Overwrought because you missed the first anxiety film festival this summer in London? Fear not.
You can still catch the Los Angeles Feline Film Festival, the next Food Film Fest and the International Festival of Short Fiction Films from the Islands of the World.
Moreover, there’s always hope for another New York City Mental Health Film Festival (which “defeats stigma by bringing together mental health recipients and film buffs”); the Let’s All Be Free Film Festival (“dedicated to exploring what it means to be free”); and the Intelligent Use of Water Film Competition, not to mention (we will, anyway) the inevitable CinErotic FilmFest; Mockfest, which features only satirical mockumentaries; and even Blobfest, at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, where a portion of the 1958 science fiction classic The Blob was filmed and which celebrates by screening monster movies.
Photo: Reuters
“People are always searching for communities that are like-minded,” said Jane Rosenthal, a founder of the considerably more catholic Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
More mainstream festivals in Venice and Toronto are just around the corner, too (Telluride’s started on Friday), but screenings aimed at more eclectic audiences seem to be proliferating.
“Niche festivals allow every oddity and every interest to come together,” Rosenthal said.
“There are ones for every cultural group, for human rights, for religions. And then you have obscure interests you can curate for: from sumo wrestlers to reptilian advocates, agro-terrorists to films that the grand rabbi has blessed.”
And just imagine the potential for film festivals that cater to even more eccentric passions.
“I get a headache just trying to think of possibilities,” said Peter Bogdanovich, the director and critic.
Audiences suffering from paranoia might take a devil-may-care approach to a festival that featured The Parallax View, The Conversation and Chinatown.
Those who thrive on schadenfreude might relish a Festival of Financial Flops that screened Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar and The Postman. An Ennui Film Festival, one critic suggested, could include La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura.
“There’s always a cinephiliaphobics festival, for those with a fear of celluloid-worshiping zombies,” said Howard A. Rodman, a professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
Thane Rosenbaum, a senior fellow at New York University Law School and director of its Forum on Law, Culture and Society, suggested an Agoraphobia Film Festival that focused on wide-open spaces or densely packed ones (think of Midnight Cowboy); and a Genius Driven to Madness Film Festival, which could feature A Beautiful Mind, Shine (about the pianist David Helfgott) and Lust for Life (about Vincent van Gogh).
What about an Enough Already Film Festival, featuring Harry Potter, Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequels, said Jeffrey Lyons, the film critic, or a Dane Cook Unfunny Comic Film Festival?
In Britain this summer, the Mental Health Foundation screened 15 films during its Anxiety Arts Festival.
“The history of film is the history of anxiety,” the film program curator, Jonathan Keane, was quoted as saying, recalling that in 1896, filmgoers supposedly fled screaming from a Lumiere brothers movie because they believed the steam locomotive on the screen was careening right at them.
“Film allows us to address our worst fears from a safe distance,” said Errol Francis, the festival director.
Among Keane’s selections were Control (about the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis’ struggle with epilepsy), Solaris (in which a psychologist goes to a space station to figure out why the crew went crazy) and The Headless Woman (about a driver who becomes psychotic because she is uncertain whether she has struck an animal or a pedestrian).
Francis said he didn’t think Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety would have trivialized the festival (the performing arts program actually included a one-woman comedy called “Hi Anxiety!”), but Brooks pronounced himself shocked at the omission of his 1977 film. (In that comedy, the patient entering the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous is informed where dinner is served and admonished, “Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup.”)
“Whether they are tardy or not — no one at that festival will be getting a fruit cup!” Brooks said in an interview.
Francis said he was unconcerned that exuberant promoters might overreach in creating a festival of, say, short films for people with attention deficit disorder, or a fat film festival starring stout actors.
“I think both obesity and ADD would make good topics for an anxiety program, given international concerns about both topics and their relationship with mood disorders,” he said.
“If the HBO network can run a website called The Weight of the Nation entirely devoted to showing films ‘confronting America’s obesity epidemic,’ then perhaps the idea is not so far-fetched.”
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