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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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The 25th Annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival
Wednesday 18 April @ 16:17:20 |
 By PAUL BACHLEITNER
The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival (M-SPIFF) is 25 years old this year! But where's the party?
 "I'd love to bask in nostalgia, but I don't have time," said the legendary Al Milgrom, M-SPIFF's artistic director and programmer for each of its 25 years, and the event's public and private face.
His 84 years of age are swept back in gray locks that bunch up behind the ears, and his corduroys and knit socks have seen better days. He's been spending the afternoon helping staffers find missing printouts about Scandinavian shorts and figuring out how to slot in a film for a Sunday and ship it off to the San Francisco Film Festival on Monday.
A City Pages article claimed as recently as mid-March that there was no opening film or established festival dates and that the size would be half of last year's 135 films. The Oak Street Theater might be sold to keep Minnesota Film Arts (MFA)--the organization running the event--solvent. But Al and the others have worked around the clock on a $20,000 budget and bent themselves into peculiar contortions to ensure a program of 108 screenings of 80 films over a 10-day swath beginning this Thursday, April 19.
Al is running the festival for no pay at all, surviving on Social Security checks. "I'd hand the fest off tomorrow, if someone would be around to pick it up."
He doesn't deny that he's cantankerous and difficult to get along with--observations noted by the likes of former collaborators and rivals Randy Adamsick (former executive director of the Minnesota Film Board), Amy Borden (former program director at Oak Street Cinema) or Bob Cowgill (former director of Oak Street Cinema, who helped raise $40k last year to keep it open), to name a few. Al said he wouldn't write any memoirs because they'd be full of excuses or problems. "So and so screwed up. So and so got in a fight with someone else in the auditorium …"
Stacks of paper and manila file folders climb in jagged heaps from his desk, the floor and anything that has a flat surface. He digs out a program from the first M-SPIFF, which in 1983 was called the Rivertown Film Festival and was operated by the U Film Society. The late actor, Richard Farnsworth, graces the cover with a shaggy white mustache and a fedora. He was the lead in "The Grey Fox," touted as the event's "special premiere."
But it was held in Stillwater over a four-day weekend in mid-May. "All it proved was that the film fans in town had to drive 35 miles more to see a movie," Al says. He received a traffic violation on the way there and was jailed for an unpaid parking ticket.
The second Rivertown Film Festival moved to Minneapolis and the U of M's Bell Auditorium, where the event has stayed for 24 years.
By 1988, the event had grown to a whopping 18 days. It featured 58 films from 25 countries, as well as local and international shorts. The film lineup included "Babette's Feast," complete with a $100-per-plate Babette's Feast fundraiser.
The festival changed names to M-SPIFF in 1996. An attempted merger with the Oak Street Cinema failed in 1997, followed by a successful second effort in 2002, which gave rise to MFA. A hyphen was added to the title of the 23rd festival in 2005, making it M-SPIFF.
2005 was also the event's high-water mark. There were more than 300 screenings of 163 films over a 16-day run. A juried Emerging Filmmakers competition awarded $65,000 in prizes, three times the entire budget of the 2007 festival.
Al laments this. "Money was spent so uselessly that the bottom line was not one of the most profitable."
He complains that the "villainous Netflix phenomenon" steals away viewers whose ability to "read subtitles has declined." He complains the M-SPIFF has "become a chore to do because it's expected" and it's "a challenge to be a mentor to lots of new staff people each year."
Yet he keeps returning to lead the festival. He tosses out a lame explanation that he needs a job, but this year he's not even being paid.
"Al scoured the earth to find these films," says M-SPIFF's office manager and volunteer and print traffic coordinator, Jim Brunzell. Al has spent two-and-a-half months this past year combing festivals all across the world for titles to bring back with him. "That's the fun of the festival--it's discovering new talents and exciting filmmakers with different experiences and expectations."
It's also what attracts the general public to the event year after year, and one more (and last?) time this year, the silver anniversary edition. ||
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