4th Italian Film & Food Festival

Firehouse Theatre, 1609 W. Broad Street
Admission $12 per screening available day of show only.
Limited number of all-day passes available in advance for $35 at Chop Suey Books & Video Fan.

Italian fare from Mamma ’Zu Ristorante is included with admission price! (Beverages sold separately.)

Combine classic and groundbreaking Italian films with classic and mouthwatering Italian food to experience a feast for the all the senses.
The 4th Italian Food & Film Festival is sponsored by Mamma ’Zu Ristorante and the Richmond Moving Image Co-op.

The following 4 films will be screened: >>See complete film descriptions

10 am Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves/Bicycle Thief) 1948, B&W, 94 minutes. Director: Vittorio de Sica.

1 pm Pasqualino Settebeliezze (Seven Beauties)1975, Color, 115 minutes. Director: Lina Wertmuller.

4 pm Rocco e I Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) 1960, B&W, 180 minutes. Director: Luchino Visconti.

8 pm Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi (Down and Dirty/ Ugly, Dirty and Bad) 1976, Color, 110 minutes. Director: Ettore Scola.

Silent Scream:
Four Silent Horror Film Classics
4 Films, 4 Saturday Mornings
10 am at the Main Richmond Public Library
All admissions FREE

The following films will be screened: >>See complete film descriptions

February 17 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir: Robert Weine, 1919, 75 mins., Germany)

February  24 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror  (dir: F. W. Murnau, 1922, 93 mins., Germany)

March 3 The Phantom of the Opera (dir: Rupert Julian, 1925-29, 98 mins., U.S.)

March 10 The Lodger  (dir: Alfred Hitchcock, 1926, 80 mins., U.K.)

14th Annual James River Film Festival Mark your calendars, hold the dates, request vacation time…the 14th James River Film Festival will be held the week of April 9-15, 2007. Stay tuned for information about festival guests and the call for entries for our annual juried competition for short films, available soon.

Club Cinema
8 Weeks of Experimental, Offbeat & Classic Films!!

All shows held at the Canal Club
1545 E. Cary St., in Shockoe Bottom

Here's the schedule of Club Cinema events so far. More details will be added soon, so please check back. Something sure to appeal will show up in this eclectic lineup of film wonders.

All events will be held at 7:30 pm. Doors open at 7:00 pm. Admission $5 unless otherwise noted.

Thursday, October 4
FLICKER
Now in its 10th year, Richmond FLICKER returns to the Canal Club featuring local and regional filmmakers whose works are  shot on 16mm or Super-8 film.  Since 1998, FLICKER has screened the works of over 100 local filmmakers. Admission $3.

Thursday, October 11
A-V Geeks with Skip Elsheimer presents Schoolhouse Scandal: Educational Films about Bad Kids in School
What started as a hobby a decade and a half ago is now a full blown passion—Mr. Elsheimer’s collection of documentary--aka educational, instructional and institutional--films of the 40s, 50s and 60s now numbers over 15,000 titles.  A guest of the James River Film Festival in 2004, Skip returns with a special back-to school program entitled “Schoolhouse Scandal”— educational films about bad kids at school! Given the current outrage against the extracurricular shenanigans taking place in our hallowed halls of learning, you'd think that kids have truly gone wild. But the A/V Geeks present a night of school films from our past that show students have always looked beyond the Three Rs in school!
Films include - The Bully, The Outsider, The Show-Off, What About Prejudice?, Dance Little Children and more!
Admission $5.

Thursday, October 18
Beat Night: with Pull My Daisy, Poetry Readings and more in commemoration of the 50th year of On The Road!
Admission $5
When photographer Robert Frank’s book The Americans was published in 1958, admiring pal Jack Kerouac penned the intro. So when Frank and painter Alfred Leslie were pondering a film project, they asked Kerouac to author and narrate a rough scenario suggested by a Kerouac/Ginsberg/Cassady poem entitled “Pull My Daisy”. It would be shot in Leslie’s NY loft and the domestic drama was roughly based on memories Kerouac had living with Neal and Carolyn Cassady in CA the summer of ’55. What was borne was the only Beat film to be soundly endorsed by the prinicipals themselves—Ginsberg, Corso, Orlovsky who starred in it, and Kerouac who brings the characters to life by doing all the dialogue, just like an old radio show. Jonas Mekas in Film Culture called it the best American film of 1959! Also featuring Jesse Rabinowitz reading selections from Allen Ginsberg, and more!

Tuesday, October 23
New Maps of the New World: Experimental Shorts by Roger Warren Beebe (in person!)
Roger Beebe is a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. Beebe has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as McMurdo Station in Antarctica and the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square as well as more traditional venues such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Pacific Film Archive in addition to numerous festivals, among them Sundance, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and New York Underground. He has won dozens of awards including a 2006 Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida and Best Experimental Film at the 2006 Chicago Underground Film Festival.
The Independent Weekly compared his work to such greats as “Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, all photographers of the atomic age whose Western photographs captured the banalities, cruelties and beauties of imperial America." In addition to his work as a filmmaker, he is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and is currently Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival. Mr. Beebe will be on hand to discuss his work after the screening.

Thursday, November 1
Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip: Music for Experimental Film
In April 2000 composer and ex-punk rocker Tom Verlaine (Television) and legendary session guitarist Jimmy Rip provided a live score to this program of silent avant-garde shorts to a packed house at the Byrd Theatre as part of the James River Film Festival.  Now seven years later their haunting score has been recorded and released by Kino as a package including seven shorts—L’Etoile de Mer, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Life and Death of 9413-- a Hollywood Extra, Emak Bakia, Rhythmus 21, Brumes d’Autumne & Ballet Mecanique.  Join us for the Richmond premiere and free DVD giveaways courtesy of Plan 9 Music.
Admission $5.

Friday, November 9
An Evening With Animator Bill Plympton
One of the most visible and important independent animators working today, Plympton’s world is oh so warped but oh so familiar. The style is recognizable from commercials and festivals world-wide, but the real signature is his dark comic commentary on American contemporary life. Mr. Plympton will lead you on a working tour of his portfolio and after the show, produce a personalized drawing for each and every ticketholder!(Co-sponsored by Style Weekly, VCU’s Department of Kinetic Imaging, Art Cheerleaders & RMIC)
Admission $15 / students with current ID $10. Advance tickets available at Chop Suey Tuey, Chop Suey Books and Video Fan.

Thursday, November 15
KOYAANISQATSI
(from the Hopi for “life out of balance”)
a film by Godfrey Reggio/music by Philip Glass 
Sponsored by the VCU Sierra Club
Released in 1983 by the then unknown Reggio (an ex-priest), Koyannisqatsi, a feature-length documentary without words, was even upon viewing, hard to describe. As a visual environmental manifesto driven by Ron Fricke’s time lapse photography and Glass’ mechanistic score, the images of cities, clouds, and canyons both awed and appalled the viewer. Though the argument is muted the message is clear—man has shifted his life dangerously out-of-balance. The success of the film later led to Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002).
Admission $5 

Thursday, November 29
FLICKER
Got a super-8 or 16mm film looking for a screen?   Contact James Parrish to be part of the November Flicker.
Admission $3.