World premiere tonight

Filmmaker Verun Khanna's interest in America's melting pot boils over onto the big screen when his new movie "American Blend" opens in Riverside today.

The movie will have a world premiere at 8 p.m. at the Metropolitan University Village Cinemas.

Khanna declined to detail much of the plot except to say it's a love story involving an Indian man Raj (Anupam Kher) and his American-born wife Jayme (Dee Wallace Stone), whose love and 20-year marriage survive problems inherent in coming from different ethnic backgrounds.

Maya (Kristen Erickson), who works at her stepfather Raj's Bollywood Cafe, faces similar hurdles when she starts to become romantically interested in Mercury (David Oyelowo), a black tap dancer who takes a job at the restaurant.

Though both parents and children make mistakes, it's an upbeat story about the strength in diversity, said Khanna, an LA-based writer and director.

Khanna called this movie a complete antithesis to his previous one, "Beyond Honor," which screened at the Riverside International Film Festival last year.

"Beyond Honor" tackled the sensitive topic of female circumcision, which remains common in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The film will go into limited release in March, opening in New York and Los Angeles.

Cinematic whirlwind tour
Riverside's growing festival showcases diverse films from a dozen countries

10:30 AM PST on Friday, February 17, 2006
By CARLA WHEELER /
The Press-Enterprise

German Zeppelin pilots and American sasquatches. Lebanese singers, American folk musicians and star-crossed Indian lovers.

These diverse characters will show up -- on screen -- when the 10-day Riverside International Film Festival gets under way today at the Metropolitan University Village Cinemas.

Tonight's gala opening will be an 8 p.m. screening of "American Blend," a world premiere of the film with Dee Wallace Stone of "E.T." fame and Anupam Kher from the movie "Bend It Like Beckham." Stone -- starring in the new ABC series "Sons and Daughters" -- will attend the screening, said the film's writer and director, Varun Khanna.

Though the festival opens with an American film, most of the movies come from about a dozen countries, including India, Germany, South Korea, Mexico and Turkey.

Watching foreign films can give people in the Inland area a better understanding of different cultures without traveling far, said film festival programmer Nancy Douglas.

The Riverside event experienced a growth spurt this year. Organizers will show more than 40 films, up from 30 movies last year.

The Riverside Youth Council also helped organize a program of student short films, which will screen from 4 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday and include question and answer sessions with the filmmakers.

Festival Vice President Kishori Reddy said board members envision Riverside's festival growing into an event on par with the respected Palm Springs International Film Festival. "Our vision is to go up to 100 (films)," she said. Festival organizers are all volunteers, with no paid staffers to scour the world for cutting-edge fare. However, Riverside received about 60 submissions. "With most of the popular feature films, we went after the directors and convinced them we are a good film festival," Reddy said. That tack helped them land full-length features including the epic romance "Parineeta" from India, the comedy "Santos Peregrinos" from Mexico and "Zeppelin!" from Germany.

Organizers also were pleased to receive the submitted documentary "Boys of Summer" by Robert Cochrane, who filmed the trip he and his father, Dan, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, took in 2004 to 30 major league baseball fields.

Independent filmmaker Heather Carawan, who worked as an intern at the UCR/California Museum of Photography six years ago, submitted her 28-minute film of reminisces about growing up with folk singers and activists Guy and Candie Carawan as parents.

Carawan said her father sang "We Shall Overcome" at the organizing conference of the civil rights group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.

Filmmakers will vie for awards at the festival including the top prize worth $50,000 -- converting a digitally shot movie into a 35mm film. Digiquest Studios in Riverside, owned by Reddy's husband K.B, will do the work.

Reach Carla Wheeler at (951) 368-9584 or cwheeler@PE.com

Student filmmakers express their thoughts

10:44 PM PST on Sunday, February 19, 2006
By CARLA WHEELER /
The Press-Enterprise

RIVERSIDE - From mulling the fighting in Iraq to rediscovering their roots, college students have a lot on their minds today.

But film students often do more than talk; they say "action." For their master's theses, they'll write the script, plan a budget, scout locations, cast actors and shoot a story that's near and dear to their hearts.

Ham Tran, who grew up in Vietnam and now attends UCLA's Graduate School of Film and Television, directed "The Anniversary," the tragic story about two brothers on opposite sides of the Vietnam War.

New York University student Eva Saks wrote and directed a trilogy -- "Confection," "Colorform" and "Date" -- about the continuum of life in Manhattan after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

American Film Institute graduate Adam Schlachter filmed "My Backyard Was a Mountain," his semi-autobiographical tale about a boy immigrating to the United States from Puerto Rico.

Audiences will get to mentally grade the results when those students' films and seven others screen Wednesday at the Riverside International Film Festival. The student showcase will start at 4 p.m. at Metropolitan University Village Cinemas near UCR.

Special to The Press-Enterprise In "The Red Veil," directed by Tarik Karam, Yasmine stares outside her window at the gypsies arriving at her home.

All 10 movies have won prizes at other venues, said Connie Leach, director of the Riverside Youth Council, who with the sponsorship of the Caucus for Television Producers, Writers and Directors Foundation in Los Angeles will bring the program to the festival. The 10-day festival began last Friday and will end Sunday.

"The one I saw, 'My Backyard Was a Mountain,' was a lovely film so I have high hopes for all of these," said festival programmer Nancy Douglas.

The Riverside Youth Council showed six of the movies last year at the city's 2005 Multi-Cultural Youth Festival, including "Winning the Peace" -- the story of an Iraqi- American Marine who faces some harsh realities about war.

Council director Connie Leach said she wanted to add a student film element to the festival to help give young people interested in moviemaking some insider knowledge.

Five producers or directors will attend.
"The filmmakers will be there for questions and answers," Leach said. "It's not just sitting there watching movies. Schlachter, 30, brought to life a story that had been percolating in his mind for years.

In "My Backyard Was a Mountain," a boy named Adan must leave his goat behind when the family moves from Puerto Rico to New York City. He and a friend named Denise search for anyone willing to take Chivo in as a pet, lest the goat ends up with a farmer who might slaughter it.

Years later, Adan returns home and runs into Denise, a woman he realizes meant more to him than he thought.
Schlachter said the movie is semi-autobiographical. "I didn't have a goat. (But) I did have a cat and some farm animals and chickens and roosters," he said.
While shooting the film, he said several cast and crewmembers told him they went through separation anxiety went they left Puerto Rico, too. "They had to say goodbye to animals and friends," Schlachter said. "I had someone tell me I had made a film about their life."

Reach Carla Wheeler at (951) 368-9584 or mailto:cweeler@PE.com

Film festival aiming for audience share
Poorly funded venture sees a big future
04:17 PM PST on Saturday, February 25, 2006
By CARLA WHEELER and DOUG HABERMAN / The Press-Enterprise

In Dr. Harki Dhillon's eyes, the Riverside International Film Festival could one day become the little film festival that could.

He sees filmmakers bringing edgy independent films to town and Hollywood studio bigwigs brokering deals with them. He sees A-list stars such as Meryl Streep sashaying down the red carpet like they do at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

"Tom Cruise is nice, but he is on everybody's list," said Dhillon, an orthopedic surgeon and founder, director and president of the festival that was launched in 2002. The 10-day event ends Sunday at the Metropolitan University Village Cinemas, closing the 54-film schedule with Kavi Raz's post- 9/11 tale "The Gold Bracelet."

Dhillon dreams big. But reality shows how difficult organizing a successful film festival can be.

Attendance after three years still hovers around 2,000. "American Blend," the opening film, brought in about 200 people but 20 to 70 people per movie in the 120-seat theater is closer to the norm.

"I'd liked (the movies) a whole lot. I'd just like to see more people in there," said Liam O'Dien, 16, of Riverside, who joined 25 others to watch a student film showcase on Wednesday afternoon co-sponsored by the Riverside Youth Council.

Still, Dhillon sees progress. Organizers, who received nonprofit status for their group this year, didn't count 2005 attendance because many people received complimentary admissions, he said.

Only 10 to 15 people came to some screenings last year, but Dhillon said numbers are up now.

"Every showing has more people than last year," he said.

Palm Springs drew 112,000 attendees in 2006, with films often sold out in the three theater complexes.

Riverside honored their first Hollywood star, Dee Wallace of "E.T." fame and the new ABC series "Sons & Daughters," with a lifetime achievement award at last week's gala opening. The Palm Springs' star lineup included Charlize Theron, Jake Gyllenhaal and Terrence Howard, all Oscar nominees.

Though young independent filmmakers brought fresh fare to Riverside in the form of student films, the new thriller "Ten Til' Noon" and the dramatic comedy "American Blend," the lineup also was peppered with films already on DVD such as the spoof "Sasquatch Hunters" and a Mexican comedy "Santos Peregrinos."

This year Palm Springs screened most of the foreign language Oscar submissions, including finalists such as South Africa's "Tsotsi" and
France's "Merry Christmas."

Riverside's organization operates on a budget of about $50,000, including $10,000 combined from the city and Riverside Public Utilities.

The Palm Springs festival's budget is $2.5 million, including $350,000 from the city and support from sponsors such as the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and Mercedes Benz.

"The quality (of films) is great," said Dhillon, summing up the organization's woes in one word: "Money," he said, rubbing his thumb and
index finger together, adding that the festival needs "marketing, marketing, marketing."

TERRY PIERSON / The Press-Enterprise

Dee Wallace-Stone accepts the 2006 Riverside International Film Festival life time achievement award at the festival's gala opening. Wallace-Stone of "E.T." fame is on the new ABC series "Sons & Daughters."

But with more than 600 festivals in the U.S. competing for new films,experts say Riverside faces some major hurdles besides better marketing

"To be Palm Springs, that's big. You have to pull out all the stops," said Nick Ashjian of Right Angle Studios, a Marina Del Rey-based film festival consulting firm. "That's a good dream -- a good goal to look toward."

Phil Scanlon, producer of the first Golden Shorts Film Fest in Hollywood this weekend, said the only way for Riverside to reach the caliber of Palm Springs' event is to hire a professional staff.

"You need excellent programming, excellent sponsorship, publicity and marketing," said Scanlon.

"Every one of those areas is vital."

So is money. Scanlon's boss, Serge Polakoff, invested almost $500,000 in cash and in-kind donations from sponsors such as Continental Airlines to host the Golden Shorts at the Egyptian Theatre.

"We have a full staff and a whole marketing campaign," said Polakoff, whose first celebrity honoree was going to be actor Owen Wilson.

According to Scanlon, volunteers alone would be unable to build a festival into a large, prestigious program that's goes on the film industry's map.

"You need a lot of focus. It's more than a group of people who like films. It's more like going out to win a war."

'Riversidey Feel'

Bigger sponsors and a larger financial commitment from the city would be the Holy Grail for Riverside's Dhillon. Every year he goes before the City Council asking for $30,000 and will do that again for the 2007 festival, he said.

"We have to prove ourselves," he said, adding that the higher attendance he's seeing at screenings may help convince the Council to fork over more money. Festival organizers never gave up. "The one thing is that we lasted. We're still here."Several Riverside politicians and those active in the arts community want the film festival to thrive. But they say that for the event to become a higher-caliber event, the group needs to hire at least a part-time executive director. Councilman Art Gage, who chairs the council's Finance Committee, said the city should be providing enough seed money to the festival to help it grow.

"It helps further our cause of trying to be the cultural center of the Inland Empire," said Gage.

If the festival grows and attracts people, especially from outside the city, the money the city contributes will come back in the form of sales and hotel tax revenues, he said. But to grow significantly, the festival needs to move beyond its all-volunteer structure, Gage said.

"It takes professional management to make any arts venue expand," he said.

But Dhillon and festival board vice president Kishori Reddy say they're in a Catch-22. Besides not having the money to hire an executive director, they say moving from a volunteer to a professional staff would lead to political infighting.

Organizers want to avoid getting "bogged down in the politics that plagued Palm Springs," Reddy said. Squabbling among Palm Springs festival board members contributed, in part, to the firings or resignations of several festival directors there over the last 17 years.

Dhillon said he wants to keep the festival's "Riversidey feel."

"It's a festival run by the good people of Riverside," he said, "and I want to keep it that way."

Dhillon said he believes that as a movie producer himself -- he produced "Beyond Honor" an independent film that will premiere in New York and Los Angeles in March -- he knows how to run a festival.

Dhillon said the volunteer board can handle the organizational details, if the city would agree to the $30,000 request.

"If we were lost and floundering, it'd be great to have someone helping us," said Dhillon, who also had a bit part in "American Blend." "But I know where this needs to go."

Getting sponsorship also will be key, said Dhillon, who acknowledged the amount raised from sponsors this year remained about the same as in 2005.

He plans to knock on some doors soon, including the Mission Inn to ask the hotel to provide free rooms for celebrities.

"Everything takes a little time to build," he said.