More Cinequest: Gary Singh on a documentary about film preservation and reviews by Singh and Jeffrey Edalatpour of seven films playing at the festival. For complete information, visit Cinequest.org.
Discovery. That’s the keyword for Cinequest, San Jose’s homegrown film festival. Now through the rest of March, the 35th edition of the festival will feature some 250 movies from 45 different companies—and more than 100 are either world or U.S. premieres.
As befits a Silicon Valley festival, Cinequest is also a showcase for new technology—“a discovery bastion” not only for filmmakers but also tech innovators. “It’s been a big part of what we do,” Cinequest co-founder Halfdan Hussey says.
“We were the first to showcase the digital filmmaking revolution and that entire workflow change, from analog to digital to IP delivery of files. We did the first film festival online in 2005. Mobile cinema, AR and VR—we’ve done so many of these things,” he says.
So naturally the spotlight has fallen on artificial intelligence—and how it can be used “as an augmentation to human intelligence and creativity.”
For the festival’s opening night on March 11, Cinequest partnered with MIT on a program of seven very short films based on the theme of dance and movement, and hosted a discussion with the filmmakers.
Asked what impressed him the most, Hussey mentioned Clown, which fused live action and AI-generated imagery: “That’s a really striking movie.” Overall, he says, the most successful projects used voiceovers. “That is the thing that AI can’t do really well,” he explains. “They can give you a person doing things—but the speaking part, they haven’t gotten there yet.”
As a tool, artificial intelligence might have the most impact in projects with special effects or animation, which are expensive to create.
“The best films I’ve seen in the past decade have not been live action films; they have been animation,” Hussey says. “If you start bringing in AI tools that are speeding up those processes, allowing things to happen cheaper, it allows more artists to do high-end animation and opens it up to small groups. You find many independently produced live action movies, dramatic narrative movies that have been equally good as the studio films, if not better …. But the animation, it’s hard to compete with Dreamworks and what they do.”
“There’s been a lot of fear in the artistic community about AI,” Hussey says. It’s a legitimate fear, he agrees. But at present the technology is based on patterns. AI can “take a poem and generate more poems off of these patterns—but it isn’t living the human experience. What a real artist does is they bring their take on the human experience and express that. And that it can’t do. It’s all hollow.”
Part of magic comes from what is at the core of filmmaking: the story. Hussey points out that if one searches online for lists of the greatest movies ever made, almost every one of those lists has nothing made in the last 15 years. He ticks off some of the main movements in film that created masterpieces: the silent era (“where they were founding the tradition”), Hollywood’s golden era, the international film movements in the ’60s and ’70s, and the rise of the independents in the ’80s. What did they all have in common? “They were very focused on the writers first,” he says.
But even after more than three decades of watching the art of filmmaking evolve, Hussey is optimistic about the future.
“I think we’re going to see a breakthrough in great artistry in film again,” he says, asserting, “we see a lot of great films every year and discover them at Cinequest.”
He adds, “I think the new generations are really primed to do innovative and great work. … I just have a feeling about that.”
He’s also sanguine about the future of people watching movies in public, even with digital innovations in IP delivery and streaming. “Film festivals still thrive because the social experience is really important around film too,” he says. Families and audiences of all ages “enjoy an outing, a date, an opportunity outside of your house, meet in a social environment, experience something and talk and share about it.”
Hussey points to this year’s Socials series, taking place 4 to 6:30, and “open to everyone who comes to Cinequest. They’re great places for the artists to meet the audience in different locations.”
Getting a film into Cinequest is a major event for most, Hussey says. “Ninety percent of the film artists that come, this is the unveiling of their artistic child and they’re usually just incredibly excited about it—and nervous, really nervous about it too. … Even established luminaries who have done 10 great movies are nervous. How will people respond to it?”
Take Joe Burke, for example. On Sunday, March 16 at 2:05pm at the Hammer Theatre Center, San Jose, he’ll enjoy the world premiere of Burt, a father-son comedy “with a bit of a twist.” The movie co-stars Burt Berger, a friend of the director’s who—like the character in the movie—is a 70-year-old street musician living in Los Angeles with Parkinson’s disease. “The movie is a love letter to him, his wonderful music, and to my own dad, who is also living with Parkinson’s,” Burke states.
Another project drawing inspiration from friends and family is director Nick Cassidy’s Childish Things, which will premiere March 16 at 3Below Theaters. The film follows a struggling musician embarking on a cross-country road trip who begins to question his long-term relationship. Cassidy cast his real friends and family in the movie, and his 22-year-old brother handled cinematography and editing.
Another film that explores just how scary a home can be is Scottish actor and filmmaker Harry Aspinwall’s The House Was Not Hungry Then, a horror story set in an abandoned home near where he grew up. His directorial debut, it also has its world premiere on March 22, screening at 4pm at 3Below.
Family is a focal point for Anna Campbell’s Cinequest offering. The filmmaker moved to Los Angeles to have it all—a dream career, two children, and a perfect life—but returned to her hometown of Portland in 2020. She explores the resulting emotional dynamics through the title character in Nora, which plays March 15 at 6:45pm in the Hammer Theatre Center and March 18 at 12:20pm in 3Below Theaters.
All genres are included in Cinequest, including the British sci-fi comedy Time Travel Is Dangerous, screening March 12 at 7:05pm and March 14 at 4:15pm at the California Theatre. At the screenings will be writer-director Chris Reading and writer-producers Hillary and Anna Shakespeare. The cast includes Tom Lenk (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) Jane Horrocks (Absolutely Fabulous), Sophie Thompson (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Gosford Park), Brian Bovell (Love Actually) and other British comedic actors.
Fans of horror and suspense will find entries from filmmakers near and far. Traveling from Nashville, brothers Trey and Chad McClarnon are eager to show off their debut feature horror film, The Other People, about a young woman who marries a widower and encounters unwelcome co-inhabitants. The Other People screens March 22 at 9:15pm in the California Theatre, and again on March 23 at 11:30am.
Among other artists traveling from abroad to premiere their work is Oriane Hermange, who grew up in a small French fishing village with working-class grandparents and “learned early on what it means to fight for a dream.” That sentiment has been transmitted in the short feature Should I Stay or Should I Go?, about a young woman whose traditional upbringing gets in the way of her field of soccer dreams. It premieres at Cinequest on March 19 during an evening of shorts that deal with sports.
Taking a comedic look at youth athletics, Good Sport centers on a basketball coach who faces a series of misadventures. It screens March 14 at 9:15pm and March 20 at 5pm at 3Below Theaters. Co-producers Andrew Zuckerman, Dillon Orth and John Cronin, all in their 20s and veterans of youth sports, filmed the comedy on their home turf in Minnesota.
Canoe Dig It, another sports comedy, enters the world of freestyle canoeing. Directed by Samuel Dunning, it follows some of the country’s top canoeists as they travel to a competition in northern Maine. The film screens March 15 at 2:30pm at the Hammer Theatre Center and March 21 at 12:10pm at 3Below Theaters.
From artsy short films to documentaries to narrative films, every color in the cinematic kaleidoscope is featured. And the audience is just as diverse, Hussey says, bringing together journalists, artists, innovators and movie lovers—“people from every culture, really representing Silicon Valley, which is so global anyway. And different ages, different ways of thinking. I love that at Cinequest. There’s nothing homogenous about it.”
“I love seeing people get together from all these walks of life with the common interest,” Halfdan says. “I’m very grateful to them for doing that.”
