10 days, 70 events at VT International Film Festival

The Vermont International Film Festival will hold nearly 70 events for 10 days starting Friday in Burlington. Orly Yadin, the festival’s executive director, said at a sneak preview that the offerings will range from Cuban films to high-quality late-night horror movies to family events and a showcase for Vermont filmmakers.

Yadin and the festival’s outreach coordinator, Seth Jarvis, teased the festival for an audience at the Main Street Landing Film House last month with trailers for nearly 20 of the films that will be screened through Oct. 30. “About three-quarters of the trailers we saw will have some kind of guest associated with them,” Jarvis said following the screening.

Here’s an alphabetical rundown of some of the films Yadin and Jarvis previewed (plus a few they didn’t) that might be worth your time over the next week and a half. (All are at Main Street Landing unless otherwise indicated.)

7:30 p.m. Oct. 27, the documentary “Agents of Change: Black Students and the Transformation of the American University” looks at campus activism in the 1960s. Director Abby Ginzberg will attend.

7 p.m. Wednesday, 11:30 a.m. Oct. 27 (with captions and audio-description for the visually and hearing impaired), “Best and Most Beautiful Things” tells the story of an autistic, legally blind teen from Maine as she strives to discover herself. Director Garrett Zevgetis and the teen featured in the documentary, Michelle Smith, will attend both screenings.

4:15 p.m. Friday, the Vermont Filmmakers’ Showcase takes place Friday and Saturday and includes Daniel Houghton’s six-minute animated film “The Collinwood Fire,” which tells of a 1908 Ohio blaze that killed 172 school children.

6:30 p.m. Oct. 30, “Contemporary Color,” the festival’s closing-night documentary, shows musician David Byrne working with high-school color-guard teams on routines involving the music of top indie-rock acts such as St. Vincent and tUnE-yArDs.

8:45 p.m. Saturday, 4:15 p.m. Monday, the Polish/Israeli feature film “Demon” blends Jewish fable and the Holocaust in a fright-tinged love story.

6:45 p.m. Monday, 4 p.m. Oct. 28, “Fatima,” a feature film from France, focuses on a mother and her two teenage daughters adjusting to life away from their North African roots.

6:15 p.m. Sunday, 8:30 p.m. Oct. 28, the Australian feature film “Girl Asleep” experiments with sound and imagery in a music-filled coming-of-age story.

6 p.m. Oct. 28, the director of the celebrated film “Oldboy,” Park Chan-wook of South Korea, tries his hand at a sensual crime drama set in the 1930s with “The Handmaiden.”

7 p.m. Friday, the festival opens with another feature film with Korean ties, “The Hanji Box.” The film’s director, Nora Jacobson of Norwich, and lead actors Suzanne C. Dudley and Natalie Kim will attend the movie’s world premiere.

6:30 p.m. Monday, the Werner Herzog documentary “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World” explores the direction the world is heading in as a result of 21st-century technology. The screening will be preceded by a 5:30 p.m. reception and followed by a panel discussion.

Noon Oct. 27, the “Lunchtime Shorts” series that runs Tuesday through Oct. 28 at Burlington City Arts includes “Unforgiven Fire,” “Stolen Shadows” and “Walking with the Dead,” three AIDS-related films made by John Killacky, executive director of the Flynn Center.

1:45 p.m. Saturday, 8:15 p.m. Wednesday, “Microbe & Gasoline,” a feature film from France, is directed by Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and looks at a couple of misfit teens scheming to take an oddball cross-country trip.

6:30 p.m. Saturday, 11:15 a.m. Sunday, “Miss Sharon Jones!” documents the career of the soul singer (who performed at the 2010 Burlington Discover Jazz Festival) whose joyful style on stage is tempered by her recent battle with cancer.

2 p.m. Sunday, 3:45 p.m. Oct. 27, the feature film “Morris from America” tells the fish-out-of-water story of a young black American trying to fit in at his new school in Heidelberg, Germany.

6:30 p.m. Tuesday, the documentary “Political Animals” highlights four women and their fights in the California legislature for gay rights. One of those women, former California state Sen. Carole Migden, will attend.

4 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday, set in a Bedouin village in southern Israel, “Sand Storm” is a feature film that dives into the tension built into male-dominated cultures.

3:30 p.m. Oct. 29, the Scottish documentary “Seven Songs for a Long Life,” which will be shown in an upcoming broadcast of “POV” on Vermont PBS, looks at end-of-life issues through the eyes of a half-dozen hospice patients. Justine Nagan, executive producer for “POV,” and film producer Lori Cheatle will attend.

4 p.m. Monday, 1:30 p.m. Oct. 29, an Afghan refugee living in Iran grapples with the bonds of tradition while striving to be a modern girl in “Sonita.” The documentary’s director, Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, will take part in a question-and-answer session via Skype following the Oct. 29 screening.

6:30 p.m. Sunday, “A Syrian Love Story” is a documentary about a Palestinian and a Syrian who met as political prisoners in Syria in the 1990s. The screening will start with a reception and be followed by a question-and-answer session with Robert Ford, former U.S. ambassador to Syria.

3:45 p.m. Oct. 29, the feature film “Tanna,” shot in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, plunges into the jungle for the story of a couple in love turning their culture’s tradition of arranged marriages upside-down. Marco Johnson, a native of Vanuatu, will take part in a question-and-answer session.

7:30 p.m. Oct. 27, presented at and in conjunction with the Flynn Center, the 2003 Oscar-nominated animated film “The Triplets of Belleville” will be jazzed up by composer Benoit Charest leading Le Terrible Orchestre de Belleville in a live performance of his original score.

9 p.m. Oct. 29, two nights before Halloween, the festival’s After Dark Spotlight presents “Under the Shadow,” a horror film set in Tehran in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War.

9 p.m. Oct. 28, the Irish feature film “Viva” follows a young drag performer in Havana dealing with the clashes of culture and family.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter atwww.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck .

If you go

WHAT: Vermont International Film Festival

WHEN: Friday through Oct. 30

WHERE: Main Street Landing, Burlington, with some events at Burlington City Arts and the Flynn Center

ADMISSION: $5-$10 per film; $120 gold pass; free with suggested donation of $5 or more for Vermont Filmmakers’ Showcase and the Vermont Archive Movie Project; $15-$35 for “The Triplets of Belleville”

INFORMATION: 660-2600, www.vtiff.org