Nantucket Film Festival: New movies, celebrities, climate change and an Oscar winner

Starting at 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 22, the opening night of the five-day Nantucket Film Festival, an art projection will light up the back of a harborside scallop shanty off Easy Street. The five-minute video, playing over and over for more than two hours, will share a vision of the island’s possible future as climate change takes its toll with storm surges and sea level rise.

The “Rising Above” art focus on the island’s working waterfront, and its history of “resilience” and coming together to adapt to change, was originally shown last fall as a joint project between ReMain Nantucket, the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge, the Nantucket Dreamland theater, digital media designer Michael Clark and art director Heather Macleod.

Environment-oriented films have long been a film festival priority popular with audiences, says festival producer Jaclyn Wohl, and seeing “Rising Above” back then helped to inspire pushing forward something more formal for this summer.

So the “Green Carpet Cinema” initiative begins this year as part of the festival’s screening of 36 feature films — evenly split between narratives and documentaries — and dozens of short films June 22-27 at the Dreamland downtown. The festival will also offer awards to top moviemaking voices who include Oscar winner Barry Jenkins and actor/director John Turturro; host celebrities like Ben Stiller and Peter Farrelly at talks; and hold a variety of special events.

For “Green Carpet Cinema,” there will be four films and a panel discussion as well as that one-night art installation. The organizers’ goal: Having the festival be an “active participant in the conversation” about how climate change impacts sea levels, weather and more on Nantucket and beyond.

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“Of course it has global consequences, but I think particularly that the people on Nantucket are really engaged with matters relating to environmentalism,” says Lori Donnelly, the festival’s head of programming. The new initiative “seemed to be a great fit with what's going on in the documentary filmmaking world and with the concerns that our audiences have.”

The festival — back fully in person this year and largely at the Dreamland, with masking encouraged — has multiple stories to tell, though. Sparking the climate change discussion is just part of what’s being offered, and Donnelly and Wohl shared some of the highlights (more information on all events: https://nantucketfilmfestival.org/):

Barry Jenkins

Jenkins, who wrote and directed 2016’s “Moonlight,” winner of Oscars for Best Picture and Screenplay, will receive the Screenwriters Tribute. “He's somebody that we have wanted here probably since ‘Moonlight,’” Wohl says. “His work is incredibly relevant and powerful and he really speaks to my generation and generations coming up. Just his voice and what he’s got in the pipeline as well, it truly embodies the type of screenwriter that we want to highlight.”

Jenkins was also Oscar-nominated for writing 2018’s “If Beale Street Could Talk” and won numerous accolades for co-writing and directing all 10 episodes of the adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad.”

“I don't think there's any other American filmmaker today that's so attuned to these torrents of emotion — love, pain, disillusionment," Donnelly says. "And the way that he orchestrates his film infuses it with this romance, this sentiment, this poeticism. He's really remarkable and stands head and shoulders above American filmmakers, right right now. (There’s) certainly a case to be made for him being one of the top five filmmakers in America right now.”

John Turturro

Wohl called Turturro “another powerhouse.” The Nantucket festival will present its Compass Rose Award for Career Achievement to the Emmy Award-winning actor, screenwriter, director, and producer for his body of work over 35 years.

Turturro's long list of acting credits include “Do the Right Thing,” “Jungle Fever,” “The Color of Money,” “Quiz Show,” “The Good Shepherd,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Barton Fink” and “The Batman.” His drecting/writing work includes “Mac,” “Illuminata” and “Romance & Cigarettes.”

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Turturro’s TV work includes an Emmy Award for “Monk,” the current “Severance” — directed and executive-produced by Stiller, who will present the Nantucket award — “Monday Night Mayhem” and “The Bronx is Burning.” On June 24, he will present a staged reading from his new script “Howard Beach” and be featured for an “In Their Shoes Conversation….” Turturro and Stiller will screen an episode of “Severance” on June 25, followed by a Q&A.

With his vast filmography, “he's the ideal person that you would want to honor as a screenwriter in a storytelling festival," Wohl says. "He’s just brilliant.”

Cooper Raiff

Cooper Raiff will receive the New Voices in Screenwriting Award, and there will be a screening of his “Cha Cha Real Smooth” film, which is only his second. Donnelly called the new film “a timeless, in a sense, coming-of-age story” about a young, unmoored man just out of college who is looking for connection and finds it in a single mother of an autistic daughter.

The movie was bought for distribution at the Sundance Film Festival, Wohl says, for the second-highest-ever amount after last year’s “Coda,” which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar – and was written and directed by Sian Heder, a past recipient of this Nantucket award.

“Cooper is definitely an up and comer, and from the looks of it, he’s really going to have quite a career ahead of him,” Donnelly says.

Ramin Bahrani

Ramin Bahrani will receive the award for Special Achievement in Documentary Storytelling, even though, Donnelly points out, he’s primarily known as a features director. Bahrani will be on-island with “2nd Chance,” his first documentary, which is an exploration of the life and legacy of the inventor of the modern-day bulletproof vest who shot himself 192 times to prove his product worked.

“You can still see those (feature) threads in terms of (Bahrani's) storytelling. (The movie) really at times feels like a traditional narrative, the way he paints these really larger-than-life characters in his film and way that he is able to develop this relationship,” Donnelly says. “The interviews are astonishing for a variety of reasons, but Ramin for nearly 20 years is another American filmmaker and filmmaker of color who is doing really phenomenal work.”

Civil rights

An issue that Donnelly says is of particular interest to her is “diversity and inclusivity and things related to civil rights  and people’s rights.”

Chief among the films that reflect this is centerpiece film “Breaking” (formerly titled “892”), which stars John Boyega as a former soldier who is unable to work because of PTSD and goes to extreme lengths to get the attention of an unhelpful veterans services program. The movie features the last performance of Michael K. Williams.

“It’s a taut film with very much John Boyega’s performance at the forefront,” Donnelly says, though she notes of Williams, “That man’s charisma and his dynamism — whenever he’s on screen, I just don’t want to look at anything else.”

Documentary “Kaepernick & America” is about football player Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests and reactions to them. It's about how, Donnelly says, “the simple gesture of kneeling at a game became this huge firestorm and and became a symbol of of obviously something much larger, and then dovetails into the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a really informative doc and it’s one of my favorites.”

‘A summer vibe’

Besides more issue-oriented films and documentaries, the festival offers several comedies and what Wohl describes as more “lighthearted” films. One is closing film “Linoleum,” starring Jim Gaffigan as a host of a failing children's science show who tries to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut by building a rocket ship in his garage.

She also recommends two films starring Aubrey Plaza: “Emily, the Criminal,” about a desperate woman who becomes a “dummy shopper” buying goods with stolen credit cards; and Spotlight Film “Spin Me Round,” about an Italian restaurant chain manager’s trip to Italy that turns from romantic getaway to catastrophe.

Donnelly adds the suggestion of “Official Competition,” starring Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas in a satire on the movie industry.

Green Carpet Cinema

There are four movies in this new category and the festival’s opening film is “Fire of Love,” director Sara Dosa’s true story of daring French volcanologists who chased eruptions around the world. Dosa will be part of a conversation about sustainability and climate change with Maria Mitchell Association visiting scientist Rich Blundell and Cecil Barron Jensen of ReMain Nantucket, hosted by Marc Skivrsky.

Focusing on climate change was “ really a mission that we started coming out of the pandemic and (with the festival) turning 25, and that we really want to be perceived as having in the community and in the industry,” Wohl says. “Blundell’s main focus of his science is actually ‘big history’ and so it is the story of the Earth and how it relates to our mission of being a screenwriter and storytelling festival. So (the presentation is) talking about the big history of the world and the Earth and how we move forward and how the Earth is telling its story.”

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The other three films address different aspects of environmental change, Donnelly says, and they are: Becky Hutner’s “Fashion Reimagined,” about designer Amy Powney’s mission to create a sustainable collection; “The Territory,” Alex Pritz’s film about a network of Brazilian farmers who seize an area of protected Indigenous territory; and “To the End,” Rachel Lears’ film about four young women of color elected to Congress and fighting for a Green New Deal.

That last movie “features AOC (U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York) at the forefront, and it's a film that really gets you up close into their lives individually, but also as they're helping to shape this movement,” Donnelly says. “It's scary, but absolutely you walk away and you feel that you know that these women who are so passionate about what they're doing can be real motivators for change.”

Special events and more star power

Returning events will be “Morning Coffee With…” chats and garden parties, which will include the “Late Night Storytelling” favorite, with guests to be announced. Other celebrities involved with events will include Chris Matthews (“Hardball”), NPR’s Ophira Eisenberg, Tom Cavanaugh (TV’s “The Flash”), Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”) and George Pelecanos (“The Wire,” “The Deuce”).

For families

As in past years, the Nantucket festival will screen the new Pixar movie, this time “Lightyear,” an origin story for “Toy Story” favorite Buzz Lightyear. Also on tap for kids is “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” with actress Jenny Slate, the main voice talent, on island; and a Kids Short program of short films.

Nantucket high and middle school students will be able to present the short narrative and documentary films they’ve produced through a festival off-season program in “Teen View Showcase,” which includes a Q&A.

A new, free community event will be Skate Jam, happening from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. June 25, where watchers and participants can join Nora Vasconcellos, professional skateboarding star of the feature documentary “Skate Dreams.” Donnelly says Vasconcellos is “at the forefront of women skating, pretty much the face of women skating right now so it’s a big deal to have her here.”

She’ll be joined by some other professional skateboarders, and there will be giveaways and ice cream.

Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Nantucket Film Festival: Movies, stars, climate change, Oscar winner