After a year’s hiatus, Terra Nova’s X Silver Images Film Festival returns as a streamlined Silver Images Film and Video Awards March 3 at the Chicago Cultural Center.
For a decade, Terra Nova ran the festival as a two-week, multi-venue event, screening 20 to 30 films that “challenge stereotypes and present an accurate, balanced portrayal of what it means to grow older,” said executive director Jim Vanden Bosch.
Three winners selected by a jury of film and aging professionals will receive a cash award of $500. This year’s field of 36 competitive films was admittedly much smaller than the average 200 festival submissions in the past, said Vanden Bosch. “I personally looked at all of these and weeded out 17 that were not being relevant to the topic or had poor production quality.”
Headlining the program will be a screening of Nicole D Sampogna’s feature doc “Her Name is Zelda,” a portrait of Manhattan activist and nightclub fixture Zelda Kaplan. “Zelda” was not a prize winner, but is being shown “because the content was so strong above the others as the most interesting film to see,” noted Vanden Bosch.
Clips will be screened from the award-winning films: best narrative, France’s Phillippe Muyl, “The Butterfly”; best documentary, Chicagoan Karen Carter’s “Ruth Duckworth: A Life in Clay”; and best educational production, San Francisco’s Julie Winokur’s “Aging in America: The Years Ahead.”
Last year Terra Nova was invited by AARP to present a three-day, 13-film festival at AARP’s National Members Event at McCormick Place. All 350 seats were filled at every showing and 1,850 persons saw the films, Vanden Bosch recalled. They’ll hold a fest again at the AARP’s October meeting in Las Vegas, where Roger Ebert will be Silver Images’ celebrity critic/lecturer.
Vanden Bosch founded the nonprofit Terra Nova in 1980 to fund his own independent productions. The company started distributing outside work in the early ?80s, and established itself nationally with the success of the educational film “My Mother, My Father.”
He started the Silver Images festival in 1993 “because we wanted to reach out to a more general audience with films dealing with elderhood, he said. He admitted the festival had problems getting off the ground. “People didn’t want to see films about older people. There’s more an acceptance now of older adult issues, he said.
Terra Nova has a staff of eight full-time and three part-time employees working out of 3,500-sq. ft. of rental space in a huge, old Methodist church in Beverly. It produces two to three films a year, and maintains a library of over 200 titles.
The company is now a distributor of elderhood films representing 30 to 40 producers. Terra Nova also markets training films to long-term care facilities Alzheimer’s and is, in fact, in the fund-raising stage for a $1 million, four-part PBS documentary, “Alzheimer’s: A Disease of the Mind?And the Heart” ? “our biggest venture to date” said Vanden Bosch.
Sponsorship is also being sought for two other major projects in development: a Silver Images series and $10,000 award to run as part of the Chicago International Film Festival and “Sunny Side Up,” a PBS series of titles from Terra Nova’s library.
The Silver Images Film and Video awards run from 5:30-7:30 p.m., at the Chicago Cultural Center GAR Rotunda and Theatre, 77 E. Randolph. Tickets are $30 at the door, $25 advance, $15 for IFP members; wine and cheese included. Carter and Sampogna will conduct a pre-screening workshop at 4:30; $5, free for IFP members.
Terra Nova is at 9848 S. Winchester, 773/881-8491. See www.terranova.org.
– by Ed M. Koziarski, edk@homesickblues.com
