SOPAC to host 10 week festival of unreleased films

Arthouse Film Festival will unspool for 10 weeks beginning March 11 at The Village at SOPAC in South Orange.

AFF is a curated series of not-yet-released movies from around the world, followed by conversations with filmmakers and actors.

The selected films comprise award winners from Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, Telluride, Venice and SXSW film festivals, along with prestige studio films, screened in South Orange before their New York theatrical release dates.

AFF has hosted 2,048 movie premieres with 1,275 guest appearances over the past 32 years. Oscar winners and nominees Ethan Hawke, Viggo Mortensen, Alan Arkin, Lee Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Chazz Palminteri, Aaron Sorkin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Derek Luke, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Kevin Smith are among the guest speakers who have come to share their insights with festival participants.

“The program will always be flexible in order to take advantage of opportunities as they arise,” said festival director Chuck Rose. “Wonderful surprises and fantastic celebrities can pop up out of nowhere, so we try to keep the schedule as fluid as possible.

The festival is open to anyone, but seating is limited, so early enrollment is advised. Subscription is $146 for five weeks or $257 for all ten weeks. Also being offered is a specially priced flex ticket so users may choose any eight out of ten nights for their convenience.

Confirmed films and those under consideration for the upcoming festival include:

• “Wildcat” with Maya Hawke, Laura Linney, director Ethan Hawke. An inventive cinematic biography of Flannery O’Connor, exploring the connections between reality, family, faith, illness and imagination. Hawke, Hawke and Linney are at the top of their games.

• “The Old Oak” with Dave Turner, Ebla Mari, director Ken Loach. After 60 years directing movies, and recent nominations for a BAFTA and the Cannes Palme d’Or, filmmaker Ken Loach announced that this will be his last film. His fiercely humanistic spirit still shines brightly in the face of challenging social, economic and political forces.

• “On the Adamant” director Nicolas Philibert. Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, nonfiction master Philibert invites us to see the transformational power of art and community. With compassion, intelligence and empathy, the film witnesses disenfranchised adults with mental illnesses flower and produce original and moving works of art.

• “Lousy Carter” with David Krumholz, Olivia Thirlby, director Bob Byington. A terrific comedy ensemble proves once again that dying is easy, and comedy is hard, unless you can make it look easy. Deadpan, offbeat and twisted all at the same time, academia, healthcare, love and death are treated with equal irreverence.

• “Taking Venice” director Amei Wallach. Can you fight Communism with culture? Did the U.S. State Department and a team of conspirators rig the biggest art competition in the world so their choice, Robert Rauschenberg could win the Grand Prize? What is gained and what is lost when art is used for propaganda, competition and market manipulation? These are just a few of the questions explored in Amei Wallach’s fascinating and thought-provoking film.

• “The Vourdalak” with Kacey Mottet Klein, Ariane Labed, director Adrien Beau. A genre film with real bite. A smartly enacted narrative that pre-dates the vampire movie, you could imagine this as an adaptation of a secret project developed by F.W. Murnau and Mel Brooks. Or you could just have fun with it, like Bela Lugosi did.

• “Flipside” with Judd Apatow, David Milch, director Chris Wilcha. Filmmaker Wilcha embraces a career of projects and a collection of disparate stories with Herman Leonard, Ira Glass, David Bowie, Uncle Floyd, David Milch and the New Jersey record store owner who gave him his first job. Weaving them all together creates a cinema of the possible, a flipside of disappointment and failure that reveals a life well lived.