3 SHORTS BY CHRISTOPHER HOLMES
with filmmaker Christopher Holmes and
LAS HURDES/LAND WITHOUT BREAD
(Luis Buñuel, 1932, 27 min.)
10:00 am, The Byrd Theatre
Admission $6

NC-based filmmaker Christopher Holmes won the top prize in JRFF’s juried show in 2005 for Fence Dogs, and was a finalist two other years. Recently returned from Slamfest in Park City, Utah, the filmmaker will show his previous entries as well as surrealist director Luis Buñuel’s 1932 documentary, Las Hurdes/Land without Bread, “the only film I could think of off the top of my head that would complement my own films. I can’t figure out how I’m supposed to interpret Las Hurdes, which is why I think I like it so much.”
Holmes will screen Fence Dogs (10 min.): One man’s search for a lost dog unearths a Southern town after a deadly fire; Arrowhead (24 min.): Two rural eccentrics battle over rights to a coveted arrowhead in this allegory of manifest destiny; and Sapsucker (12 min.): One man’s crusade to dispatch a rare woodpecker leads him to discover an ecology of sight and sound that’s more than he bargained for. Holmes will be available for a Q&A session after the screening.

THE EXILES
(Kent Mackenzie, 1961, 72 min.)
2:30 pm, The Byrd Theatre
Admission $6

Selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, The Exiles (1961) is an incredible feature film by Kent Mackenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the district of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California. Bunker Hill was then a blighted residential locality of decayed Victorian mansions, sometimes featured in the writings of Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Charles Bukowski.

The structure of the film is that of a narrative feature, the script pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects. The film shares a curious number of surface similarities with Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep, which has been featured twice during the James River Film Festival. Both films are gritty, frills-free depictions of marginalized Los Angeles communities made within about a decade from each other by young filmmakers who were both compared to John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica; they both have existed for decades without theatrical release; they both have been featured in Thom Andersen's film Los Angeles Plays Itself; they both have been restored by Ross Lipman at the UCLA Film & Television Archives and they both are Milestone Film & Video releases. Despite (or because of) the fact that no other films at the time were (and still very few now are) depicting Native American peoples (aside from the overblown stereotypes in Westerns) let alone urban Native Americans, The Exiles could not find a distributor willing to risk putting it out theatrically, and so over the years it fell into obscurity, known and loved by cinephiles and admired for its originality and honesty by such Native American filmmakers as Chris Eyres (Smoke Signals, 1998) and Ben-alex Dupris (experimental filmmaker and writer) but remaining largely unseen to the public, including communities like the ones depicted in the film. Milestone’s 2008 theatrical release provided the opportunity to redeem this fact and the James River Film Festival brings it to Richmond for the first time – don’t miss this rare cinematic treat! See The Exiles website.

MY BLUE STAR: THE LIFE AND HUNCHIN’ TIMES OF HASIL “HAZE” ADKINS
(2009, 75 min.)
with director Ron Smith
4:30 pm, The Byrd Theatre
Admission $6
(Also screening Friday, April 17)

According to Richmond filmmaker Ron Smith, “Hasil Adkins is the Godfather of Psychobilly, the King of Appalachian Punk, a Hillbilly Blues Savant and the World’s Greatest One-man Band.” Smith says he never planned on making a documentary about legendary bad boy Hasil Adkins, “but after Hasil passed (in 2005) I had all this footage and friends said, ‘Ron, you got to do something with it’, so I put together what I had.” Smith had earlier sent Adkins a painting he’d done of him and when the singer called up to order more, a friendship sprouted. “Sometimes he’d call me up at 3 a.m. and play a song he’d just written, and I visited him lots of times in the hollow where he lived in West Virginia.” Screening as a work-in-progress, Smith’s film utilizes talking heads and performance footage as well as plenty of on-camera time for the show’s star. Smith will be available for a Q&A session after the screening.

BRUCE BICKFORD DOUBLE FEATURE and WRIR AFTER PARTY
PROMETHEUS’ GARDEN
(1988, 28 min.) and
CAS’L
(2008, 47 min.)
with musical score written & performed by Johnny Hott and Coby Batty
8:00 pm, Gallery 5
Admission $10

Best known for his collaborations with rock iconoclast Frank Zappa in the 1970s (Dub Room Special, Baby Snakes, The Amazing Mr. Bickford), underground animator Bruce Bickford has influenced generations of artists with his startlingly original vision. Join us for a double feature of Bickford’s post-Zappa work.

Prometheus’ Garden (1988, 28 minutes) is the only completed film over which Bickford maintained complete creative control. Except for a handful of select screenings, the film has resided in the basement of the reclusive Bickford for two decades.

Inspired by the Greek myth of Prometheus, a Titan who created the first mortals from clay and stole fire from the gods, Prometheus’ Garden immerses viewers in a cinematic universe unlike any other. The dark and magical images of this haunting film unfold in a dreamlike stream of consciousness revealing an unlikely cast of clay characters engaged in a violent struggle for survival. Enchanted forests, animated torture chambers, hamburgers that morph into mythical monsters, and epic battles between giants, fairies, and anachronistic historical figures populate just a small corner of Bickford’s animated universe.

The main event is a rare film performance – a screening of Bickford’s silent opus, CAS’L, with a score written and performed live by Richmond’s very own Johnny Hott and Coby Batty. Bickford describes CAS’L this way: “Mercenaries and other obnoxious brutes are trying to muscle in on the castle territory. They’re looking for trouble and find it; stray energies morph them into grotesque bulbous heads. The conquistadors and barbarians of the castle are smoking the wrong brand of cigarettes, causing them to commit random violence – even against each other. Some little people and fairy folk defeat many of them.”
Guest filmmakers Bruce Bickford and Brett Ingram (Monster Road) will introduce the program.
See the Bruce Bickford and Brett Ingram websites.

Immediately following the performance, media sponsor WRIR-97.3 LPFM will host a JRFF after party