NE Montana Film Fest: March 6th

ArtSpot Presents: First Annual Northeast Montana Film & Video Festival

Date:

Saturday, March 6th

When:

10:30 am (featured films, NO discussion, NO short films)

2:30 pm (featured films, discussion w/featured films creators, short films, awards)

Where:

Evangelical Church, Glasgow

Cost:

$5 adults/$2.50 seniors and students/$10 family

Featured Films:

Butte, America, Pamela Roberts, 67 minutes

High Plains Winter, Cindy Stillwell, 10 minutes

Trailer:

Mother of Normandy, The Story of Madame Simone Renaud (trailer), Doug Stebleton, 6 minutes

Short Films:
Hi Lonesome (2 minutes) and See You Then (2 minutes), Audrey Hall

Trax (1 minute), Toni Marie LaGree

Dolan’s Doodles (3:30 minutes), Shawn Newton

Please call Toni (228-9072) or Laura (526-7262) with any questions.

Special thanks to the Theo & Alyce Beck Foundation and Cottonwood Inn in Glasgow and F11 in Bozeman. Thank you!

Pamela Roberts, Butte America (67 minutes)

Narrated by 2009 Golden Globe winner Gabriel Byrne, Butte, America recounts the sometimes glorious, often sorrowful, but always fascinating story of the most lucrative hard rock mining town in United States history, "the Richest Hill on Earth," "the town that plumbed and electrified America," the Pittsburgh of the West. In Butte, the Industrial Revolution collided with the romance of the frontier, corporate capitalism battled organized labor, and human appetite laid waste to land and water, yielding vast fortunes for a few and a tragic environmental legacy for the people left behind. Those people are the heart of the film--miners, their families, the working class neighborhoods they created amidst danger and hardship. In a copper crucible, they forged a community whose toughness and solidarity speak to what's missing in America today. Butte, America combines historic fact and first-person narrative to bring to life the highly compelling but largely untold story of this legendary city.

As more countries pursue an urban-industrial lifestyle, at great social and environmental cost, the story of Butte becomes a story for the world.

Major funding for Butte, America provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Great ideas brought to life € Independent Television & Video Service € M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust € Environmental Protection Agency, Butte € Montana Cultural Trust € The People of Butte.

Over the past 24 years Roberts has produced and directed award-winning documentary films and videos for public television and national and international theatrical and video distribution. These include Backbone of the World: the Blackfeet, broadcast nationally on public television and WorldLINK TV; Ishi, the Last Yahi, a one-hour documentary nominated for an Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and broadcast nationally on American Experience; and Contrary Warriors: A Story of the Crow Tribe, nationally broadcast on A&E and PBS and winner of the John Grierson Award for Best Film for First Time Director.

Cindy Stillwell, High Plains Winter (10 minutes)

HIGH PLAINS WINTER, 2006, is a short experimental documentary film that looks at the winter season in relation to human experience. Particular to the open high plains of Montana, and other areas of the American West, is a landscape that in its sheer scope can shrink anything of human scale. When winter settles on this landscape the subtle colors and sounds that come to life in the growing season revert to an even simpler palette, often a near monotone: white hills and blue sky. The wind blows. HIGH PLAINS WINTER is an attempt to understand what becomes of the human spirit in such a landscape and season. Through color and black and white super 8 and 16mm images of snowscapes traversed by large-scale powerlines, small strings of feeding cattle, and the occasional grain bin dotting the whiteness, humans find a way to leave traces in what very often seems an environment hostile to their existence. As people gather to watch and participate in the winter sport Ski-Joring, this act becomes another way of coping with or even celebrating, the long winter season.

HIGH PLAINS WINTER, a ten minute short film by Cindy Stillwell, will be a part of the Sundance Film Festival 2006. From there the film will screen at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. The short is the third film in Stillwell’s “Western Trilogy.”

Cindy Stillwell received her Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University’s film program and since then has worked as a filmmaker, cinematographer, editor, DVD designer/author and professor. She is currently teaching at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT, as an associate professor in the Department of Media and Theatre Arts. She works with undergraduate and graduate students, teaching film production.