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Cinema Along the Potomac
| Article
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20306 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
1,977 Words |
| Author
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David H. Ehrlich
David H. Ehrlich, an avid theatergoer, is an independent
writer based in Washington, D.C. He has previously written
numerous essays for The World & I. |
"I admit it. I'm a total film junkie. I can't tell you how many movies I've seen in my life, but it's got to be well over ten thousand. And I can remember almost all of them.
"It started when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn. I never played hookey from school, but sometimes I spent my lunch money at a theater in Brooklyn and came home hungry. And I've never stopped."
This is Tony Gittens, executive director of the six-year-old Filmfest D.C., talking. Filmfest a unique potpourri of fifty-five feature-length movies from all over the world, plus a similar number of shorts and documentaries, that disrupts the lives of film buffs throughout the Washington area for ten days in early May.
Gittens and Marcia Zalbowitz founded Filmfest D.C. in 1987, with considerable trepidation. "We really were rank amateurs back then," he recalls. "I was a media specialist at UDC and Marcia was a public librarian. Neither of us had done much more before than present black films or courses in filmmaking in the D.C. public schools, and see films--lots of films.
"But we were fascinated with the little-known films that were the private preserve of museum audiences, and we sensed that D.C. offered just the right milieu for bringing them public. People here are cosmopolitan, sophisticated, culturally diverse. They have traveled the world and are always seeking unusual one-ups. After all, the claim 'I've seen the most fabulous film from Burkina Faso' will stop conversation dead around most dinner tables.
"And besides, we have all the foreign embassies here and huge numbers of foreign students, too. Whether they come from Bulgaria or Madagascar, they provide a built-in core audience for any film we might choose to show."
Filmfest has grown from a miniscule enterprise that Gittens ran virtually out of his back pocket to a major undertaking that now occupies nearly nine months of Gittens' year.
A cultural event of this magnitude is not normally profitable. Most of the films do not go on to national distribution in this country, and even the sellouts are typically shown only twice. But both UDC and the mayor's Office of Motion Picture and Television Development have long taken an interest in this locally generated event and have funded it generously. By combining this
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