Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Cinema in Boston enjoys a generous gamut that ranges from the mainstream to the fringe. The city’s largest theater, a Loews multiplex, is essentially at its epicenter, opening straight onto the Boston Common, the animated marquee projecting down Tremont Street in either direction. Arthouse cinema is largely resorted to the suburbs: the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline; the Landmark in East Cambridge; the HFA and Brattle Theater in Harvard; and the Somerville Theater. A programmatic diversity in these theaters more or less echoes their metropolitan arrangement, and pronounces a volatility in establishing the city’s cinematic cultural identity.

Enter the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Now in its sixth year, the IFFB has emerged as a stabilized film festival, a more comprehensive answer to the Boston Film Festival or the surfeit of repertory festivals and revivals that screen throughout the year. This year’s program, which is the largest thus far in the festival’s short history, consists of narrative and documentary features – many of which premiered at either Sundance or South by Southwest – short films, and films made locally, promising compendium of both fiction and nonfiction, mainstream and avant-garde, domestic and foreign cinema. Almost every one of these is a New England premiere.

The 2008 IFFB commences on Wednesday, April 23rd, with Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian, and ends the following Tuesday with Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. In between are two world premieres – Taylor Greeson’s Meadowlark and Twelve, a collaborative project between young, Boston-based filmmakers – and a rare screening of Trent Harris’ Beaver Trilogy. Please refer to this page for reviews of select festival films.

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Short films – The Drift, The Pull, Primitive Technology, A Catalog of Anticipations, Reorder, Spider, I Love Sarah Jane, Doxology, Safari

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Films

Crawford	25 April
Vexille	01 May
American Teen	01 May
Mister Lonely	02 May
Intimidad	05 May
Meadowlark	05 May
Second Skin	06 May
Transsiberian	06 May
The Linguists	07 May
Big Man Japan	07 May
At the Death House Door	08 May
The Beaver Trilogy	12 May
The Beaver Trilogy	12 May
Nerdcore Rising	15 May
Goliath	19 May
The Tracey Fragments	20 May
Saviours	27 May
Medicine for Melancholy	28 May
Severed Ways	29 May
Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie	30 May
Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie	30 May
Jump!	02 June

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By Katherine Follett, Victoria Large, and Rumsey Taylor   ©2008 NotComing.com