World Cinema

World Cinema

October 10, 2011
International Film Series features eight films, new home in 23rd year

For 23 years, the International Film Series has brought foreign blockbusters and independent films to the University of Richmond. With this fall’s season, the eclectic selection plays on, while the series itself gets a bit of an upgrade.



Media Resource Center director Paul Porterfield started the program in the 1980s with Uliana Gabara, dean of international education, and another University professor in order to bring international cinema to Richmond’s campus. From the start, all regular screenings of the eight to 10 films selected each semester have been free and open to all.



The audience has grown over the years with a regular following among members of the greater Richmond community, and international and film students. In addition, many of the films are not screened anywhere else in Virginia, so people come from as far as Charlottesville and Norfolk to watch. With as many as 300 people coming to each film (screened three times over the course of a weekend) the series was in need of a new home. “We’d been looking for a larger venue for several years,” says Porterfield. “For some films we had to turn people away.”



This year, the series is held in the Ukrop Auditorium, a 225-seat space in the Robins School of Business’ new Queally Hall extension. The series poster and webpage were redesigned to coincide with the move to a new space.



At the launch of this fall’s series, The New York Times film critic David Thomson spoke to the audience about the changing role of film critics and the ways home entertainment systems have affected the experience of viewing films. In contrast to the 1970s and ’80s culture of viewing films with groups of people, today people can watch them alone, in bits and pieces, while doing other things like eating, talking, and sending text or email messages.



Spanish exchange student Ana Galán attended the speech and says her own preference coincides more with the format of the film series. “I love big screens on which you can actually see films in great detail, so I go to the cinema as often as I can,” she says. “However, I don’t think we should be alarmist about new technologies or ways of consumption; films, as everything else, have evolved from the invention of cinema and will continue evolving.”



As a student of journalism and film studies, Galán looks at film from technical and social perspectives. In Europe, she says, “We don’t have the huge budgets that mainstream Hollywood cinema has, so European films are not focused on the special effects of CGI; they are mainly based on the narrative. European audiences … go to the cinema to enjoy stories.”



In addition to enrolling in film production and Porterfield’s Values in World Film courses, Galán sought out film festivals when she first arrived in Richmond, which led her to the International Film Series. “I really like the variety of films you can watch,” she says. “They are all from different places in the world.”



That is one of Porterfield’s goals when he works with distributors — to find films that represent a number of different countries and genres. The options have changed over the years. “When we started, it was a lot of European films,” he says. “Now there are a number of films from Latin and South America, and from Asian countries, like Korea.”



This fall’s lineup includes a mainstream Japanese film from a niche director — “13 Assassins,” which is also the festival’s first samurai film. Porterfield also lists “Mascarades,” a small film from Algeria, and “Revanche,” from Austria, among the highlights.



“They are contemporary films,” says Galán, “so I guess that after watching the whole series you can get [quite a] good idea of what’s going on in world cinema nowadays.”