Lights. Camera. Festival … and don’t forget the parties.
The fourth Louisiana International Film Festival (LIFF) is gearing up for a return this month at Cinemark Perkins Rowe. Festival officials expect the interest generated during the festival’s first three years will continue to grow this year.
“It’s like many community-based organizations,” says LIFF Executive Director Chesley Heymsfield. “Each year we pick up momentum from different groups—students, philanthropists, filmmakers.”
In 2012, skeptics asked Heymsfield why she was interested in starting a film festival here. Did Baton Rouge really need a film festival? To help answer the question, she organized small pop-up focus groups, discovering that the interest was definitely there.
Heymsfield and the newly launched Louisiana Film Society staged events before the first festival, including a screening of the Coen brothers’ classic The Big Lebowski, with Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for the film’s title character, in attendance. A second pre-festival event—simultaneous screenings of the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 and the Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper-starring drama The Place Beyond the Pines—was well attended and segued into a full-scale Louisiana International Film Festival in 2013.
Opening night of the inaugural event featured a gala screening of the music documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. Held in New Orleans, the screening’s special guests included Merry Clayton, one of the stars of the future Oscar-winning film, and director Morgan Neville.
Festival attendance has grown each year since, centered around Cinemark Perkins Rowe and reaching 6,000 in 2015. LIFF also maintains a year-round presence through its free pre-release screenings. These have included the hits Gone Girl and The Fault in Our Stars. In the few months before the 2016 Academy Awards ceremony, LIFF screened awards contenders Brooklyn and The Revenant.
Heymsfield credits the festival’s Los Angeles-based programmers for picking potential award-winners and nominees. The team features artistic director Dan Ireland (a director and co-founder of the Seattle International Film Festival), program director Ian Birnie and guest programmer Lane Kneedler (American Film Institute, Sundance).
“They work throughout the year to find films that are going to be the talk of Hollywood,” Heymsfield says.
Four years into the festival’s existence, Heymsfield is grateful for Baton Rouge’s reception and optimistic about its future.
“I’m nostalgic for the people who we have been privileged to be around and the things we helped create,” she says.
RELATED STORIES
‘Born to Be Blue’ director talks acclaimed film ahead of its Louisiana Film Fest debut
Christy Turlington Burns talks doc at Louisiana International Film Festival
Feature film selections for the 2016 Louisiana International Film Festival include:
• The Oscar-nominated The Embrace of the Serpent, an epic set in the Colombian Amazon
• The Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner Dheepan, a drama about a Sri Lankan refugee who invents a family to gain entry to France
• The documentary selection Miss Sharon Jones!, Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple’s cinema-vérité portrait of the soul singer
• Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You, another documentary, about the creator of the TV classics All in the Family, Maud and The Jeffersons
WHEN: April 13-17
WHERE: Cinemark Perkins Rowe
ADMISSION: VIP pass $150; all-access pass $125 (update to $100) student pass $50 (update to $20) single screening $10
ONLINE: lifilmfest.org
