Creativity is focus of film festival’s Art & Artists series lineup
Six selected films include four documentaries on lives, drive of creatives
A six-pack of movies about artists and the passions that drive them make up the Art & Artists series at this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival.
The series, announced Thursday by series sponsor Milwaukee Art Museum, includes four documentaries exploring creativity from Ghana to the Bronx.
The non-documentaries in the program are “The Rehearsal,” a New Zealand film based on Eleanor Catton’s novel about a first-year theater student whose bid to gain his teacher’s favor could wreck everything else in his life; and “Paula,” a biopic telling the story of Paula Becker, an Expressionist painter who defied societal norms and traditions in 1900s Germany. Also showing the Art & Artists series: “Paa Joe & the Lion,” in which a father and son from Ghana go to the U.K. to revive the family’s business — creating “fantasy coffins,” handcrafted coffins often incorporating fantastic creatures.
“Through the Repellent Fence,” a documentary following the Native American art collective Postcommodity, developing a work made up of 28 inflatable spheres distributed along a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Everybody Knows … Elizabeth Murray,” a portrait of a celebrated popart figure who never stopped creating, even while battling cancer.
“Bronx Gothic,” which captures Okwui Okpokwasili’s performance-art tale of two young African-American girls in New York in the 1980s (Okpokwasili performed this work in the Alverno Presents series in Milwaukee in 2016).
The 2017 Milwaukee Film Festival runs from Sept. 28-Oct. 12.
The film festival will unveil the 2017 program book, including a complete lineup, at a release party starting at 11:30 a.m. Saturday at Good City Brewing, 2108 N. Farwell Ave. See Milwaukee Film’s Facebook page for details.