New York International Independent Film and Video Festival 2007

Anne Michaud

For its 14th year, the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival (NYIIFVF) selected many films and videos from students, filmmakers and veterans from around the world. Once again, the festival proved that film is a powerful medium.

More than 200 short and feature films were showcased from all genres in the two small and often empty screening rooms at the East Village Cinema. Between many delays and mostly forgettable plots, a few gems sparkled between the rocks.

Carl Janes’ experimental myth,The In Between, presented a surreal feel of his beautiful shots and lingering moments that could have been taken from a dream.
Many documentaries were quite memorable, from New York’s street bike-endearing Messenger by Gary Beede, to the shocking look at blind mediums from Japan in Gabriel Santamarina’s The Blue Speck of the Unknown.

Anna’s Trip by Alan Ezequiel Jais proved that time cannot erase the horror of the Holocaust as a woman tries to find her family’s roots in Poland, while Bush, Fran Apprich’s short video in which a Scottish four year-old girl talks about forestry biased by politics, made quite an impact. In Popwhore, James Hanlon offers a behind-the-scenes look at a bisexual mother of two who conducts—and participates in--a porn site. But the cream of the crop was the touching Stay Away a Little Closer by Rick Rodgers, in which playwright John Ford Noonan’s passion is mixed with drug addictions and his residence at an psychiatric hospital.