Lone Star International Film Festival

Posted 29 October, 2009 in TX News

The Buzz

There may not be a lot of red-carpet glitz, but the Lone Star International Film Festival has a distinctive Fort Worth flavor: high artistic
aims, down-to-earth attitude, community spirit .

If Fort Worth has a national reputation for culture, it’s for the great museums, atmospheric honky-tonks and famous piano competition. Until recently, few people would have thought of it as a movie town. With apologies to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which has long brought us arthouse movies on weekends, a true film scene may finally be taking shape thanks to the Lone Star Film Society and its Lone Star International Film Festival, whose third edition runs Nov. 11-15. After a somewhat rocky start in 2007 (the founding director was ousted just after that first festival’s close), the event came back last year with a smaller schedule and more organization, and earned generally positive reviews. The revamped management team that made it all happen then went to work immediately on this year’s festival, and that year-round effort has been a major boon to the fest — and to the film options in Fort Worth. Lone Star has been
able to promote its festival at other film events around the world, boosting its profile and raising the quality of submissions.

Maybe more important, Lone Star is more than just the four-day festival, and it’s definitely not just for film snobs. It has produced more than 50 screenings in Fort Worth in the past year, joining with art museums, music groups and other community institutions to offer everything from classical-music documentaries at the Cliburn Competition to a summertime film festival for kids. It’s all thanks to the vision and hard work of executive director Dennis Bishop, managing director John Storm and
artistic director Alec Jhangiani, although each stresses the collaborative nature of the work and is quick to share credit with staff, board, interns and scores of volunteers. Bishop, an Oak Cliff native who lives in Santa Monica, is a movie and TV producer whose résumé includes Dexter and The Trip to Bountiful. A former vice president at HBO Pictures, he has strong industry connections and knowledge, and came with lots of experience organizing discussion panels at film festivals. He was called in to do just that about It In
a month before the first LSIFF in 2007. “I came just to produce the panels and help out a friend, and here we are two years later.” Bishop and Jhangiani, with help from a 50-person screening committee who watch and rate hundreds of titles, choose the festival’s films and create other relevant programming such as educational panels. Unlike some other festivals, the focus is on high- quality films, not the number of films, and not celebrity appearances. “Any big names we bring in need to be relevant to the festival and not just for
attracting press,” Bishop says. One important goal is to “bring out artists who are doing stuff that’s really relevant and ground-
breaking but who just aren’t getting the proper attention,” Jhangiani says. The focus is on independent films, meaning ones that don’t yet have theatrical distribution — you’re not going to see them at the mall. Only these are eligible for the festival’s awards, although we’ll see four “centerpiece” films that might include bigger-name releases such as Serious Moonlight, starring Meg Ryan and directed by actress Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s Hines’ first film as a director, and that fits the LSIFF’s mission, too. “We’re very focused on emerging artists, first and second-time feature directors, and actors who are really talented but may not have made it to the point
where they’re the lead in films,” Jhangiani says. The screening committee volunteers aren’t industry insiders or even film geeks, necessarily. They come from all walks of life, from one staff member’s 7-year- old son to a couple in their 80s. “That helps us curate a
festival that’s for everybody,” Jhangiani says. This user-friendly attitude plays out during the festival, too. “We have a lot of people who come here Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton in Serious Moonlight, a black comedy about fidelity and revenge. Written by the late Adrienne Shelley (Waitress), it marks the directorial debut of Cheryl Hines (Curb Your Enthusiasm).

The Details The Lone Star International Film Festival is Nov. 11-15 at various venues in Sundance Square and the Cultural District.
As of press time, the schedule had not been released. See www.lsiff.com for more information. Drink It In from Houston and El Paso and Austin, because it’s a great time of year to come to Fort Worth and people love the fact that our festival is in Sundance Square,
where you park your car on Wednesday and don’t have to do anything else — the trolley can take you everywhere.” And most competition films screen twice, giving moviegoers a chance to react when a particular film generates word-of-mouth buzz. That inclusive spirit extends to filmmakers. “We’re very much a filmmakers’ festival,” says Storm. “It’s a place to come and interact with your peers, to see quality films made by your peers and to really be part of the filmmaking community.”
A Panther City showcase puts the spotlight on locally made works, and educational panels are designed to bring local filmmakers and students up to speed with what’s going on in LA in New York. Education happens on a broader community level, too, with collaborations with other arts groups and organizations including Carter BloodCare and the Girl Scouts. One example: “Last year we had the
film How to Be, with Robert Pattinson of Twilight, so we knew we could fill the theater,” Bishop says. “We learned that the local food bank had a 10-minute documentary about the food bank made by a local filmmaker. So we screened that before How to Be in front of 250
people, mainly twentysomethings who we thought might need to know about food banks and that part of the world. The local filmmaker was high as a kite. So we try to get the word out and help on many levels.” In the past year, this Tinseltown veteran has spent more time here than at his Santa Monica home, though he hates our summer weather. “I love Fort Worth. I love the community here, I love all the support. It’s so radically different from Hollywood, and that makes all this worthwhile.”