In 1978 Marin County documentarian Fred Padula completed his breathtaking movie, EL CAPITAN about the ascent of the 3000 foot vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park. The film followed Gary Colliver, Richard McCracken and Lito Tejada-Flores accompanied by climber/cinematographer Glen Denny scaling the sheer granite face to The Nose.

Fifty years later filmmaker E. Chai Vasarhelyi collaborated with world-renowned photographer and mountaineer Jimmy Chin to make an intimate and unflinching movie about free soloist climber Alex Honnold as he prepared to scale the El Capitan and be the first person to do it without a rope. The result is the suspenseful FREE SOLO taking film festival audiences to new heights of excitement this autumn and now a hit in theaters.

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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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