Maryland Film Festival (May 8-12 in downtown Baltimore) is proud to announce that acclaimed cinematographer Bradford Young will co-host its 2013 Closing Night screening, presenting Oscilloscope Laboratories’ Mother of George alongside director Andrew Dosunmu. MFF 2013’s Closing Night, which takes place the evening of Sunday, May 12th in downtown Baltimore’s historic Charles Theater, will be the first public screening of Mother of George since its premiere within Sundance 2013.
Young won the U.S. Dramatic Cinematography award at Sundance 2013 for his gorgeous work on both Mother of George and David Lowery’s Cannes-bound Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. His rich body of work as cinematographer includes Dee Rees’ Pariah (2011) and Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere (2012), as well as two features screened within Maryland Film Festival: James Spooner’s White Lies, Black Sheep (MFF 2008) and Dosunmu’s earlier feature Restless City (MFF 2011). It’s with great pleasure that MFF welcomes back to Baltimore one of the most talented cinematographers working in contemporary film.
The story of a Nigerian couple in Brooklyn struggling to make their young marriage work while running a restaurant and navigating a new culture, Mother of George boasts gripping central performances from Danai Gurira (of The Visitor, The Walking Dead, and Treme) and Isaach De Bankolé (whose distinguished filmography includes career-spanning collaborations with such directors as Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch). Maryland Film Festival has proudly supported Mother of George since its earliest stages of development, awarding Dosunmu and screenwriter Darci Picoult the Maryland Filmmakers Fellowship for their script in 2005. It’s a beautiful and fitting selection for the closing night of the festival’s 15th annual edition.
Maryland Film Festival is thrilled to announce that filmmaker David Lowery will be the host for our 2013 Opening Night Shorts Program, which will take place on Wednesday, May 8th at the MICA Brown Center, 8pm. Tickets for Opening Night and the rest of MFF 2013’s lineup are on sale now – click here to purchase through MissionTix.
Lowery, a multi-year participant in MFF and an alum of the festival’s signature Opening Night Shorts Program, has received widespread acclaim for his forthcoming feature, the Cannes-bound Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, starring Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, and Rooney Mara. Lowery has also made waves in recent months with a series of profile-raising announced projects, ranging from a reinvention of Disney’s Pete’s Dragon to a crime drama with Robert Redford attached as star and producer, The Old Man and the Gun.
MFF has been a proud supporter of Lowery throughout his career. Among Lowery’s films as director, MFF has screened his short film A Catalog of Anticipations in 2008, his feature St. Nick in 2009, and his Will Oldham-starring short Pioneer within MFF 2011’s Opening Night Shorts Program. The many other features Lowery has worked on in various capacities include editing Sun Don’t Shine (MFF 2012), shooting Lovers of Hate (MFF 2010) and Empire Builder (MFF 2012), and co-writing Pit Stop (MFF 2013).
MFF first devoted their Opening Night to short films in 2002, and has done so each year since 2004. Thanks to the ongoing support from the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, creator of the Baker Artist Awards, the festival has played a unique role in advocating for short-form film and video work. MFF has presented its Opening Night with a series of fascinating hosts, from acclaimed critics like Andrew O’Hehir and Ann Hornaday to award-winning filmmakers such as Bobcat Goldthwait and Barry Levinson. It’s with great pleasure that the festival welcomes David Lowery, a visionary director and generous film collaborator, as the first Opening Night alumnus to host this special evening.
As announced last week, Maryland Film Festival 2013’s Opening Night Shorts Films are: Frances Bodomo’s Boneshaker, a drama about an African family lost in rural Alabama starring Academy Award nominee Quvenzhané Wallis; Grainger David’s The Chair, the story of one boy’s reaction to an outbreak of poisonous mold in his small town, nominated for Cannes 2012’s Short Film Palme d’or and winner of SXSW 2012’s Short Film Jury Prize; Riley Stearns’ 16mm-shot The Cub, a note-perfect dark comedy about humans living amongst wolves that was nominated for Sundance 2013’s short-film grand-jury prize; Dara Bratt’s observational documentary Flutter, a portrait of an ordinary man living in the extraordinary world of butterfly collecting; Chetin Chabuk’s Jujitsuing Reality, an inspiring documentary about Scott Lew, a screenwriter living with ALS; and Lauren Wolkstein’s elegant and sly Social Butterfly, in which a mysterious American woman (Anna Margaret Hollyman) arrives at a teenage party in the South of France.
Maryland Film Festival 2013 will take place May 8-12 in beautiful downtown Baltimore, presenting approximately 50 features and 80 short films on 7 screens within the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. Its Closing Night film, as announced last week, will be Mother of George by Andrew Dosunmu. For more information, please visit our website at http://www.mdfilmfest.com.
MFF 2013 Closing Night selection: Andrew Dosunmu‘s Mother of George
Maryland Film Festival (May 8-12 in downtown Baltimore) is proud to announce our 2013 Closing Night selection, Mother of George by Andrew Dosunmu. Mother of George, which premiered in the prestigious U.S. Dramatic Competition section of Sundance 2013 and is distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, will screen the evening of Sunday, May 12th in downtown Baltimore’s historic Charles Theater, with director Dosunmu in attendance.
The story of a Nigerian couple in Brooklyn struggling to make their young marriage work while running a restaurant and navigating a new culture, Mother of George boasts gripping central performances from Danai Gurira(of The Visitor, The Walking Dead, and Treme) and Isaach De Bankolé (whose distinguished filmography includes career-spanning collaborations with such directors as Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch). Also of note is the film’s gorgeous cinematography from Bradford Young (of Pariah and Dosunmu’s 2011 feature Restless City), who won the U.S. Dramatic Cinematography award at Sundance 2013 for his gorgeous work on both this film and David Lowery’s forthcoming Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.
Maryland Film Festival has proudly supported Mother of George since its earliest stages of development, awarding Dosunmu and screenwriter Darci Picoult the Maryland Filmmakers Fellowship for their script in 2005. Dosunmu’s first produced narrative feature, the beautiful and moving Restless City, was presented within Maryland Film Festival 2011, and it’s with great pleasure that we welcomes him back to Baltimore with this tremendous new work.
The fifteenth annual Maryland Film Festival 2013 takes place May 8-12, 2013 in beautiful downtown Baltimore, screening nearly 50 features and 80 short films on 7 screens in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. Click here to check out our 2013 program.
Within their 2013 festival, SXSW Film has found a clever method to remind each audience of the many ways film festivals discover and nurture talent. In celebration of their 20th anniversary, SXSW has been rolling archival festival bumpers before each screening. Bumpers are those short pieces (typically running between 30 and 60 seconds) that thank festival sponsors, audiences, filmmakers, and volunteers for their support. Since SXSW has a great tradition of inviting festival alumni to create these bumpers and give them some narrative heft, they’re now able to draw from two decades of what are essentially little-seen short films by major directors that have emerged on the festival circuit.
One of the most striking bumpers is by frequent MFF alum David Lowery (director of MFF 2011 Opening Night Short Pioneer), whose forthcoming Ain’t Them Bodies Saints was one of the breakthrough films of Sundance 2013, and stars Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, and Keith Carradine. This 2010 SXSW bumper entitled “Soundstage” is an artful encapsulation of the dreamlike aesthetic he brings to his work:
Another bumper, 2007’s “McGriddles,” was directed by Joe Swanberg and stars Andrew Bujalski, a nice distillation of the sharp humor and charm the two brought to Swanberg’s feature Hannah Takes The Stairs.
It’s an intriguing moment to revisit the early work of these pioneers of handcrafted digital cinema, as both have exceptional new features in the SXSW 2013 line-up that seem to mark bold new phases in their careers. Swanberg’sDrinking Buddies is perhaps the film audiences expected from him after 2009’s Noah Baumbach-produced Alexander the Last, which was his most conventionally polished and accessible film to date. Instead, for several years Swanberg turned inward for a series of deeply personal micro-budget films such as Silver Bullets and Art History (both MFF 2011). Drinking Buddies, set in and around a craft-beer brewery in Chicago, is shot by Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Ben Richardson, and brings in a winning cast of familiar faces such as Anna Kendrick, Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston, and Jake Johnson. As with Lynn Shelton’s recent work, the film depends on these established actors embracing the conversational tone and spontaneous working methods that distinguish most of Swanberg’s filmography; and as with Shelton’s recent films, the cast more than responds to the challenge, yielding results that are warm, hilarious, and emotionally resonant. Drinking Buddies wowed a packed house in the historic, 1200-seat Paramount Theater, a triumphant moment in a fascinating and still-evolving film career. It would seem to mark not so much a move to the mainstream as the mainstream moving toward Swanberg.
Photo still from Andrew Bujalski’sComputer Chess.
Bujalski’sComputer Chess, on the other hand, is a masterpiece with no obvious creative precedent. Set circa 1980 and, in a challenging but brilliant move, shot on period-specific analog video, the film takes us inside a subculture of offbeat personalities who camp out in a hotel conference hall, attempting to create the first computer system capable of beating human chess masters. But as the film builds into a Robert Altman-worthy ensemble comedy, it also takes on unexpected surreal and even hallucinatory notes, largely thanks to the rich subplot of a self-help event simultaneously taking place in the hotel. Computer Chess is funny, daring, and utterly unpredictable; each creative risk—and there are many—pays off brilliantly. Simply put, if I see a more original film this year, I’ll be quite surprised.
Lowery, Swanberg, and Bujalski all have the biggest films of their respective careers poised to emerge in 2013. In so many ways, SXSW 2013 has been a great reminder that well-curated, forward-looking film festivals like SXSW and MFF offer unique opportunities for audiences to share in the early discovery of major film artists, and to continue to follow them as they grow and evolve.
The Maryland Film Festival is extremely proud to announce that Andrew O’Hehir, film critic and writer for Salon, will host the MFF 2012 Opening Night Shorts Program. The event takes place at 8pm this Thursday, May 3rd, at the MICA Brown Center, 1300 West Mt. Royal Avenue.
Andrew O’Hehir has been writing about film since the early 1990s for publications including The San Francisco Weekly, The New York Times, SPIN, The Times of London, and The Washington Post. He started writing for Salon.com in 1995, where he has served as Arts Editor and is now the principal film critic. His reviews and interviews appear regularly in Salon, and his “Pick of the Week” has become a popular feature for filmgoers. Andrew is a 1984 graduate of The Johns Hopkins University. He joins such esteemed hosts from past years as Academy Award winning writer/director Barry Levinson, filmmaker/comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, and Washington Post film writer Ann Hornaday.
Maryland Film Festival’s 2012 Opening Nights shorts have been announced as:
I AM JOHN WAYNE (dir: Christina Choe; the film won Slamdance 2012’s grand jury award for short films)
THE KOOK (dirs: Nat Livingston Johnson and Gregory Mitnick; award-winning veteran of over 25 festivals)
MODERN MAN (dirs: Kerri Lendo and John Merriman; the team behind MFF 2011’s short Sleep Study)
CORK’S CATTLEBARON (dir: Eric Steele; this will be the film’s world premiere)
FISHING WITHOUT NETS (dir: Cutter Hodierne; the film has screened within Sundance ’12 and Sundance London)
This announcement comes quickly on the heels of this weekend’s news that MFF 2011 Opening Night short director David Lowery (PIONEER) will write and direct the feature AIN’T THESE BODIES SAINTS with leads Rooney Mara, Ben Foster, and Casey Affleck.
The Maryland Film Festival’s Opening Night Shorts Program is supported by a generous grant from the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, Creator of the Baker Artist Awards.
For tickets and more information for this event and the entire MFF 2012 line-up, visit:
Maryland Film Festival Blog 
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