Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Mountain biker promotes documentary
Ultra-endurance mountain biker Rebecca Rusch led about a dozen people on a two-hour lunch time mountain biking ride along the Lake Bella Vista trails, through Bowling Springs and the Back 40 on Friday. Rusch arrived to the Bentonville Film Festival to promote
Blood Road, a documentary she stars in that followed her 1,200-mile cycling journey along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Rusch’s Vietnamese journey was in search of the crash site where her father, an Air Force pilot, was killed.
Rusch wanted to make the documentary as a “story to share for healing and for recovery,” she said. “It’s something people still don’t talk about, nearly 45 years later.” Meeting the villagers along the way inspired Rusch to take responsibility for the recovery still happening in the area. She now returns to host fundraising rides and while stateside fund raises for Mines Advisory Group.
■ Nancy Cartwright, known as the voice of Bart Simpson from The Simpsons
television series, now owns Spotted Cow Entertainment and produced In Search of Fellini, a feature film loosely based on a journey she took to Italy while in her mid-20s. The film screened Friday night at the festival. Cartwright said she was introduced to La Strada in an acting class and wanted to turn it into a play, but never received legal permission to do so. After her trip to Italy, her dreams of producing a play became dreams of having this one-woman show, which she began to develop in 1995.
“I continued to write with the idea of making a film,” Cartwright said. “I didn’t have the wherewithal or the power I have now, or have the confidence to produce a film, especially one that means so much to me personally. But I didn’t want to do it until I was ready.”
■ Let Me Go writer Polly Steele and producer Lizzie Pickering, both of London, said the Bentonville Film Festival was “community meeting Hollywood, a beautiful mix.”
“We’ve been enveloped in good will, met so many fans and it’s been so heartening,” Steele said. Pickering said screening Let Me Go at the festival resulted in
LaLaLand music producer Marius DeVries extending a brief review of the film.
■ Gail Gilbert, a film editor who broke into movie writing and directing with her short film Lunch in Lima, said the Bentonville Film Festival allowed her to take a master class with Sam Raimi, director of Spider-Man. Raimi instructed her to watch her films with audiences as much as possible to learn from the experience and imbue the lessons on her next script. “The screening was exciting and strong, it was wonderful to be in an audience looking at your work and reacting in places I didn’t expect,” Gilbert said. “It gave me insight.”
■ Vegas Baby, a documentary about couples around the world competing for a free round of in vitro fertilization, screened at the festival on Friday. Director Amanda Micheli said filmmaking is competitive no matter what gender you are.
“I find it harder to get funding for ‘women’s pictures,’” Micheli said. “In documentary, there’s this feeling that you must have most important topic. Stories about ordinary women are remarkable. They convey social relevance, but women’s stories always are.” ■ Lost & Found actress Melonie Diaz said being a woman of color in the film industry is always challenging.
“There’s two roles I always go out for, the sassy friend or maid,” Diaz said. “The imagination for people like me is not very big, so it’s hard finding those roles that inspire me.” Diaz said her working landscape would seem more optimistic if women had more chances to land roles in general, citing that actresses have 20 percent the opportunities that male actors do.
■ Director Sabine Krayenbuhl and producer Zeva Oelbaum said the Bentonville Film Festival was an ideal place to screen their film Letters from Baghdad.
“It’s about a trailblazing woman, traveling extensively through the Middle East who had a real respect for peoples of the region,” Oelbaum said. “We want viewers to come away with an understanding of what a champion she was of diversity and add importance to the contemporary dialogue.”
“It’s inspiration for young women to be ambitious,” Krayenbuhl said. “She didn’t take no for an answer and didn’t have to step behind the men, but confronted them and forced her point of view.”
■ Directors of Flip the Record, Wexford Plaza and Deep Storage heard positive things about the Bentonville Film Festival while competing at the Slamdance Film Festival, an annual film festival in Park City, Utah, that focuses on emerging artists and low-budget independent films. The good buzz made them interested to visit Northwest Arkansas.
■ For more information on the Bentonville Film Festival, download the BFF app, follow them at @BFFfestival or visit bentonvillefilm festival.com.
“Stories about ordinary women are remarkable. They convey social relevance, but women’s stories always are.”
— Amanda Micheli, director of Vegas Baby