The Circuit

by Steven Rosen
It’s been a very good year for Denver, and the 31st Starz Denver Film Festival – which began Thursday – hopes to continue the city’s hot streak. The event, which started with comic caper film “The Brothers Bloom” and continues with 215 films from some 30 countries through Nov. 23, uses Denver Film Society’s own Starz FilmCenter as well as larger venues around town.

The city, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, hosted the Democratic National Convention in August. It was central to the excitement of Barack Obama’s candidacy and election. (He carried Colorado.) So close does the city feel to Obama that signs are still everywhere, and the Denver Post newspaper has published a special book, “Obama’s Mile High Moment,” for the holiday gift-giving season.

Britta Erickson, in her first year as the film festival’s director although she’s been with organizer Denver Film Society for 10 years, referenced that recent past in her opening-night introductory remarks. She recounted the film society’s involvement in co-sponsoring a “citizen filmmaking” event during the convention called Cinemocracy. (This is also the first festival for the film society’s new executive directory, Bo Smith, who had been in charge of film programming at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.)

“And it all culminated just nine days ago with the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States,” Erickson said, to applause and cheers from the roughly 1,800 people in attendance at the city’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House for “Brothers Bloom.”

That film’s director/writer, Rian Johnson, was on hand for the screening of of his first movie since 2005 debut “Brick.” As some of his friends and family sat in the audience, he recalled attending a Denver-area elementary school, and how he became interested in filmmaking early. “My dad got the first video camera on the block,” he said. “And that was when you had to plug a videocamera into a VCR and lug it around, which is especially hard when you’re nine.”

The film, which has played other festivals including Toronto, stars Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Weisz and is about con artists and their targets. After the screening, at a packed-to-the-gills party at a nearby dark and stylish (and loud) nightclub, response was generally positive to its light tone and to Weisz’s performance, with some dissenting opinions.

Among the topical issues receiving festival exposure is transgender, with two documentaries and a panel discussion on the topic. One of those films is “Prodigal Sons” by Kimberly Reed, about her complicated Montana family’s response to her own transgender operation. But the film becomes as much about her physically challenged, older adopted brother Mark as it is about her. He discovers his birth mother is the (now-deceased) daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, which prompts an invitation from Welles’ late-in-life companion Oja Kodar to visit her in Croatia. Reed accompanies him.

Among the myriad other activities on the first weekend was a scheduled Sunday tribute to actor Richard Jenkins of “The Visitor.” And there were early screenings of films touted as awards-season favorites. One of those, Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” packed some 500 people into a large college auditorium on Friday night, where many were mesmerized by Mickey Rourke’s downbeat turn as a down-and-out professional wrestler.

There were also films about the arts, a favorite topic of the festival. At a Friday screening of the documentary “HAIR: Let the Sunshine In,” director Pola Rapaport revealed during a Q&A why Milos Foreman’s filmed version of the milestone countercultural musical didn’t come out until 1979, some 12 years after it had debuted on the New York stage. By then, its moment had seemed to pass.

Rapaport said Foreman had wanted to make it much earlier, but was stalled while director Hal Ashby, who had the first crack at it, couldn’t move forward because of a drug problem. 

Learning the story behind films – and filmmaking – is an important component of what the Denver Film Festival is about.