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280 movies!

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, August 6, 2006

By Michael Janusonis

Journal Arts Writer

The movie Wetlands Preserved will be screened on Thursday.

A scene from Tomorrow is Today, being screened Sunday.

Cicely Tyson will be honored with the festival’s 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award Friday in a ceremony at the Providence Performing Arts Center.

AP / Jennifer Graylock

Providence-based producer-director Michael Corrente will be honored in Tuesday’s opening night ceremonies with the festival’s Creative Vision Award.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

A new version of Lassie will be screened at the Jane Pickens Theater, in Newport, as part of the film fest.

The Match Girl, from Walt Disney Studios, will be screened at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, which begins Tuesday.

Carmen Electra is scheduled to attend the screening of her new movie, Hot Tamale, Saturday at the Columbus Theater.

As part of its neverending quest to be all things to all people and not leave one single, solitary stone unturned when it comes to movies, this year’s Rhode Island International Film Festival will bring together under one roof a new animated film from the Walt Disney Studio, a short film directed by actress Gwyneth Paltrow, student films, Jewish films, kids films, gay and lesbian films, non-combat photos from the Vietnam War, Michael Corrente, Cicely Tyson and Carmen Electra.

Cicely Tyson and Carmen Electra at the same event is too good a prospect to pass up.

Tyson, the star of such thought-provoking films as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Fried Green Tomatoes and The Rosa Parks Story, will receive the festival’s 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award Friday afternoon in a ceremony at the Providence Performing Arts Center. Her latest film, Fat Rose and Squeaky, about a pair of older women trying to survive, will have its world premiere that night at the Columbus Theater as part of the festival.

“She has been on our list for this award for years,” said festival executive director George Marshall. “But what tipped her this year was the fact that she had a film in the festival.”

Electra, star of TV’s Baywatch as well as the films Scary Movie and Starsky & Hutch, is scheduled to be part of an entourage that includes Jason Priestly for their new film, Hot Tamale, which will be screened at the festival.

And Corrente, the Providence-based producer-director who is trying to get his Buddy Cianci movie, The Prince of Providence, in front of the cameras, will be honored Tuesday at the opening night ceremonies with the festival’s Creative Vision Award. Corrente joins the ranks of past award recipients Rosa von Praunheim, a German experimental filmmaker, and Elaine Lorillard, one of the founders of the Newport Jazz Festival.

Corrente, on stage, will be followed on screen by Disney’s new The Match Girl and other film shorts. But Corrente will have his own mini-festival inside the festival as well. His name-making 1994 film, Federal Hill, will be screened outdoors for free at the Bank of America City Center downtown skating rink, and there will be a retrospective of his work at the Providence Place cinemas as well.

Preparations have been under way for this year’s 10th festival since just about the close of last year’s festival last August. Don Farias, who slots the films for the festival and helped get the more than 2,000 entries boiled down to the 280 that will be screened between Tuesday and next Sunday at a half-dozen or so venues, said the films started coming in from points around the world last October.

“It started very slowly,” he said, remembering that he was hopeful at the time that the judges would be able to get through the process easily. But the momentum picked up, the closing date was extended twice, and in the end there were another 500 last-minute entries. By the time the very final final date was reached June 15, they were still coming in, and right into early last month.

“We got some from Russia in July that were postmarked June 15,” he said ruefully.

All this put enormous pressure — not to mention eyestrain — on the 35 or so judges, who had to weigh which films would get a berth in the festival. Each film, Farias said, had to be watched in the first round by three judges, who would either reject the film — sometimes after only 10 minutes or so of viewing (“You can tell”) — or send it on to the next level.

About 1,000 of the 2,000-plus entries made it to the next level, where they were then screened by up to seven judges. “Near the end we had screening nights in the office where up to 20 people looked at the films. We did that for four nights.

“We wanted to get it down to 220. But it ballooned to 280, and there are still more than 100 deserving films that didn’t get in.” He paused for a second. “Well, maybe there will be 282 . . . or 289 maybe, if I can sneak in one or two more.”

Places and people

In addition to the films shown at the Columbus, the 1920s movie palace on Broadway, in Providence, where the festival has its headquarters in a suite of upstairs offices, the outdoor movies at the skating rink, the IMAX and the Providence Place cinemas, there also will be screenings at the Cable Car Cinema on North Main Street, in Providence, and the closed-for-a-couple-of-years Castle Cinema on Chalkstone Avenue, also in Providence, which was reopened for this event.

Although there will be limited screenings at the Black Box Theater, in Cranston, and the Courthouse Center for the Arts, in West Kingston, most films will be shown in Providence . . . with one major exception — the Jane Pickens Theater and Redwood Library, in Newport.

For Marshall, the executive director, it’s sort of a homecoming. Marshall, who lives in Newport, founded the Newport Film Society in 1983. It presented films in the city for several years and was the precursor of today’s festival, which made its debut in 1997.

The Newport showings — all day Wednesday and Thursday — also tweak the nose of the rival Newport International Film Festival, which celebrated its ninth year in business last June.

Screenings at the Jane Pickens will include a new version of Lassie, starring Peter O’Toole and Peter Dinklage, who just completed filming Underdog in Providence, and a documentary about ski racer Bode Miller.

In the past, the Rhode Island festival had also screened its films in such far-flung places as Barrington and Westerly, but Marshall said some filmmakers, who had arrived in Providence from great distances expecting to see their movies on screen in the big city, “were not happy to have to go to Westerly to see the first screenings of their films.”

Because there are so many films in the six-day festival — even though many of them are shorts that run from 6 to 15 minutes — it means many will have to be shown at times that are not exactly prime . . . say 2 p.m. on Thursday. To get around that, the festival’s Adopt-a-Film program has made tickets — usually selling for $10 — free to nonprofit groups. Each organization can get up to 50 tickets, explained Marshall, with the films geared to each nonprofit group. They can then sell them for as much as they want and pocket the money.

Although the festival doesn’t make any money on these tickets, what it does get are fuller houses for its off-hour screenings and happier visiting filmmakers, who might be dismayed to otherwise find that the afternoon screening time their film has been slotted into has attracted only a handful of people. Marshall added that only the people who actually turn up for a film are counted in the festival’s attendance tally, not the total number of freebies that have been given away to the nonprofits.

Marshall said that in the past few years the festival has attracted even more filmmakers, since it was named one of only 60 festivals in the world that can qualify films for the Academy Awards in the short film category. This attention to short films is underscored by the fact that all the opening night films will be shorts.

“We’ve got a plethora of young filmmakers who are all trying to break into the business,” said Marshall. “All these people are trying to make themselves known and it’s important for them to win an award. Film festivals become their portals of entry.”

“Awards are important,” added Farias, ``especially the audience awards.”

“Our specialty is discovering new talents,” Marshall continued. “We’re always looking for new entries. We want to give the opportunity to let new filmmakers be seen.”

The Rhode Island International Film Festival will run from Tuesday to next Sunday at venues across the state. See the schedule below or in the daily pages of The Journal or visit www.RIFilmFest.org for updated information or to order advance tickets.

Tickets for screenings are $10 each; $7 for Flickers members. Kidseye tickets are $6 for adults; $4 for children. The opening night screenings, beginning at 7 Tuesday at the Columbus, are $15. Tickets for a VIP party starting at 5 p.m. in the rotunda at One Citizens Plaza, Providence, with Michael Corrente as guest, the Columbus screening, and a gala ``after party” back at One Citizens Plaza, are $100. Tickets to attend the film and after-party gala are $50; $35 for the party alone.