Category Archives: Uncategorized

2022 Festival Cover Art

Each year, the Fargo Film Festival commissions an original piece of cover art from a regional artist. Lynette Triebwasser is the Cover Artist for the 2022 Festival. Lynette has served as the Festival’s graphic designer since its inception. The Fargo Film Festival is proud to reveal the official cover art for the 2022 Festival.

Festival Director Emily Beck says, ““Lynette Triebwasser has enriched every Fargo Film Festival with her unique artistry, creative mind, and exquisite sense of style. We are deeply grateful for her contributions to the FFF and proud to feature her as our 2022 Cover Artist.”

Special Radisson Blu Fargo Rates for FFF22 Visitors

The Radisson Blu Fargo is offering discounted rooms for Film Festival guests again this year.

To book a room in the Fargo Film Festival discount block, guests can use one of the following methods:

  1. Call the Radisson Blu Fargo directly at (701) 232-7363 and ask for the Fargo Film Festival Room Block.
  2. Go to www.radissonhotelsamericas.com/en-us/hotels/radisson-blu-fargo, enter the appropriate dates, select “Promotional code” in the Special Rates drop-down menu and enter FGFILM in the fillable field.

Guests need to book by February 26, 2022 to get the promotional rate.

FFF22 Official Selections and Category Winners Announced

The Fargo Film Festival jurors are proud to announce the slate of movies selected for the 2022 event. Congratulations to all the filmmakers for sharing your talents with our audiences.

Selections for the 2-Minute Movie Contest will be announced in the coming weeks.

Animation 

Winner: Fly (Carlos Gómez-Mira Sagrado)

Honorable Mention: Annah la Javanaise (Fatimah Tobing Rony)
Honorable Mention: Homebird (Ewa Smyk)

Official Selections
Aurora (Jo Meuris)
A Different Kind of Different (Jordan Baseman)
Drawing on Autism (Alex Widdowson)
Forever (Mitch McGlocklin)
Freebird (Joe Bluhm and Michael Joseph McDonald)
Hold Me Tight (Mélanie Robert-Tourneur)
Little Forest (Paulina Muratore)
In the Shadow of the Pines (Anne Koizumi)
Oldboy’s Apples (Brad Hock)
Our Bed Is Green (Maggie Brennan)
Polka-Dot Boy (Sarina Nihei)
Souvenir Souvenir (Bastien Dubois)
Stereotype (Dahyun Beak and Nahyun Beak)
The Train Station (Lyana Patrick)
Wayback (Carlos Salgado)

Documentary Feature 

Winner: Krimes (Alysa Nahmias)

Honorable Mention: High Maintenance (Barak Heymann)

Official Selections
A Decent Home (Sara Terry)
Eatnameamet: Our Silent Struggle (Suvi West)
Muscle Memory (Mary Trunk)
North by Current (Angelo Madsen Minax)
Trusted Messenger (Chris Newberry)
Vinyl Nation (Christopher Boone and Kevin Smokler)

Documentary Short 

Winner: When We Were Bullies (Jay Rosenblatt)

Honorable Mention: Snowy (Alexander Lewis and Kaitlyn Schwalje)

Official Selections
6,000 Waiting (Michael Joseph McDonald)
All I Can Do (Maxwell Moser)
Documenting Death (Sara Joe Wolansky)
Final Chapter (Conor Holt)
Hello Sunshine (Joe Quint)
Junior (AJ Wilhelm)
New Horizons (Kelsey Andries)
New Horizons (Mike Scholtz)
Nsenene (Michelle Coomber)
¿Que Haces Aqui? A Documentary About Karen (Rob Rook) Seahorse (Nele Dehnenkamp)
The Secret History of Donnelly (Mike Scholtz)
Smelly Little Town (Zach Neumeyer)
Supper Club (Matthew Koshmrl)

Experimental

Winner: The Length of Day (Laura Conway)

Honorable Mention: Feast (Li Yongzheng)
Honorable Mention: Discovering of Fire (Seunghwan Kim)

Official Selections
Flux (Cléa van der Grijn)
Revolykus (Victor Orozco Ramirez)
Shadows in a Landscape (Edwin Miles)
Studies at Huningue / Basel or the Tree to Sleep (Lutz P. Kayser)
Summer Light for Tula (Silvia Alison Turchin)
To the Girl That Looks Like Me (Ewurakua Dawson-Amoah)
What’s Mine Is Yours (Nick Ribolla)

Invited Films

The Beauty President (Whitney Skauge)
Hair-Trigger (S.G. Warkel)
Put the Brights On (Raymond Rea)
Sadie Breaks the Silents (Tom Brandau)

*Additional titles may be added to this list in the coming weeks.

Narrative Feature 

Winner: We Burn Like This (Alana Waksman)

Honorable Mention: Glob Lessons (Nicole Rodenburg)

Official Selections
Anchorage (Scott Monahan)
The Bobcat Boys (Mac Alsfeld)
Dreamover (Roman Olkhovka)
Everything in the End (Mylissa Fitzsimmons)
The Grand Bolero (Gabriele Fabbro)
Kendra and Beth (Dean Peterson)

Narrative Short 

Winner: The Letter Room (Elvira Lind)

Honorable Mention: Frankie (James Kautz)
Honorable Mention: Like the Ones I Used to Know (Annie St-Pierre)

Official Selections
Ace of Clubs (Henri Kebabdjian)
Break Any Spell (Anton Jøsef)
The Call (Aisha Schliessler)
Cherry Cola (Amandine Thomas)
The Criminals (Serhat Karaaslan)
Dọlápọ̀ Is Fine (Ethosheia Hylton)
Gabriela (Natalia Kaniasty)
Georgia (Jayil Pak)
Girl with a Thermal Gun (Rongfei Guo)
GraceLand (Bonnie Discepolo)
Hazel (Jordan Doig)
Human Trash (Aitor Almuedo Esteban)
Inheritance (Annalise Lockhart)
The Intervention (Ryan Becken)
The Kicksled Choir (Torfinn Iversen)
Leylak (Scott Aharoni and Dennis Latos)
Little Bird (Tim Myles)
A Little House in Aberdeen (Emily Goss)
Marked (Matthew Avery Berg)
Marlon Brando (Vincent Tilanus)
The Mohel (Charles Wahl)
Myrtle (Patricia McCormack)
North Star (P.J. Palmer)
Numb (Natasha Jatania)
An Occurrence at Arverne (Robert Broadhurst)
The Painting (Seth Colón)
Paper Geese (Elizabeth Chatelain)
Please Hold (KD Dávila)
Pops (Lewis Rose)
The Right Words (Adrian Moyse Dullin)
Sales Per Hour (Daniel Jaffe and Michelle Uranowitz)
The Sands of Time (James Hughes)
Sea Dragon (James Morgan)
Shark (Nash Edgerton)
Silent Night (Haz Al-Shaater and Yaz Al-Shaater)
The Syed Family Xmas Eve Game Night (Fawzia Mirza)
Synthetic Love (Sarah Heitz de Chabaneix)
There’s Something in the Silence (Mike Castro)

Student 

Winner: Winter of ‘79 (Julia Elihu)

Honorable Mention: The Dress (Tadeusz Łysiak)
Honorable Mention: Final Masterpiece (Patrick Hanser)

Official Selections
Black Gold (Sydney Bowie Linden)
Charlotte (Zach Dorn)
Forgive Me, Father (Jona Schlosser)
Fourth of July (Major Dorfman)
Kinesthesia: A Walk Through the Fargo-Moorhead Music Scene (Trinah Szafranski)
Making Beethoven Proud (Brian Naughton)
These Voyages Unknown (Kyle Odefey)
Underdogs (Alex Astrella)

Thank you from the Fargo Film FEstivaL

Thank you for supporting the 2021 Virtual Fargo Film Festival!

We were so proud to present 69 Films, 22 Q&As, 11 Days, and 2 Panel Discussions to our audiences.

The Fargo Film Festival is the largest annual fundraiser for the historic Fargo Theatre and we are grateful for the generous support of our sponsors and the engagement of our audiences. However and wherever you watched, we hope you enjoyed the show.

Submissions for the 2022 Fargo Film Festival will open soon on FilmFreeway.

Thank you from all of us at the Fargo Film Festival and the Fargo Theatre.

FFF21 2-Minute Movie Contest Winners Announced

The New World (Hong Ning and Zhao Xiaofeng)

The Fargo Film Festival is proud to announce the winners of the 2021 2-Minute Movie Contest.

Third place: Seeker (Rassoul Edji)

Second place: Don’t Shoot the Messenger (Bianca Malcolm)

First place: The New World (Hong Ning and Zhao Xiaofeng)

Thank you to all the moviemakers who shared such inventive and inspired art with our audiences this year, and to all the moviemakers who submitted work for consideration. We look forward to the 2022 edition of the 2-Minute Movie Contest.

2021 Panel Discussions

Join the conversation at the 2021 Virtual Fargo Film Festival with live panel discussions broadcast on the Festival’s Facebook page at 1pm on Saturday, March 20th and at 3pm on Saturday, March 27th. Watch the panels live on Facebook and you can suggest questions for the panelists in the comments on the video.

The first panel will discuss how film exhibition and production have had to adapt and change because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more about each panelist below.
The second panel will discuss how films connect with audiences and generate empathy through personal narratives. This panel features four directors with films in the Festival. Learn more about each panelist below.

Get to Know Our Panelists:

Panel 1: Film Exhibition and Production During the Pandemic

1pm, Saturday March 20th Live on Facebook

Brian Owens became Artistic Director of the Calgary International Film Festival in 2018. Prior to that, he served as Artistic Director for the Nashville Film Festival for a decade. After seven years as an online critic, he began his career in the film festival world when he founded the Indianapolis International Film Festival (now Indy Film Fest) in 2004. He has served on film festival juries across the world including Slumani Film Festival in Iraqi Kurdistan, Heartland Film Festival, Cleveland International Film Festival, Oxford Film Festival and more.

Producer and Entrepreneur Ryan Donnell Smith has emerged as a leader in the entertainment industry over the last few years, lending his expertise in line production and tax equity structure to some of the most critically acclaimed films in the business today. As Partner and President of Production and Development at Streamline Global and Co-owner of Thomasville Pictures (based in the burgeoning area of Thomasville, Georgia), Smith has successfully financed and produced a slew of A-list independent projects, garnering Executive Producer credits along the way. Smith’s most recent films include Executive Producing Netflix’s Academy Award nominated historical drama “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with Aaron Sorkin directing. Smith wrapped production on “One Way” starring Colson Baker a.k.a. Machine Gun Kelly, and is gearing up for his latest feature “Supercell” starring Alec Baldwin. The disaster action film
will be co-produced by Thomasville Pictures and financed by Streamline Global. In addition to his film projects, Smith serves as a producer on Broadway’s musical comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which is set to resume performances following the coronavirus epidemic.

Sabrina Doyle is a writer and director based between Los Angeles and London. Her feature directing debut, Lorelei, starring Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone, was an Official Selection of the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. It won the Jury Prize at the 2020 Deauville American Film Festival, along with Audience and Jury Awards at the 2020 Mannheim-Heidelberg Filmfestival. It’ll be released theatrically and on VOD by Vertical Entertainment in the US in Summer 2021. The late Sir Alan Parker called Sabrina’s work “outstanding […] refreshingly intelligent, serious and lyrical. Much needed in tomorrow’s cinema.”

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nora Mariana studied English and Creative Writing at Stanford University and subsequently worked in documentaries around the world — on subjects as diverse as Daft Punk to Korean pro-gamers — before turning her focus to narrative storytelling. She recently worked as a staff writer on the upcoming Sam Esmail-produced miniseries Angelyne and is currently a 2020 Fellow at the Jewish Film Institute, where she is developing a feature film. Nora is an alumna of the Sundance Feature Film Program and previous finalist in the HBO Access Screenwriting Competition. She is the writer and producer of Alina, screening in the Fargo Film Festival.

Panel 2: Personal Narratives and Empathy in Film

3pm, Saturday March 27th Live on Facebook

Cristian Gomes is the director of the documentary short Road to Roxham. Gomes is an emerging documentary producer, director and cinematographer based in Toronto, Canada. His work often focuses on exploring identity, politics and economics in North America. In 2018, he graduated from the Film Production major at York University, Canada’s oldest film school. Since then he has been independently producing, directing and shooting short docs, commercials and music videos and is in development on his first feature length documentary.

Tiffany Hsiung is a Peabody award-winning filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada and is listed as one of DOC NYC’s 40 under 40. Her film ‘Sing Me a Lullaby’ (2020) won the Oscar qualifying Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary film festival, along with the inaugural Toronto International Film Festival ‘Share Her Journey Short Cuts Award’ during her world premiere at TIFF. ‘Sing Me a Lullaby’ went on to winning The Directors Guild of Canada Best Short Film Award, and is Listed as one of TIFF Canada’s Top Ten of 2020. In 2018 Tiffany received the prestigious Peabody award for her debut feature ‘The Apology’ (2016) (Produced by the NFB) along with the DuPont Columbia Award, the Allan King Memorial Award and over 15 international awards. Tiffany’s work has been screened in over 150 film festivals around the world, theatrically distributed in Asia and Canada and broadcasted by PBS and world-wide by Al Jazeera. Tiffany currently sits on the board of DOC Canada Ontario chapter, Hot Docs Executive Board and is second vice-chair of the Directors Guild of Canada Ontario Executive Board and is a member of the National BIPOC committee for the DGC.

Miles Levin has had intractable epilepsy since he was very young and has been a passionate advocate for many years. Miles now serves as a board member for the Epilepsy Foundation of Northern California, where he advocates for the use of Cinema to break down stigma that has plagued the epilepsy community for so long. Miles’ new film ‘Under the Lights’ has been used by the community to include the general public in the conversation. He is currently working on the feature length version of Under the Lights. You can help Miles’ efforts by subscribing at www.underthelightsfilm.com or @underthelights on instagram.

Doug Roland‘s film ‘Feeling Through’ is the first film to star a DeafBlind actor and is nominated for the Oscar for Best Live Action Short film. Featured on The Daily Show, in The New York Times, and LA Times, Feeling Through is executive produced by Academy Award winner Marlee Matlin, and has won 17 awards at film festivals including Slamdance, San Diego International, and Portland. Doug also made Feeling Through in partnership with Helen Keller Services and created a fully accessible screening event around it called ‘The Feeling Through Experience,’ which he has shared with organizations, schools, and universities as SEL curriculum, and has been featured at numerous events and conferences including the India Inclusion Summit and Pac Rim Conference.

Fargo Theatre Film Club – Narrative Shorts 1 – FFF21

Join the conversation on Zoom! Sign up at https://fargotheatre.org/fargo-theatre-film-club/

In March, Fargo Theatre Film Club is going to the 2021 Virtual Fargo Film Festival! Our selection for the month is Narrative Shorts 1, a collection of award winning live action short films. The Shorts Program is streaming on the Fargo Film Festival Eventive page beginning on Thursday, March 18th. Click here to learn more and buy your tickets: https://bit.ly/3cFybbt

This month, we will host our discussion on Zoom at 7pm on Wednesday, March 24th!

The films in Narrative Shorts Block 1 will make you think and help you to experience the world from new perspectives. This collection includes 2021 Academy Award Nominee Feeling Through. It also features a Q&A with Doug Roland, the writer/director of Feeling Through.

Sign up to learn more about Fargo Theatre Film Club here: https://fargotheatre.org/fargo-theatre-film-club/