The Museum of Modern Art, in association with IFP, presents the third edition of Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You, an exhibition of the five films nominated for the “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” award. The winner will be announced on December 2 at IFP’s Eighteenth Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards.
This exhibition of screenings at MoMA is a collaboration between the Museum’s Department of Film and the nonprofit organization of independent filmmakers, IFP, and its quarterly publication Filmmaker Magazine. Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You screens in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at MoMA from November 20–24, 2008, and is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art; Michelle Byrd, Executive Director, IFP; Scott Macaulay, Editor, Filmmaker magazine; and Milton Tabbot, Senior Director, Programming, IFP.
All of the nominated films are American independents made in 2008 that have been screened at film festivals yet have not been distributed theatrically. They were selected by members of the Filmmaker editorial staff and by MoMA’s Joshua Siegel. Among the nominees are three narrative films that blur distinctions between fiction and documentary through verite techniques, using improvisation with non-professional actors, handheld cameras, home movie footage, and gritty location shoots. These include Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade, about a South Philadelphia working-class family torn apart by divorce; Antonio Campos’s Afterschool, a disturbing study of violence and voyeurism at a New England prep school; and Jake Mahaffy’s Wellness, the tragic and quintessentially American portrait of a door-to-door salesman who unwittingly participates in a pyramid scheme.
Also featured is Nina Paley’s delightful animated musical Sita Sings the Blues, in which the filmmaker interweaves the epic saga of ancient Indian lovers with her own romantic travails. The fifth nominee, Taylor Greeson’s Meadowlark, is a haunting autobiographical documentary in which the filmmaker’s adolescent experiences of first love and family tragedy become entwined.
Past nominees have included such cult favorites as Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story, So Yong Kim’s In Between Days, and Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland—all of which went on to receive theatrical runs, and critical and popular success, after being screened at MoMA in this series. While several of the films nominated for 2008 and presented at MoMA have received acclaim in their own right—Wellness was the winner of the narrative Grand Jury award at the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival, The New Year Parade won the 2008 Slamdance Grand Jury Prize, and Sita Sings the Blues was awarded Best Feature at the prestigious Annecy Animation Festival—all are in need of theatrical distribution.
The screenings of the five films will be introduced by their directors, and followed by a Q&A. A special Modern Mondays event on November 24 at MoMA brings together the filmmakers of all five nominated films for a panel discussion, illustrated with clips. -- www.moma.org
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