Festivals & Events
Recognizing the innovative mountain filmmakers
Film Festival for the Independent Winter Sports Enthusiasts
The Cold Smoke Awards is a weeklong film celebration of the winter lifestyle and for independent filmmakers to be recognized for their exceptional talents and skills.
What is displayed is a series of the most real, raw, innovative and original winter sports films created. The quality of footage is astounding, and it’s all from independent filmmakers simply doing what they love.
Getting international submissions and national attention, the Cold Smoke Awards is compared to Telluride Mountain Film Festival and Banff Mountain Film Festival. But this is one that is about you and me, playing in ways we know is real and we can relate to: with our buddies in the cold smoke powder.
If it weren’t for this festival, where else would these films be screened?
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bring nature alive on the page
Writers Workshop Reborn in ‘07
Eileen Garvin is this year’s Beargrass coordinator. She lives, plays, and writes in the Columbia Gorge.
Beargrass Writers Workshop 2007 - Voices From Nature
We are pleased to present the Beargrass Writers Workshop at the Northwest Service Academy Mt. Adams Center in Trout Lake, Wash., from March 30 to April 1, 2007. Located just 20 miles north of Hood River, Ore., Trout Lake sits under the majestic gaze of the Northwest’s second highest peak.
This year marks the revival of the Beargrass Writers Workshop, which has been dormant for several years. The workshop takes its name from the hardy native grass, Xerophyllum tenax, which thrives in the alpine forests of Mt. Adams. Like the dramatic flowering stalk of the Beargrass itself, we are pushing out strands of new growth and energy.
Beargrass 2007 brings together a host of talented regional and local writers whose craft is informed by the voice of nature. Following our welcome session and readings on Friday night, workshop attendees will participate in three different sessions on Saturday. Saturday evening will take us to the Trout Lake Country Inn for an evening of reading, performance and celebration.
Featured writers will include the Columbia Gorge’s own Bill Weiler and Leigh Hancock.
Stick around on Sunday morning for a choice of different nature hikes (weather permitting) or a bonus workshop on how to combine art and poetry...
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February Events
Boulder Arts & Culture Roundup
With snow predicted to fall again in Boulder this week, this winter has more than overstayed its welcome. But although the cold temperatures can hamper outdoor fun, the last few weeks of winter are an excellent time to take in some indoor cultural activities.
Tonight, the Center of the American West hosts Sioux author, actor, screenplay writer, storyteller, and educator Joseph Marshall III at Old Main Chapel on CU Campus (February 18, 7:30 p.m., free). According to the Center, "His most recent publication, Keep Going: The Art of Perseverance (2006), attends to the power of perseverance through stories that stretch back across generations through the Lakota oral tradition." Marshall will speak and sign books after his presentation.
Over at the Dairy Center, some local students are putting on a production of Ira Levin's "Deathtrap." As explained in this Daily Camera article, Lisa Campbell and Danny Goldhaber, who are sophomores at Boulder High, wanted to be involved in all aspects of putting on a play, so they started their own theater company, "The Real Players," and will raise the curtain on their first production on Friday. (February 22-23, 7:30 p.m., February 24, 2 & 7:30 p.m., $9-$10).
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Baby, if I buy you dinner, will you put OUT/EX?
New Fringe Film Series in SLCOK. Get ready folks, because what I'm about to tell you is pretty cool.
A new monthly film series is beginning this Saturday, February 17th at 7:30pm at Nobrow Tea and Coffee Company (315 East 300 South) in Salt Lake City. The series is titled OUT/EX because each monthly screening will alternate between showing OUTsider and EXperimental films from around the world. Get it?
Anyway, OUT/EX is actually the brainchild of Loaf-I Productions and The Lost Media Archive and will be presented in collaboration with The Pickle Company. The idea is to bring fringe film to Utah residents each 3rd Saturday of every month as well as to get local filmmakers to submit their own work. In fact, the series will end with a final award show in February of 2008 with a $500 award going to the best film of the series. The winner will be chosen by audiences as well as a panel of industry professionals.
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New West Pick: Documentary Film Festival
Big Sky Film: “Can Mr. Smith get to Washington Anymore?”
One of the first things Jeff Smith says in the documentary, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is that even his grandmother couldn't believe he was running for U.S. Congress.
And when you first meet Jeff Smith in the film, you'll see his grandmother's point.
Smith is a part-time university teacher with a slight lisp and what could be a clip-on power tie. We first see him standing outside a townhouse, yelling up to a possible voter on a balcony. "I'm running for Congress," he exclaims as he crosses the street back to the house, looking small and hurriedly desperate.
Editor's Note: "Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?" is one of NewWest.Net's picks featured this week to help you plan for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which opens Feb. 15 at the Wilma Theater. This film plays at the festival Monday, Feb. 19 at 6:45 p.m. Bookmark www.newwest.net/bsdff to keep tabs on the previews and coverage of the festival.
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bold words in bingen
CGEC Presents “America: Freedom To Fascism” in Bingen, Wa.
Editor’s note: Guest writer Mark Capps is the event organizer for the Columbia Gorge Earth Center’s Film and Lecture Series.
The CGEC launches the new season with a free presentation of Aaron Russo’s new film "America: Freedom To Fascism”. The public is invited to attend the screening on Monday, Feb. 12th at 7:00 PM at the Solstice Wood Café (formerly Red Fish) in Bingen, Washington. An open discussion will follow the screening and due to the controversial nature of the film, the discussion is expected to be quite lively.
The film makes the case that America is moving headlong into a fascist police state and that this state of affairs is the result of two of the most profound changes in American history...
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not for the kiddies
MUD on the Stage
What I see people looking for today in theatre or other entertainment is some kind of confirmation of their lives… a simple appetite for something that gives them insight into life.”
--Maria Irene Fornes
CAST will present Mud by Maria Irene Fornes at the Columbia Center for the Arts on three weekends in February, 2007. With this play, the award-winning Cuban-American Fornes has written an uncompromising and emotionally truthful piece about the struggle to be free and the quest for some greater understanding of one’s life. Suggestive of the works of Samuel Beckett and John Steinbeck, this terse, lyrical play is both thought-provoking and emotionally evocative. It raises questions about human nature, the biologic, socio-economic and emotional forces that tether us to this world, and the powerful life forces that motivate us.
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Even More Bizarre
Bukowski Musical? We’re Not Joking
Charles Bukowski and musical theater. Can there be two any more disparate literary ideas?
I’m guessing not, which makes “Bukowsica!” (the exclamation mark doubles as an “l” of course) such a wonderfully absurd night of theater. Created by the Sacred Fools theater company of Los Angeles, it closed out the Tricklock Company’s 2007 Revolutions International Theater Festival and was directed by Tricklock’s own Joe Perrachio, the company’s artistic director.
The structure of the play is set up as an audition for potential backers to help take the play to Broadway — a ridiculous notion considering the exquisite profanity that peppers nearly every song. Hey, this is a show about Bukowski, the Beat Generation writer who ripped the lid off everything from his bowel movements to sex and hypocrisy, so you should expect no less. The program bills it as “Delusion, heartbreak, drunkenness, cirrhosis of the liver and some catchy tunes” and it doesn’t disappoint. (The program itself is masterpiece of absurdity that really is a fabulous keepsake. Among other things, it offers up appropriately pretentious fake bios, along with real ones, and details the company’s “other” musicals, such as “Songs of Sam,” “Ku Klux Klambake,” and “Holy Cow: The Ghandi Musical.")
The first number sets the scene perfectly with lyrics about coughing up blood and screwing whores, all done as a hilarious send-up of musicals, complete with jazz hands and jazz squares. (“You can be Bukowskical too!” they sing with all their hearts.)
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Theatre of the Bizarre
Revolutions Recreates Ellis IslandMany Americans are now far removed from the immigrant experience and can only guess what ordeals today’s émigrés face.
But Tricklock Company and Germany’s Futur3 did their best to offer a taste this week. The two companies created a piece just for Tricklock’s Revolutions International Theater Festival called CityBeats that puts audience members smack in the middle of immigration.
As we entered Amy Biehl High School, a young man dressed totally in black with black boots and sporting a badge that read “United Americas Immigration & Naturalization” directed us to a room down the hall. A woman wearing a mask with a curiously blank expression and a shawl, lugging an old-fashioned suitcase, got similar directions.
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They Say You Want a Revolution
Revolutions Revisits Henry VIt takes a minute to realize, but the show has already begun when you walk into the theater for “Henry V Live From Times Square.”
Thaddeus Phillips is talking to the audience, advising them to take seats with better views, showing his deck of cards featuring the most-wanted Iraqi war criminals. I was engrossed without realizing it. Call me gullible, but for most of the play I really thought Phillips was a guy who had developed this bizarre and intriguing version of Henry V in Times Square and somehow been discovered by “legitimate” theater.
He did a bit, which I didn’t realize was a bit until later, near the end of the show when he can’t find his glasses. He continues with the show, wandering around in a distracted manner, describing the role of the Duke of Burgundy in the play’s endgame as akin to a United Nations negotiator to whom no one listens. It was totally believable. My husband and I even argued afterwards because he insisted Phillips was actually breaking character to look for his glasses. When we saw him later at a reception, however, there was no sign of the specs.
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