Red Rock Film Festival presents winning films
By Matt Marxstein
With more than 6,000 films submitted to the Red Rock Film Festival since its inception, the winners from the 12th annual festival shows several filmmakers received multiple awards. Many of these awarded films will be shown in the festival’s Winners Showcase 12 in St. George and in Cedar City this month. The feature will play with some of the winning shorts June 26 at 8 p.m. at the Groovacious Records backlot venue, located at 195 W 650 S #2 in Cedar City. Then, on June 27 at 7:30 p.m., the Winners Showcase 12 will show more of the winning shorts at the Megaplex Main Street Theater, located at 905 S. Main St. in St. George.
Last year’s festival included 22 people on the grand jury consisting of mostly experienced festival practitioners and award-winning filmmakers such as Academy Award nominee Tim Reckart and Oscar winner Thomas Lennon. The judges were also generous in their offerings for the grand jury prize, the festival’s micro-cinema Aglet Awards, and special achievements.
Adam Rosenberg’s music video “Canopy” won four awards, Nick Markham’s Collegiate drama “Reverie” won three more awards after the Audience Award, Iza Pająk’s experimental doc “Big Fish” won too many to list, and Bobby Pontillas and Andrew Chesworth’s animated short “One Small Step” not only was the audience choice but also won over the grand jury with two more awards and was later nominated for an Academy Award this year. When music video jury member Monique Madrid was asked to nominate awards for special achievements, she responded with an enthusiastic “Every category you got.”
“What a sly piece of filmmaking,” said documentary short jury member Thomas Lennon said on the genre-bending short “Big Fish,” without any criticisms. “When it was over, I thought I knew what it was about, but I rushed back to the beginning to watch again and confirm my suspicions. Wonderfully oblique and understated.”
Other multiple winners included Simon Lehembre’s music video “Marche par Marche” (“Step by Step”), “Dead Air” from young Utah director Steven Uribe, Olya Schechter’s documentary feature “A Sniper’s War,” Morrisa Maltz’s “Ingrid,” Erik Bloomquist’s “Long Lost,” Carla Patullo and Elizabeth Beecherl’s animated documentary short “Lotte that Silhouette Girl,” and Taron Lexton’s “Son to Son,” which included a double win for Jim Meskimen (“Parks and Recreation”) for acting and screenplay.
The Red Rock Film Festival programmers did have one say for the awards, and that is the Spirit of the Festival Award, which went to Brian Elerding (“Mad Men”) and Fred Cross (“The Last Ship”, “The Office”) who attended the festival last year with their fiction feature “Lear’s Shadow.”
“Lear’s Shadow” puts audiences in the middle of a story of friendship and loss as two good friends from a modern-day theater company cope with a shared loss and repair their troubled relationship and arguments by acting out Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”
Admission to either show is $10 at the door and $3 for children. Audience members can bring their own chairs to the June 26 event for reduced pricing. The Red Rock Film Festival will screen other films from June through September as part of its summer film series. To enter this year’s actual festival for November, visit redrockfilmfestival.com. Call (435) 705-5555 for information.
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