18th annual Maryland Film Festival delights audiences

The 18th annual Maryland Film Festival took place in Baltimore from May 4 to 8. Each year the festival showcases approximately 50 feature-length films and 75 shorts in addition to one film selected and hosted by cult film director John Waters, a Baltimore native.

The films span all genres imaginable and cover a wide variety of subject matter each year. Each North American film screened during the festival is presented in conjunction with a question and answer session with the filmmaker. Celebrity film-enthusiasts present their favorite films as well. Jonathan Richman presented Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) in 2001 and Dan Deacon presented Total Recall (1990) in 2010.

This year, Baltimore activist and former mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson presented Fresh (1994), a critically-acclaimed film set in New York City during its crack epidemic. Mckesson presented the film, which stars Sean Nelson, Giancarlo Esposito and Samuel L. Jackson, at MICA’s Brown Center on Saturday.

The festivities began on Thursday, when 16 feature-length films were screened. Also on Thursday, the festival presented about an hour of opening night shorts, preceded by an hour-long reception, also at Brown Center.

The second day of the festival had a packed schedule with over 30 screenings, including John Water’s pick,The Deep Blue Sea (2011). Standouts from earlier in the day include Cemetery of Splendor (2015) and Kate Plays Christine (2016). The former premiered at Cannes last year and screened in the Walters Art Museum on Friday.

Cemetery of Splendor is the eighth feature film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is known for his slow, rhythmic pacing and personal themes. The film follows Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) through her days at a makeshift clinic in her former school, located in rural northern Thailand. A psychic medium by the name of Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) helps Jen and others communicate with comatose men, who experience troubling dreams. The film is charming, nuanced and driven by a female-dominated cast and plot. The film explores themes such as healing, the mystical, love and memory and has strong political undercurrents. Ultimately, it is a masterful film in terms of both aesthetics and content and leaves the viewer contemplative and in search of more.

Kate Plays Christine, which also screened on Thursday, is a film with similarly sky-high emotional and psychological themes. The film, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, documents Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares to portray Christine Chubbuck, a news reporter on a Sarasota television station who shot herself during a live broadcast.

In Kate Plays Christine, American documentary filmmaker and critic Robert Greene muddles the definition of reality. It depicts an actress searching for another woman’s truth, in all of its grit, and discovering something about herself in the process. The film screened at the Gateway on the MICA campus to an eager audience. Kate Plays Christine is intense, perhaps one of the festival’s most “difficult” films, and raises more questions than it answers.

Friday’s evening screenings kicked off with The Deep Blue Sea, presented by John Waters. Before the screening, Waters walked onto the stage of the large auditorium in the Brown Center, resplendent in green plaid pants and scarf, and sung the film’s praises in his own iconic, outlandishly humorous way. He highlighted the film’s melodrama-sans-campiness and recited some of his favorite lines.

The Deep Blue Sea follows the tenuous relationship between Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) and Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), for whom Hester left her husband. The two have a passionate and erotic relationship, but it soon becomes clear to Hester that Freddie does not love her the same way she loves him, and so she attempts suicide. When Freddie discovers this, their relationship crumbles. Set in England directly after World War II, the Terence Davies-directed film is an adaptation of the 1952 Terence Rattigan play of the same name.

The Deep Blue Sea jumps around in time and place but retains warm, lustrous visuals and high emotional stakes throughout. Following the screening, Waters cracked jokes about the main character’s melodramatic “neediness” and interacted with the crowd.

The festivities continued into the third day, where 26 feature length films were shown across 6 venues. There was also a selection of shorts screened at the Baltimore Lab School.

At the MICA Gateway Building, Clay Liford’s Slash (2016) showed. The film stars young actor Michael Johnston (Teen Wolf) playing Neil, a confused high-schooler and a slash fiction writer. Slash fiction is a type of fan fiction that explores same sex relationships. Neil’s writing reaches fellow high school slash writer Julia, who is played by Hannah Marks (Necessary Roughness). Together, the two manage to challenge the manner in which they think and interact with others.

The film served as a welcome change of pace when compared to a good majority of recent high-school-centered flicks. The acting was strong throughout, and the characters were written with enough flavor and depth that their actions felt realistic and human.

The next showing at the MICA Gateway was Fraud (2016), a pseudo-documentary directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On). It offers a voyeuristic view of a modern American family as it engages in rampant consumerism, buying things at an impulsive rate. Bookending their purchases are scenes which show the family engaging in various forms of fraud, including insurance and credit-card fraud.

The film’s kicker is that none of the actions that the family “does” during the film actually happened, at least as they were shown. The film’s crew went through home video footage that the family submitted, altering it to make it seem that the family committed the crimes. They also altered the appearances of multiple letters and television screens to make it seem as if legal pressure was mounting on the family.

Fraud contained a certain hypnotic quality, as the packed audience in the MICA Gateway remained silent, aside from a few laughs or gasps at key scenes, throughout the showing and the seats stayed filled through the film’s Q&A.

Finally, the 10:30 p.m. showing at the Brown Center was Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise. The film, an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel, starred Tom Hiddleston (Thor, Crimson Peak) as a new tenant in the middle floors of a newly built high-rise. The floors represent the social class of the tenants, with the highest being home to the richest members, who live in decadence to the extreme, and the lowest floors being reserved for those who are in the lower-middle classes.

As social issues begin in the high-rise, the floors are inevitably placed at odds with each other, until a full breakdown of societal structure disrupts everything. The upper floor champagne parties soon turn into animalistic orgies, while the mild complaints of the lower floors culminate in more violent unrest.

High-Rise (2015) could be seen as a companion piece to 2013’s Snowpiercer, another film where social strata is visualized in an architectural fashion. Any comparisons between the film and Snowpiercer should be seen as a positive, since both feature very strong acting, especially from their leads, with Hiddelston pulling the audience in with a convincing descent into madness which is only rivaled by that of his co-stars, Jeremy Irons and Luke Evans.

The film’s problems come from its’ run-time, a bulky 119 minutes, and the small pop of the film’s ending. Anyone can see that the film is a commentary on social classes, but by the film’s ending, the message seems tired and there feels like there isn’t much to left to say. Yet, the film’s first three quarters have a wonderful stride – unless you’re squeamish with a little gore.

The festival concluded on the fourth day, where there were a number of repeat screenings, but the real highlights were 11 a.m. Alloy Orchestra performance at the MICA Brown Center, as well as the closing film Hunter Gatherer. The Alloy Orchestra is a musical ensemble that performs newly orchestrated soundtracks for silent films, and their selection for this year’s Film Festival was 1924’s French drama L’inhumaine.

Hunter Gatherer (2016), the festival’s closing film, stars Andre Royo (The Wire, Hellbenders) as a man fresh out of prison, eager to re-enter his girlfriend’s life even though she’s moved on. He’s furthered in his goals by a newfound friendship with the simple, but well-meaning Jeremy, played by George Sample III.