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Film Festival Lineup Brings Race Into Focus

Tickets are on sale for the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville, November first through the fourth.  Many of this year’s movies focus on issues of race.

The festival kicks off with a movie called Green Book – the winner of the audience choice award in Toronto this year. 

Virginia Film Festival Director Jody Kielbasa says it’s a tale from the South in the 60’s featuring Mahershala Ali  and Viggo Mortensen. “A jazz musician has a tour of the Jim Crow South, and a bouncer or bodyguard is hired to escort him, so that he can make his way through the South.”

Also on the schedule, a documentary by Academy Award-winning filmmaker and Charlottesville resident Paul Wagner. Programmer Wesley Harris says it too tells a story about race in America. “Black in Blue was about the first African-American student football players to break the color barrier in the Southeastern Conference in 1967.”

Martin Luther King III will speak following another documentary about events last summer in Charlottesville.

Film buffs may also want to get tickets for The Other Side of the Wind – Orson Welles’ new movie. “It was his last film and it was lying essentially unfinished for over 40 years,” Kielbasa notes. The man who finished it, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, will also speak.

And for music lovers there’s Fiddling – a documentary about the world’s longest running blue grass competition in Galax.  “Which is the longest-running such event in the world," says programmer Wes Harrison.  "It’s been going on for 80 years, and we’re bringing in a few of the musicians – Wayne Henderson, the Wildmens, for somethihg like a really intimate storytellers’ session.”

Tickets for that and about 150 other films are now on sale on the Virginia Film Festival website.

The Virginia Film Festival is a financial supporter of Radio IQ.

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief
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