Freedom Cinema Festival provides a unique, alternative forum for leading grassroots artists addressing socially and politically relevant themes. It runs concurrently with the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
The second annual Freedom Film Festival features 64 provocative films from around the world, including U.S. premieres. The Festival also includes live music events, panel discussions of activist media, stand-up comedy, and graphic arts/cartooning.
“While other festivals have done a good job of including important political work in their program, the films with the big stars and the big corporate money behind them will continue to get the most attention at these festivals,” said Andrew Jon Thomson, the festival’s founder and executive director.
“If there was a prize for ‘Best Vibe’ the Freedom Cinema Festival would surely have won,” said Mark Achbar, director of “The Corporation”, a 2004 Sundance Audience Award-winner. “There was a consciousness in all the organizers’ choices that did not pervade the larger festival down the street.”
It all happens January 25-30th, at the Main Street Mall (333 Main Street) 2nd floor.
Highlights:
* An Iraqi Lullaby For Children Who Are About To Die/ World Premiere (Directors: Allie Light, Irving Saraf) An Iraqi mother sings a lullaby to her children as bombs and artillery demolish their world.
* Beyond Right and Wrong (Director: Dixie Gamble) A severely mentally ill death row inmate’s tortured past becomes his only salvation.
* Peaceable Kingdom (Director: Jenny Stein) A fourth-generation Montana cattle rancher turns vegetarian.
* Searching For Angela Shelton (Director: Angela Shelton) Filmmaker Angela Shelton discovers that 16 of 32 Angela Sheltons she interviewed had been raped, beaten or molested.
* SHEM /US Premiere (Director: Caroline Roboh) A gay, good-looking 19-year-old abandons a life of pleasure to search for his great-grandfather’s grave somewhere behind the former iron curtain.
* Seoul Train /US Premiere (Directors: Jim Butterworth, Aaron Lubarsky, Lisa Sleeth) The life and death of North Koreans trying to escape on an “underground railroad.”
* Livicated /Special Sneak Preview (Director: Eric Crown) Rare interviews with Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh as one man’s reggae archives move from Los Angeles to Jamaica to become the first National Museum of Reggae.
For more info, visit the Freedom Film Festival website.
