The Austin Film Festival (AFF) unveiled the first wave of films and award honorees for its 28th-anniversary festival program. AFF will award the Outstanding Television Writer Award to Emmy award-winning writer and producer Michael Schur and the Polly Platt Award for Producing to the prolific producer of film and television, Stephanie Allain. The film festival will run from October 21-28, 2021.
In anticipation of the October festival, AFF is proud to present the first ten films of this year’s extraordinary lineup.
AFF’s first announced 10 films (the full lineup will be revealed in September) includes seven world premieres and a number of first-time feature filmmakers.
Featuring seven world premieres and highlighting films by talented first-time feature filmmakers, this year’s lineup celebrates diverse storytellers. Highlights include Stephen Karam’s haunting debut The Humans from A24, a chilling Icelandic horror It Hatched by first-time writer/director and filmmaker to watch Elvar Gunnarsson, and the cautionary drama Everything I Ever Wanted To Tell My Daughter About Men which was helmed by an impressive 15 female directors including Talia Balsam, Saffron Burrows and Fuschia Sumner.
The first ten films of the 2021 AFF lineup are:
- Everything I Ever Wanted To Tell My Daughter About Men (Directed by an ensemble of 15 women, Written by Lorien Hayes) – World Premiere
- Ghosts Of The Ozarks (Directed by Jordan Wayne Long and Matt Glass, Written by Tara Perry, Jordan Wayne Long, Sean Anthony Davis) – World Premiere
- It Hatched (Directed/Written Elvar Gunnarsson) – World Premiere
- Memoria (Directed/Written by Apichatpong Weerasethakul) – Texas Premiere
- Petite Maman (Directed/Written by Céline Sciamma) – Texas Premiere
- Ragged Heart (Directed by Evan McNary, Written by Evan McNary and Debrah McNary) – World Premiere
- Swamp Lion (Directed/Written by Torben Bech) – World Premiere
- The Big Bend (Directed/Written by Brett Wagner) – World Premiere
- The Humans (Directed/Written Stephen Karam) – Texas Premiere
- With This Breath I Fly (Directed by Sam French and Clementine Malpas) – World Premiere
This year’s lineup features breakthrough talent and pivotal narratives that challenge traditional storytelling. Explore the woods through a child’s eyes in Neon’s acclaimed French drama Petite Maman from Céline Sciamma (AFF 2019 selection Portrait Of A Lady On Fire) which explores the connection between mother and daughter in the wake of their grandmother’s death. In Ragged Heart, first-time filmmakers Evan McNary and Debrah McNary explore loss and love as the film follows a washed-up musician who is haunted by his estranged daughter’s ghost to finish the last song she wrote.
Incredibly timely and important documentary With This Breath I Fly follows two women in Afghanistan as they courageously fight for their freedom against a patriarchal Afghan society that imprisons them for “moral crimes.”
AAF also welcomes back festival alumni and Texas filmmakers with their latest films. The Big Bend stars Jason Butler Harner, Virginia Kull, Erica Ash and David Sullivan in a West Texas-set drama where two families meet for a reunion that doesn’t go as planned. Faced with mountains of debt from his son’s cancer treatment, director Torben Bech shows how far a father will go to save his son in Swamp Lion, one of Michael Ray Escamilla’s final films.
Go back in time to post-Civil War Arkansas with Ghosts Of The Ozarks starring Tim Blake Nelson, David Arquette and Phil Morris where a Black doctor is summoned to a remote town in the Ozarks only to discover that the utopian paradise is not all it seems to be. Audiences can also immerse themselves in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s meditative and complex Memoria starring Tilda Swinton as a woman attempting to discover the cause of a sound only she can hear.
Outstanding TV Writer Award recipient Schur and Polly Platt Award winner Allain join the previously announced recipient of the Bill Wittliff Award for Screenwriting, Scott Frank.
Getting his start at Saturday Night Live, Schur is known for creating the critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place and co-creating Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn 99. Allain is one of the most prolific African American producers working today. Known for launching the careers of many first-time directors, including John Singleton, Craig Brewer, Justin Simien and Gerard McMurray, her award-winning films shape the cultural landscape. A longtime advocate for inclusion, she is the only Black woman to produce the Oscars, for which she was Emmy nominated. Previous recipients of the Outstanding Television Writer Award include Benioff & Weiss, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Marta Kauffman, and Norman Lear. The previous recipient of the Polly Platt Award for Producing was Sarah Green.
Local school staple “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” from 1939 hits the big screen nationwide
Most Maine schoolchildren know about the boy lost for more than a week in 1939 after climbing the state's tallest mountain. Now the rest of the U.S. is getting in on the story.
Opening in 650 movie theaters on Friday, "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" tells the harrowing tale of 12-year-old Donn Fendler, who spent nine days on Mount Katahdin and the surrounding wilderness before being rescued. The gripping story of survival commanded the nation's attention in the days before World War II and the boy's grit earned an award from the president.
For decades, Fendler and Joseph B. Egan's book, published the same year as the rescue, has been required reading in many Maine classrooms, like third-grade teacher Kimberly Nielsen's.
"I love that the overarching theme is that Donn never gave up. He just never quits. He goes and goes," said Nielsen, a teacher at Crooked River Elementary School in Casco, who also read the book multiple times with her own kids.
Separated from his hiking group in bad weather atop Mount Katahdin, Fendler used techniques learned as a Boy Scout to survive. He made his way through the woods to the east branch of the Penobscot River, where he was found more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where he started. Bruised and cut, starved and without pants or shoes, he survived nine days by eating berries and lost 15 pounds (7 kilograms).
The boy's peril sparked a massive search and was the focus of newspaper headlines and nightly radio broadcasts. Hundreds of volunteers streamed into the region to help.
The movie builds on the children's book, as told by Fendler to Egan, by drawing upon additional interviews and archival footage to reinforce the importance of family, faith and community during difficult times,... Read More