By STEVE PFARRER
A film festival for the 21st century.
As the organizers of the newest version of the Northampton Film Festival see it, film in the digital age has broadened beyond a mostly passive experience in which someone sits and watches a movie. And at a time when anyone with a computer or digital device can download all manner of entertainment on their own, how do you create a film-based event that a whole community can enjoy?
The answer, says Al Williams, is to mix some traditional films with some non-traditional ones, offer multiple venues, add some virtual reality experiences, season with special events like a filmmaking class, and throw in a free screening of a popular movie with related, spin-off events.
In short, a film festival as community party.
“We wanted to give it a more dynamic feeling and kind of spread it through the city,” said Williams, the director of Northampton Community television (NCTV), the principal organizer for the NFF this year, which takes place Sept. 28 through Oct. 2 at several downtown locations.
“We’re focused on trying to model the different ways of storytelling there are today,” he added. “The idea is to try and evolve the film festival and engage the community in different ways.”
The film fest began in the 1990s and at one time featured several dozen movies, screened predominantly at the Academy of Music. It’s been held annually most years since then, though in different incarnations, and it was put together by different people over the years.
This year, Williams and a number of other volunteers, including Brian Foote, director of the Northampton Arts Council, combined forces to create the revamped model.
In venues that range from the Academy to The Parlor Room to First Churches and Thornes Marketplace, the festival offers 13 films, including full-length features, foreign-language movies, documentaries and short films. There’s also a “crowd-sourced” version of Rob Reiner’s classic 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” in which some 44 teams of local actors and filmmakers, of all ages, have recreated the movie — produced by NCTV — scene by scene.
This retooled, homegrown “Princess Bride,” which closes the festival on Oct. 2 with a 7 p.m. screening at the Academy, is free — as is a showing of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” in Pulaski Park on Sept. 28 at 7 p.m. to open the festival.
Williams says the screening of “Star Wars” will be combined with related events: a “Star Wars” costume contest for kids; free frozen yogurt from GoBerry for any youth in such a costume; and a post-movie party at a “rebel base” (The Foundry) for people 21 and over, where “Star Wars”-themed beers will be on tap.
And if you see any full-size Stormtroopers wandering downtown that day, Williams says, don’t be alarmed — they’ll be there to lend a little atmosphere to the festivities, not to enforce the will of Darth Vader.
As has been a tradition, though, the NFF focuses on independent films rather than blockbusters, with an emphasis on the quirky and unusual. Take “Girl Asleep,” an offbeat comedy and coming-of-age story described by one critic as “Australia’s answer to ‘Napoleon Dynamite.’ ”
The film stars Bethany Whitmore as Greta Driscoll, a nervous teen on the cusp of her 15th birthday who finds herself buffeted between her weirdo parents, her contemptuous older sister, a nerdy boy who’d like to know her better, and a clique of mean girls at her new suburban school.
Set in the 1970s, “Girl Asleep” offers a hilarious sendup of the disco era and an extended excursion into Greta’s dreamscape, a world of strange forest creatures and people from her daytime life who take on different personas. Variety calls it “an exuberant example of imaginative filmmaking that … takes on new gravitas and urgency beneath the surface.”
The film plays Oct. 1 at 7 p.m in the sanctuary at First Churches.
On a different tact, “An Art that Nature Makes,” a documentary on photographer Rosamond Purcell, has a local connection: producer Alan Edelstein is a graduate of Northampton High School and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Purcell, of Boston, has long photographed found objects — old books, birds eggs and nests, driftwood and other things — to create intricate, sometimes unnerving tableaus of death, decay and metamorphosis.
Edelstein and the documentary’s director, Molly Bernstein, combined a few years ago on “Deceptive Practice,” a documentary on magician and actor Ricky Jay that played in Northampton as part of the “Four Sundays in February” series. In fact, Edelstein says, it was through working on that film that he and Bernstein met Purcell and became interested in her photography, leading in turn to the new documentary.
“An Art That Nature Makes” plays Oct. 2 at 5 p.m. at the Academy of Music; Edelstein and Purcell will lead a Q&A after the show.
Other cinematic highlights: “Microbe and Gasoline,” a French comedy about two misfit teens and their friendship, directed by Michel Gondry, director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”; short films that won awards earlier this year at the Five College Student Film and Video Festival; and a sneak preview of part of “Hamilton’s America,” an upcoming PBS documentary about the uber-popular musical “Hamilton.”
To complement all this old-school filmmaking, the Northampton festival will hold all-day demonstrations Oct. 1 of virtual reality equipment and experiences. Hosted by the A.P.E. Gallery and led by contributors like Pioneer Valley Game Developers, the demonstrations are free, Williams says, and cover a lot of ground.
“There’s one in which you can paint in 3D,” he said. Another examines the experience of domestic violence, based on a true story.
“”It’s a new way to explore media,” he said of the VR experiences.
NCTV itself will host a six-hour workshop on 16mm and Super 8mm filmmaking on Oct. 2 at the station’s office at Northampton High School. There’s a separate $60 fee for the workshop aside from that for the film festival, Williams said.
He stressed that, in addition to the festival’s free events, the price for the whole five-day event, $25, has been kept deliberately low with the help of grant money and business sponsors, such as Comcast. A one-day pass costs $10.
“We want this to be something the whole community can enjoy,” he said.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
For more information, visit northamptonfilmfestival.com.