Continuing excellence

The International Film Series comes out swinging and doesn’t stop

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It’s that time of year again. The roads are packed, the lines at the sandwich shops quadruple, electrical outlets at Starbucks become a scarce commodity and Boulder is flooded with 30,000 hungry young minds ready to change the world. School is back in session, and so is, thankfully, the International Film Series (IFS).

Touted as Boulder’s first art-house series, IFS has been locally programmed since 1941 and is responsible for providing the Boulder community with monumental works of cinema as well as the talent behind them. Special effects master, Ray Harryhausen, documentarian Albert Maysles and directors, Werner Herzog, John Cameron Mitchell and Ramin Bahrani have all stopped by to give moviegoers something more than the usual fare. And the tradition continues with IFS’s 2015 fall line-up.

IFS’s first week of programming commences Sept. 15 and includes four programs that are free of charge. University of Colorado Boulder faculty and filmmaker, Tom Shadyac, opens the series with a pick of his choice, yet to be revealed, but something that Boulder audiences are sure to connect with.

The rest of opening week is devoted to CU’s grand challenge — Our Space, Our Future — in conjunction with the Aerospace Engineering Department. These space-themed movies include The American Astronaut and Small Star Seminar, both with filmmaker and musician, Cory McAbee, in attendance (Sept. 18 and 19).

IFS programmer, Pablo Kjølseth, eagerly tells Boulder Weekly that the work in progress, Small Star Seminar, will be, “a fantastic roadshow documentary” of McAbee performing his soloalbum as a singing representative of the “Small Star Corporation.” The evening will be taped and included with other Small Star Seminars that McAbee is hosting around the country for the final documentary that Kjølseth guarantees “will play Sundance 2017.”

Screening six days a week (except on CU Buff home games) for ten weeks, Kjølseth has put together another exemplary slate of movies and shorts. Of the 52 programs, Kjølseth zeroes in on We Come As Friends, playing Nov. 10.

“Jaw dropping,” Kjølseth says about Hubert Sauper’s intimate and horrific documentary about colonialism impact on Southern Sudan. Sauper’s previous documentary, Darwin’s Nightmare, was nominated for an Oscar in 2004, but We Come As Friends is a bold step forward. “[We Come As Friends] makes [Darwin’s Nightmare] look like The Wizard of Oz,” Kjølseth says.

And he’s not wrong. We Come As Friends is an unbelievable cinematic feat, one that Sauper achieves by building his own plane and taking small cameras to remote portions of the country to capture images that no one else thought to grab. It’s a troubling movie, one that rattles whatever notion moviegoers might have about the world we live in and how we live in it. It’s not a crowd pleaser, but Kjølseth is screening We Come As Friends regardless. “I want to support the guy, even if it doesn’t make any money.”

While We Come As Friends is one of several films that Kjølseth is championing, he’s also programming heavyhitters from this year’s art-houses: A Hard Day (Sept. 30), A Poem is a Naked Person (Oct. 11) and Tangerine (Oct. 21); alongside documentaries: Cartel Land (Sept. 22), Stray Dog (Oct. 27) and Welcome to Leith (Nov. 17); and imports: Rebels of the Neon God (Oct. 14), Horse Money (Nov. 4) and The Assassin (Nov. 11).

But movies aren’t the only thing IFS brings to the table, and the fall line-up sees the return of the Flatirons Food Film Festival.

Now in its third season, the Flatirons Food Film Festival takes over IFS from Oct. 23–25 with its sights on the gastronomic senses.

“It’s bigger and better than ever. We’re actually doing some things we’ve never done,” festival director Julia Joun says. “Including, bringing in some speakers — most of them are fairly well known — and actually screening some local films.”

The Flatirons Food Film Festival incorporates movies about food with food events for cinematic and culinary delights. One evening in particular, Oct. 24, places two documentaries side-by-side — The Search of General Tso and Deli Man — to highlight popular dishes in a historical context.

“That’s going to be a really fun night,” Joun says. “It’s going to be two really entertaining documentaries, that really are a part of mainstream American food life — which is Chinese American food and Jewish delicatessen kind of cuisine — [that] have a lot to do with the immigrant history of this country.”

Another feature for this semester’s IFS season comes in seemingly small packages. Longtime friend and former Northwest Film Forum programmer, Adam Sekuler, returns to Boulder to put together a series of short films on different subject matters for IFS.

“The shorts program,” Sekuler says, “is focused around thematic content and kind of genre work.

“All the programs are pretty broad, so the content of them, in terms of the styles and aesthetics of the films are going to … paint a broad picture of what people do with these themes,” Sekuler explains. “There’s a mix of experimental work, and narrative work, and documentary work and some animation.”

Aptly titled, The Weatherman Shorts Program, this series is designed to take a barometric reading of cinema past, present and future. The first program screens on Sept. 20 and ties into CU’s Our Space, Our Future.

“The first program is looking at space, space travel, outer space,” Sekuler says. “I called it ‘The Space Race.’ 

“The second programs is … a horror themed program, screening on the first of November,” Sekuler continues. “We call it the ‘Horror Hangover.’ 

“And then the last program is a week out from Thanksgiving and it will be focused on some Native American filmmaking that’s been going on.”

And Sekuler adds a dash of Boulder flavor to these programs.

“For each of the programs, with the exception of the Native program, there will be student works and faculty works included in the screenings as well,” Sekuler says.

Much like the Flatirons Food Film Festival, The Weatherman Shorts Program puts a signature stamp on IFS.

“There is something for everybody within the program,” Sekuler explains. “My hope is that the audience is willing to go with me into these various areas within cinema and experience these themes from a variety of points of view, from a variety of approaches to filmmaking.”

And that’s the best part of a shorts program: variety. “If they don’t like one, there’s one that’s coming up shortly thereafter,” Sekuler says.

Whether it is bringing together a community, exhibiting student and faculty projects or programming speakers like Shadyac and McAbee, Kjølseth hasn’t lost sight of the importance of IFS and what it provides for the Boulder community. Of which, his Thursday night series of movies projected on 35mm is a key component.

For the fall line up of 35mm titles, Kjølseth returned to the Universal Pictures Archive and brought out three from Steven Spielberg: E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Sept. 17), Jurassic Park (Oct. 29) and Schindler’s List (Nov. 5 – free admission); two coming-of-age tales: American Graffiti (Sept. 24) and The Breakfast Club (Oct. 8); a seismic onetwo punch of Earthquake (Oct. 15) and Tremors (Oct. 22), because, “tremors follow earthquakes,” Kjølseth jokes; and a smattering of classics: High Planes Drifter (Oct. 1), The Sting (Nov. 19), and the movie Sight and Sound voted the greatest motion picture of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (Nov. 12).

Some of them you’ve seen and some of them you haven’t, but if you haven’t seen them on 35mm, then you need to see them again. Every Thursday night at 7:30 p.m., Kjølseth and company retire to the Visual Arts Complex (VAC) basement to bask in the glow and flicker of 35mm.

And that is precisely what makes IFS special. It fills a much-needed gap for Boulder moviegoers. Each year, hundreds of movies are released to either coast, with those of us in the middle waiting for our chance to see these movies, and see them as they should be seen: on a big screen, in the dark, with a community of strangers. Recently restored classics like The Third Man (Nov. 21) played Denver, but failed to make its way up to Boulder until now. For the criminally under seen, Tales of Hoffman (Nov. 20), this exquisite restoration never even came close — and it is a masterpiece that should be seen by all.

Thankfully, IFS gives these movies, big and small, past and present a place where adventurous moviegoers can come and watch entire worlds unfold before their eyes. It’s daydreaming in the dark, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

ON THE BILL: Tickets start at $7, but a handful of shows are free, so check www.internationalfilmseries.com for information and in-depth reviews. All shows start at 7:30 p.m. in either Muenzinger Auditorium (just west of Folsom Field) or in the Visual Arts Complex Basement (north of Euclid Ave. auto park), on CU´s campus.