Academy Award-winning Bay Area filmmaker Allie Light steps into the world of narrative film after 40 years of making documentaries. ANY WEDNESDAY, the short drama she wrote and co-directed is a compelling story that tackles the subjects of dementia, PTSD and the human condition. Light, who is 83, along with her late husband Irving Saraf, won an Academy Award back in 1992 for their documentary IN THE SHADOW OF THE STARS, which profiles members of the San Francisco opera chorus. Her move into narrative film came as a way of dealing with her own grief after her Irving’s death.

ANY WEDNESDAY will have its regional premiere screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival on Saturday, October 13, 2018, 4:30 PM, at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, as part of the program An Afternoon with Eleanor Coppola and Allie Light. Guests expected in person, representing ANY WEDNESDAY, will be co-directors Allie Light and Patrick Stark, producers David Lundstedt and Julia Hilder, and actors Mary Black and Shane Dean. Eleanor Coppola will present her TWO FOR DINNER and they will talk about the transition from documentary filmmakers to the dramatic narrative form.

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By Meredith Brody

There are, of course, a number of ways to attack film festivals. (In fact, there are a number of ways to write that sentence. The verb could also be “approach.” Or “enjoy.” Or “parse.”)

“I hope,” my editor said, “that you write about more small movies in your second piece on the Mill Valley Film Festival.” I knew what he meant. I’d written about looking forward to seeing the movies I’d missed in Telluride and Toronto, and most of them were movies that would be showing up at multiplexes within days or weeks – certainly by the end of the year, if they harbored Oscar hopes.

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by Arlin Golden

In 2016, Jacqui “Jax” Griffin was dismayed to learn that the Bradford International Film Festival was to be no more.

“I moved to Bradford in England’s West Yorkshire because it was the City of Film and, to me, a large part of that heritage was the annual film festival.” says Griffin. “I thought the City of Film should have at least one festival celebrating the newest most interesting films being made around the world.” A lifelong cinephile and PhD student in film, she was not going to let her town go without some sort of series of screenings, but where to show them? At the time there were only 2 movie theaters in Bradford, and they would require venue fees and ticket revenues, but there are many more pubs, which are free to enter. So she put 2 and 2 together and the Drunken Film Fest was born.

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We have posted trailers for all the films discussed in Meredith Brody’s overview of the 41st Mill Valley Film Festival playing October 4-14 in Marin County.

The full schedule can be seen here.

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By Meredith Brody

I have a mantra that’s meant to soothe myself as I surf the roiling waves of the fall film festivals I’m lucky enough to attend:

In Telluride, the bucolic, intimate, user-friendly festival held in a one-horse town, I repeat “If I miss it here, I’ll see it in Toronto.”

In Toronto, a well-oiled huge, baggy, and increasingly corporate festival, where I mostly am relegated to the shadow and less festive festival of press-and-industry screenings, I say “If I miss it here, I’ll see it in Mill Valley.”

And the  41st Mill Valley Film Festival, whose far-flung screenings are held in three one-horse towns, is hard upon us.

Mill Valley benefits from its timing in the festival year, and its location: it can cherry-pick from every festival held earlier in the year, and its proximity to Los Angeles (and the Bay Area’s high number of Academy members, i.e. Oscar voters) means that a number of directors and stars will appear on its stages.

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