27th Annual James River Film Fest Cancelled

Due to current and unprecedented circumstances we regret having to cancel our programs for the 27th James River Film Festival, March 18-22.

Cinema should pull people together and that's been our aim since '94, but maybe not this year. We plan to revive some of the events in the coming months at various venues so stay tuned.

stay healthy and thanks for your support.

We hope to see you soon,

JRFF Committee

Announcing the 2020 James River Film Festival

The 27th James River Film Festival RVA runs March 18-22, 2020 with events screening at the VA Museum of Fine Arts, Byrd Theatre, VCU's Grace St. Theater, Gallery 5 and Richmond's Main Public Library.

special guests include:

RON MANN, one of Canada's foremost documentarians, from a country with a strong documentary heritage; we'll be screening Comic Book Confidential ('89) and his latest, Carmine St. Guitars (2019),

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KEVIN WILLMOTT, screenwriter/director/actor shared a 2018 Academy Award for Best Screenplay with Spike Lee for BlacKkKlansman, which will be screened along with his mockumentary film, Confederate States of America (2004).  He also co-scripted Lee's Chi-Raq and the up-coming series Da 5 Bloods,

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Premiere Screenings:

Other Music (dir: Hatch-Miller, Basu, 2019),  a fond look at one of NY's beloved indie record stores,

One Man Dies A Million Times (dir: Oreck, 2019), a true story, set in the future,

How Andy Invented a Superstar/ How Andy Met Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground and Nico (dir: Shoor, Nagle, 2019), tales from Warhol's Factory by those who lived them,

Other Screenings:

Neil Young's/Bernard Shaky's  Human Highway;  Rockers, a forgotten reggae gem;

The NY hip cult classic, Liquid Sky; Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast; Silent/Music Revival screens Cocteau's Blood of a Poet w/ The Photosynthesizers


More guests/programs/details to come:  jamesriverfilm.org

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See you this Fall!

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Congratulations to this year’s finalists!

Good Conversation   Jenn Gomez  (14:02, MA)

Petrichor  Mireille Heidbreder  (6:08, VA)

The Guide  Shayne Hatfield  (11:05, VA)

UNCLE'S CAR  C. E. Dye  (7:11, NM)

Here Lies Beatrice  Katarina Docalovich  (12:23, NY)

Story of the Dreaming Water, Chap. Two  Brittany Gravely  (3:00, MA)

By Any Other Name  Peter Kimball  (12:38, Wash., DC)

Tous Les Jours  Nicholas Mullins  (13:35, GA)

The Usual Route  Cory Warner  (11:00, CA)

The Bartender  Travis Newsad  (10:00, MA)

Stuck in Between  Burcu Halacoglu  (6:00, Turkey)

VMFA event page

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With Steve Shelley, SY archivist Aaron Mullan, and Tannis Root/Kung-Fu co-founder Bill Mooney in conversation.

Sonic Youth released their sixth album Daydream Nation in October of 1988 and performed the material live that year and through 1989. The album was an immediate critical success. Robert Palmer wrote in Rolling Stone that it “presents the definitive American guitar band of the Eighties at the height of its powers and prescience”. Time has not dimmed the album’s luster: It was selected to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2005, and in 2013 Consequence of Sound declared “the record simply rules.”

In celebration of the album’s 30th anniversary, Sonic Youth, in conjunction with SY archivist Aaron Mullan, will present a program of Daydream Nation-related films. The rarely-screened 1989 documentary Put Blood in the Music will be shown in a new restoration. Rare and unseen gems from the band’s archive, plus live footage of the band performing songs from the album in 2007/2008 will round out the bill.

Put Blood in the Music 1989 Dir. Charles Atlas (SY Edit): Charles Atlas’s first major recognition came for his work with Merce Cunningham as the company’s filmmaker-in-residence from 1978-1983.

Put Blood in the Music is a unique documentary on the downtown New York music scene. In a collage of music, performance, and commentary, Atlas captures the energy and pluralism that characterize this urban milieu. Reflecting the eclecticism of his subject, Atlas re-structures the conventional “talking head” format to allow a fragmented, fast-paced compendium of voices and sounds. Presented here is the Sonic Youth segment of the film, in a context which is less a documentary than a cultural document, a vivid time capsule of the late 80’s New York music scene.

Sonic Youth Archives: Steve Shelley: ”Through the years and as the times changed we recorded our live shows as often as we could afford to on cassettes, DATs, CDs and when possible on multi-track recorders and videotape. We collected fan-generated audience tapes, shady bootlegs and anything we could get our hands on. We now maintain an archive of hundreds of hours of Sonic Youth concerts and we’re starting to share some of our favorites (often from the best-uncirculated source possible).