The 2013 Fall New Jersey Film Festival — a product of the Rutgers Film Co-op, New Jersey Media Arts Center, and the Rutgers University Program in Cinema Studies — continues through Friday, November 15, on the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers, the State University.
Films range from the classics and the current.
The former is the George Melies Retrospective, set for Thursday, September 12. The revered French pioneer filmmaker used time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted effects to create such wondrous films as “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) and “The Impossible Voyage” (1904). His efforts to enchant recently served as the spirit for director Martin Scorsese’s Valentine to both Melies and filmmaking, “Hugo.” This is an opportunity to see Melies’ bigger than life visions on a large screen.
Visual artist and director Han Ricter’s 1948 “Dreams that Money Can’t Buy” — a classic in its own right and created with input by famed modern artists Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Fernand Leger, and Marcel Duchamp — returns again this year to the festival’s large screen with a Thursday, September 19, showing. The festival emphasis on the now also puts an emphasis on the near and involves Garden State filmmakers.
Case in point is the Friday, September 20, screening of “Allegory of the Mind,” Jonathan Petermann of Mendham’s short about temptation, and the Sunday, September 22, viewing of Haworth’s Breet Mole’s documentary of an athlete playing and bringing awareness of a deadly disease, “AliveAndKickn.”
Then there is a kind of New Jersey filmmakers at work weekend on Saturday and Sunday, September 28 and 29. The Saturday films are East Brunswick-based Zack Morrison’s “Melody,” a short film about a brother’s love for his sister and the ways in which music and art can transcend the boundaries brought on by a disability,” and “Richie,” Irene Geller of Piscataway’s love story of a lonely artist who work sets off a chain of events that bring him closer to the object of his affection “than he ever imagined.”
Sunday, September 28, is the festival’s Jersey Fresh day and includes the films “Kaleidoscope,” Piscataway’s Matt Riddles short of a man who “cannot see that he has a problem until he sees it for himself”; “I Have No Idea What The F**k I’m Doing,” a wry look at film making by the Summit-based Shaneez Tyndall, Caitlyn Siehl, and Marissa Cramer; and “Sex & Violence,” West New York’s Giancarlo Orellana’s tale involving a man celebrating a year of sobriety by not being sober and a recently escaped serial killer.
The state filmmakers will be on hand at their screenings to talk about their films and answer questions on both nights.
Stretching over several months — with films spanning borders and eras — film seekers need to check the full schedule. Screenings are held in Voorhees Hall on the College Avenue Campus and the Ruth Adams Building on the Douglass College Campus. For the complete schedule that includes the lineup of programs, screenings, presentations by filmmakers, venues, and special events, visit the festival website atwww.njfilmfest.com or call 848-932-8482.
