Presenting Two New Films, free admission
Love and Other Anxieties at the Hooker Dunham, Brattleboro August 10th 7:30pm
White: A Memoir in Color at the Organ Barn, Guilford, August 11th 7:30pm
Filmmakers in attendance to take your questions.
{The festival is collaboration with the Center for Independent Documentary which is located in Boston.}
The Festival opens with a screening of Lyda Kuth’s Love and Other Anxieties at the Hooker Dunham Theater at 139 Main Street in Brattleboro on Friday night, August 10th at 7:30pm. In this year’s festival Kopkind focuses on the personal while not excluding the political. Susi Walsh, who runs the Center for Independent Documentary and co-programmer of the Kopkind/CID festival and retreat with John Scagliotti, has encouraged many of the filmmakers who have attended the Guilford seminars to take the time to look inward. Susi explains, “It is this self-exploration that allows the filmmaker to connect in a deeper way with the political forces swirling around them. This intimate process helps many of us, the viewer and the filmmaker, make some sense of the given realities of politics on our lives that we face every day.”
Faced with the realty that her only child will flee the nest for college, film-funder turned filmmaker Lyda Kuth gets anxious not only about how her daughter will fare in today’s world of love and romance, but also about her relationship with her husband of 20 years. What will life be like after her daughter leaves? What is the real meaning of love, marriage, and long-term commitment? She queries non-experts and experts alike, such as indie filmmaker Josh Safdie, playwright and musician Kyle Jarro, author and scholar Stephanie Coontz, about their successes and failures of the heart. Love and Anxieties, a midlife story, is both personal and poetic. With the help of editor/co-writer Lucia Small (filmmaker of “My Father the Genius” and “The Axe in the Attic”), Kuth has crafted a meditative documentary that is poignantly intimate yet surprisingly universal. Lyda Kuth will be at the theater to take questions after the screening.
Lyda Kuth’s Wedding Day
The next evening, August 11th at 7:30pm Kopkind opens up the Organ Barn in Guilford to the public again for a free screening of White: A Memoir in Color. In this deeply personal and emotional exploration of racial identity, director Joel Katz (“Strange Fruit” 2003) shares his family’s journey of immigration, assimilation, liberal idealism, bitter disillusionment and ultimately, reconciliation. The son of white Jewish, immigrant parents who assimilated in 1930s Brooklyn, Katz’s father became a professor at Howard University. As a white Jew working at the nation’s preeminent African-American college during the turbulent civil rights era, he went through a range of difficult experiences and emotions. Katz himself became a professor at a predominantly non-white university, and later confronted his own racial attitudes as the adoptive parent to a mixed-race child of Irish-Italian and African-American descent. Highly engaging and thought-provoking, White: A Memoir in Color packs a powerful punch as it exposes intricate dimensions to race and prejudice in the melting pot of American society. Joel Katz will be in the Organ Barn to take questions about the film following the screening.
Kopkind is a living memorial to the late Guilford resident and journalist Andrew Kopkind, who tracked politics and culture for thirty years for publications from Hard Times to The New York Times, The Nation to Esquire. The project puts on seminars for its summer participants and free events like this Film Festival for the public. The theme of the seminars during the week with filmmakers is about diversity and filmmaking. The seminars are co-sponsored by the Center for Independent Documentary.
For information or directions to the Organ Barn in Guilford, call John Scagliotti: 802.254.4859, , or email stonewal@sover.net All the screenings are free and donations to Kopkind are welcome.
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Website for “Love and Other Anxieties” http://www.loveandotheranxieties.com/press-kit/
Website for “White: A Memoir in Color” http://www.ajff.org/film/white-memoir-color
Kopkind Website: www.kopkind.org
Kopkind Colony 