Juliette Goodfriend, the aptly named Executive Director of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute in suburban Philly, is one of those devoted art house exhibitors who does whatever it takes to bring the best in international cinema to her audience. We’re proud to have her institution as partof the Emerging Cinemas network. At this year’s Toronto Film Festival, Juliette scoured the available films and I’m pleased to share her thoughts with you. Those of you who live in or near Philly, owe it to yourself to check out her theater.
From Juliette Goodfriend:
A failed tweeter, I submit in good, old-fashioned prose my comments about the 30 films I viewed in part or in their entirety. As has become the custom, they are grouped in approximate descending order of appeal to what I take to be our audience at BMFI. Remember, too, that I have previously submitted notes on the couple dozen films we saw at Cannes ’09, some of which were major hits here at Toronto.
Emerging themes from Toronto: Uncertainty, infidelity, intoxication, and apocalypse—any relationship you see among them is purely intentional. What I noticed most was that there was very little blood in “My Toronto”. So here goes: Continue reading “Toronto International Film Festival 2009 – Juliet Goodfriend’s Notes”
About 5 or so months ago, 
Ever since I joined forces with my partners Barry Rebo and Giovanni Cozzi to form Emerging Pictures, one of our goals was to use the new digital technologies to revive the idea of the neighborhood repertory cinema. At first, there was a lot of resistance…from filmmakers and from theater owners, both of whom were still married to the 35mm format. Over time, that resistance has worn down, as both filmmakers and theater owners began to realize the economic benefits of leaving 35mm behind. But perhaps more importantly, as they began to experience it in a theater, they realized that the compromise in picture quality was very minimal, and was compensated for by not having the degradation that goes along with running 35mm through a projector. The image was the same in week 3 as it was in week 1. It was the same in Oklahoma City as at the Zeigfeld. 
When I think of Sam Cohn, what comes to mind is not his reputation for not returning phone calls, or his famous habit of eating paper, but rather I think of a man of impecable taste, who truly loved the arts–all the arts. My fondest memory of Sam is when both he and I were in Chicago for the premiere of a film he packaged that I was involved with financing and releasing that was called “Miles From Home.” The morning after the premiere, Sam and I went to the Art Institute to see a major Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit, and we ended up spending the day together. Sam was exhuberant about the exhibit, and loved being my guide, filling in details that he knew, but had not been included in the museum’s signage. He was a genuine enthusiast. 
I was very sad to read in the New York Times about the death of Steven Bach. Steven and I were colleagues at Columbia University, and we discovered we had many other things in common. We both went to Northwestern and we both worked at United Artists at the same time, although we didn’t get to know each other until we were at Columbia. Steven was instrumental in shaping what has become the producing program at the school, and even after he moved to Vermont, he came down for guest lectures a few times every year. The students loved his lectures on the history of producing and the origins of independent film.