Gold Coast International Film Festival organizers announced on Tuesday the lineup for the first annual North Shore event, offering 43 widely varied feature and short films including two with strong North Shore ties.
“We’ve got a lot of good films,” said Sean McPhillips, senior programmer and festival director. “It’s a real smorgasbord.”
Regina Gil, founder and executive director of the festival, and McPhillips, released the list of international and domestic films during a press conference with Town of North Hempstead Supervisor Jon Kaiman Tuesday morning in front of the Manhasset Clearview Cinema on Plandome Road in Manhasset.
The festival, which will run from June 1 to June 5, is poised to both put a spotlight on Long Island’s North Shore and boost business.
“The Gold Coast Film Festival is an idea whose day has come,” Kaiman said. “This is about arts, culture and community. This is about the North Shore of Long Island.”
The films will be shown at the Clearview Cinemas in Great Neck, Herricks/Garden City Park, Manhasset, Roslyn, and Port Washington. Festival films will also be screened at several outdoor venues and at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn. Clearview Cinema is one of the festival’s corporate sponsors.
Kaiman said research demonstrates that film festivals are potentially financial bonanzas, generating business for restaurants and other businesses in the communities where they’re held. He said he’s hoping the Gold Coast festival is a big draw that will keep film buffs coming back to the locales they visit to see the films.
“Film festivals are really an economic tool. It helps everyone in the local community,” Kaiman said.
Gil said part of the idea of staging the festival is to hearken back to the Long Island “Gold Coast” of an earlier era. In the early days of the 20th century, it was “the place that was Hollywood before Hollywood,” she said.
“Film is arguably the most accessible art for of them all. Film is an extraordinarily powerful medium,” Gil said.
In keeping with the association of jazz age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers with ties to the Gold Coast, the theme of the festival is films based on books.
Gil dubbed the week-long event as an “A” list festival with films and panels of directors and actors that “will create buzz for a long time to come.”
Some of that buzz will be about the work of two local directors originally from Great Neck. Kevin Ash’s “Holy Rollers,” about a young Orthodox Jew who is drawn into becoming an Ecstacy dealer by a friend who has ties to an Israeli drug cartel. Seth Swirsky’s “Beatle Stories,” an offbeat documentary that features famous people and people with no claim to fame who have personal stories to relate about themselves and the legendary British pop band.
“Chasing Madoff,” director Jeff Prosserman’s account of Harry Markopolouos and the team of investigators who uncovered the Bernard Madoff financial scandal, also seems appropriate choice to make its New York premiere at the festival.
“We figured it would give people an opportunity to throw tomatoes at the screen,” Gil joked.
The overall objective of the festival is a serious attempt to create a niche in the film festival season between the Cannes Film Festival and the Nantucket Film Festval that the Gold Coast Film Festival will be occupy for a long time to come.
The lineup is a potpourri of films of different genres and cultural underpinnings, from “Baby Arabia,” a Thai film about the Naseb band by that name, “Fleurs Du Mal,” (“Flowers of Evil”) about a romance between a young Frenchman and an Iranian in exile to “Little Sparrows,” an Australian film about a family spending its last Christmas together, and “Slackistan,” about a groups of Pakistanis who spend their days partying, surfing the Web and smoking shisha pipes until reality begins to intrude on their lifestyle.
One Israeli film, “Homecoming,” about three children seeking their roots in their parents’ homeland, will have its U.S. premiere. Another Israeli film, “Rafting to Bombay,” about a five-year-old boy and his mother escaping the Nazis in Poland and ultimately rafting to India on the Tigris, will have its Long Island premiere. A third Israeli production will have its New York premiere: “Naomi,” tells the tragic story of an astrophysics professor’s obsessive love for his young wife. “Infiltration” tells the story of a special platoon organized for those unfit for military service.
India is represented in the festival by three films: “Memories in March,” about a mother who learns things she never know about the life of her 28-year-old son after he is killed in an accident,; “Phas Gaye Re Obama,” a comedy about a Indian American who loses his fortune in the global recession, and “In Camera,” about the 25-year career of award-winning documentary cameraman Ranjan Palit.
A film from China, “The Piano in a Factory,” tells the story of a steel factory worker who fights for custody of his young daughter by building a piano from scratch for her to indulge her love of playing the instrument.
U.S. entries in the festival span all genres. There’s “Chess Kids,” about young prodigies competing in a World Youth Tournament; “The Best and the Brightest,” a comedy about a couple trying to get their five-year-old into one of New York City’s elite private kindergartens; “My Sucky Teen Romance,” about four geeks trying to defend their friend from vampires at a Sci-Fi convention; “When Harry Tries to Marry,” a cross-cultural comedy about a man who decides to have an arranged marriage, and “Rejoice and Shout,” a documentary about the evolution of Gospel music through the myriad styles of spirituals, four-part harmony quartets, Soul music, and Rap and Hip Hop.
“It’s a very diverse community and this brings them together,” Kaiman said.
McPhillips said his goal was to offer a diverse mix of films from different cultures, and he said it wasn’t easy to line them all up. Typically, he said, filmm makers won’t commit to a festival until three months before it’s scheduled, so he had to do a lot of scrambling to assemble the lineup for Gold Coast.
McPhillips, who formerly worked for Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, is also the programmer of the Furman Film Series, which is presented at Great Neck Arts Center.
The Nassau County Museum of Art will screen classics, including “Blow-Up” and “Rear Window” as its part of the festival, as well as “Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light,” an American Masters documentary about the famous portrait photographer, all for free with the museum admission fee.
Tickets for films at the Clearview Cinemas will go on sale on May 16.
Along with the Town of North Hempstead, the festival has support from a number of corporate sponsors, including Blank Slate Media, The New York Post, Gold Coast Studios, Prudential Douglas Elliman, Panavision, Deluxe, Katten Muchin Rosenmann LLP, Louie’s Oyster Bar & Grill, Kramer Levin, NYIT, Americana Manhasset, Long Island Pulse Magazine and Cablevision.
The Long Island Railroad is also a sponsor, with festival organizers emphasizing the ease of access to the various film venues by train. Buses will be provided to take festival goers to films screened at the Herricks/New Hyde Park and Roslyn locations that aren’t as accessible by train.
