The Gen Art Film Festival, the leading showcase for emerging American independent filmmakers, has announced two new additions to the upcoming festival: the Gen Art Film Alumni Award, honoring a filmmaker who came to fame via the Gen Art showcase, and the iFUSE/Gen Art Micro-shorts program, a collaborative effort with iFUSE highlighting new short films less than five minutes in length. The Fifth Anniversary Gen Art Film Festival will be held in New York from April 26 through May 2.
The first annual Gen Art Film Alumni Award will go to filmmaker Brad Anderson, who gained international notice at the inaugural Gen Art Film Festival in 1995 with debut feature film “The Darien Gap.” The acclaim generated by this screening fueled excitement in his talents. He followed this effort with the popular “Next Stop Wonderland,” which earned him the Grand Special Prize and Audience Award at the 1998 Deauville Film Festival and a Grand Jury Prize nomination for Best Dramatic Film at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Mr. Anderson returns to Sundance this year with the quirky romantic comedy “Happy Accidents,” which stars Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio as a couple on the rise which is thrown for a loop when D’Onofrio insists that he is a time traveller from the year 2470.
“It is fitting that someone whose debut film stunned audiences at the first annual Gen Art Film Festival has given us the opportunity to repay him for the inspiration he has passed on to today’s aspiring filmmakers and filmgoers alike,” says Dominick Balletta, Gen Art Film Division Director. “Brad is a stalwart of independent cinema.”
The Micro-shorts program is a collaboration with iFUSE, the online champion of youth culture (www.ifuse.com). This series will highlight the work of filmmakers who are using digital video, video and film to create short visual works under five minutes in length. The iFUSE/Gen Art Partnership, which is believed to be the first collaborative effort between a film festival and a webcaster, gives audiences and filmmakers access to each other in the celebratory and social environment of a film festival, and also through the daily delivery channel of the Internet, where these films can be seen through iFUSE’s content partnership with Real.com Take5, Real Networks’® daily news and entertainment showcase.
“We are very excited about partnering with Gen Art,” says iFUSE VP of Marketing Stefan M. Gerard, who was also one of the founders of Gen Art, “As we chart new territory in the realm of youth culture, Gen Art is creating a platform for new approaches to creativity. In both cases it’s about developing new audiences for creativity.” Gen Art and iFuse.com will celebrate their partnership, along with the Sundance screening of “Other Voices” starring Rob Morrow, Gen Art advisory board member Campbell Scott and Peter Gallagher, with a party at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday January 28.
Gen Art, founded by brothers Ian and Stefan Gerard in 1993, is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to exhibiting the work of young artists and breaking down the barriers between artists and audiences. The organization produces events year round in the fields of film, fashion, and visual arts in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Known for its unique format of presenting the New York premiere of one short and one feature length film each night followed by an ‘all-access’ post screening party attended by audiences, cast, crew, and industry professionals, the Festival has been called “the city’s premiere hipster event,” by New York Magazine, and was cited as one of New York’s best new film festivals by Variety in September. Over the past four years, the Gen Art Film Festival has introduced New York audiences to such diverse films as “Sex: The Annabel Chong Story,” “Hands on a Hard Body,” “Oxygen,” “Modulations,” “Eye of God,” and “Six Ways to Sunday.”
Principal Sponsors of the Gen Art Film Festival 2000 to date include: Skyy Vodka, Bass Ale, Evian Natural Spring Water, Loews Cineplex Entertainment, The New York Times, Cataland Films/Cyclops (sponsors of a $25,000 production/post production package of services to the winner of the Festival’s Audience Award) and XL Graphics. Supporting Sponsors of the Gen Art Film Festival 2000 to date include: AIVF, Eastman Kodak and Filmmaker Magazine. Screenings for the Gen Art Film Festival 2000 will be held in New York at SONY Lincoln Square Cinemas and Worldwide Plaza Cinemas.
For more information on the Gen Art Film Festival, visit the organization online at www.genart.org or call (212) 290-0312.
