at six and haven’t turned back yet.”

The 2024 IIFC will see more short films, Savage said. “It’s a growing category as is animation. There’re fewer feature films this year, but more music videos, too. We’ll have films from 16 countries.”

The first show of the festival is at 10 a.m. Tuesday, March 5. But the honor of opening night of the IIFC belongs to “A Summer Night.” This full feature was written and directed by Oscar Torre and produced by Torre and Chuti Tiu, who also stars in the film.

An exotic dancer, a dying mother and strangers all made “A Summer Night” an exceptional opening night film with seven festival nominations including Best Feature Film.

The dancer is Summer, whom Tiu plays. She is desperately trying to raise money for her mother’s experimental cancer treatment. The challenge is doing this during the COVID pandemic, when people were not going out to nightclubs, while she also is a recovering alcoholic.

Another nominee for Best Feature has a connection to Idyllwild. “Proof Sheet” was co-written by Richard Kilroy and Eduardo Santiago, who was an Idyllwild resident for several years while on the Idyllwild Arts Academy staff and also a fiction writer then.

“Proof Sheet” also sprouts from the mystery genre. A photo lab worker cleaning up after closing discovers a roll of film in the drop box marked “Rush.” The prints are of a woman being attacked in an apartment.

In addition to new films and premiers, this year IIFC ventures into Hollywood history. A screening of “Pulp Fiction” will be shown Saturday, March 9.

“This is it’s 30th anniversary,” Savage related. “One of the actors, Duane Whitaker, is a good friend of mine. He was Maynard, the sadistic pawn shop owner, in the film. I’m trying to get him up here.”

As usual, the festival’s concluding weekend will offer two interesting seminars. Savage will lead both and be joined by several industry people. The topics will cover film distribution and funding independent films.

These are frequently a very high moment during the festival. “The audience is composed of filmmakers, not just people looking for celebrities. They want to sell and distribute movies.” So, the proximity to Los Angeles is a positive that attracts many from the business side of film making and not just those on the screen.

Besides features, there will be featurettes (about 20 to 40 minutes in length) and shorts (less than 20 minutes in length). Several of both have garnered quite a few prestigious IIFC award nominations.

“Many festivals won’t even accept short films over 12 to 15 minutes as they’re harder to fit into a program or schedule,” Savage illuminated on the difference. “We embrace those longer-form shorts and spotlight them as we would a feature film, especially films that are in that 20 to 40 minute range. We can put them in blocks of three and it seems to be a good formula to showcase those films.”

Featurettes viewers should be aware of include “Dixieland,” “Radio Silence” and “Enemy No More.” Each has more than nine nominations, including “Best Featurette.”

And among the “Best Short” nominees that should attract attention include “The Stairs (USA),” including Best Director, “Nocturn,” and “Life of Riley.”

Two other features to consider seeing are “The Uncanny” and “The Nanny.”