Red Rock Film Fest in Cedar Adds Second Festival With Its Kayenta Festival
With 108 films this year between Red Rock has formed two Festivals the main Festival which started Wednesday in Cedar City and the Red Film Market Cinema Conference at the Center of the Arts at Kayenta in Ivins.
The 14th Annual Red Rock Film Festival continues on Friday as it changes it up at Cedar’s Festival Hall with panel discussions, outdoor screenings, a high-risk screening, and shorts at Policy Kings Brewery and a feature at Fiddlers Fun Center and concludes Saturday night.
The Red Film Market has moved to the Center for the Arts in Kayenta. These films are shown out of the traditional competition. Instead, the films will be competing for the “most original hook”.
This Festival has included a November 11 free screening for Veterans of Frederick Marx’s “Kalani’s Story” which highlights the “best people and programs doing work to support Vets.” It plays with Jaremey McMullin’s “Silkies” that takes another approach to healing: by Vets who hike symbolically with 22 kilograms on their backs in military underwear.
Daniel Troia (“We Are All In This Together”) is also on a journey via cross-country bicycle with no food, no money and shows how humility in the U.S. in these turbulent times of 2020. Another trek follows a group of adventures in JT Bruce’s Doc feature “The Devil’s Road: A Baja Adventure”, a 5,000-mile journey to recreate the century-old expedition of two naturalists. In an off-road race, Amy Lerner’s “One More Win” follows Rod Hall in one of the world’s most dangerous motorsports down the Baja Peninsula in Mexico.
The theme of finding a place in a hard world continues in Sunhui Chang’s short “How to Fall in Love in a Brothel” about two Koreans trying to fit in after the Korean War and David Quint’s feature doc “Father Unknown” that records a man’s desperate search for the father he’s never truly known.
Other filmmakers such as Kristin Ford explore the west with two films in the Festival: “Castle Hot Springs: Oasis of Time” a short doc that begins with the Yavapai Tribe and onward with the mining settlers that came to the Arizona Territory. Her film “Riders of the Purple Sage: The Making of a Western Opera” follows a classically-trained composer as he adapts Zane Grey’s novel into a grand opera.
Chris White’s “Electric Jesus” is about an American oddity from the ’80s: Christian hair metal. This music-comedy stars Andrew Eakle as Erik, Wyatt Lenhart of “Star Trek Continues”, Brian Baumgartner of “The Office” and Judd Nelson of “The Breakfast Club” who plays a preacher whose daughter stows herself away in the band’s RV.
There main films at the Red Rock Film Festival from November 4-7 play at Festival Hall (105 N. 100 E., Cedar City.) The films at the Red Film Market play November 10-14 at the Center for the Arts at Kayenta (881 Coyote Gulch Ct., Ivins, UT.) Tickets are $10 each, or access to 108 films is just $80 for locals or $150 for the general public. www.RedRockFilmFestival.com.
