Local people, issues dominate ‘NHdocs’ film fest

‘Henry Green Story,’ ‘Food Haven’ among offerings

NEW HAVEN >> NH docs? They’re awesome, but enough about your heart or retina doctor. We’re really referring to the absorbing film collection called “NHdocs: The New Haven Documentary Film Festival” — any one of which might just heal what ails you. Or blow your mind.

The film screenings at Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.) and New Haven Free Public Library (133 Elm St.) start Thursday, run for 11 days, and they’re free.

What exactly might capture a movie-goer’s eyes, heart and mind?

How about the Thursday 7 p.m. opener, New Haven independent filmmaker Stephen Dest’s “I Am Shakespeare: The Henry Green Story,” about a New Haven high school student in 2009 with a double life as a gang-associated “renegade” and a brilliant young actor? Dest tells the story of then-19-year-old Henry Green, who was brutally shot and left for dead just shortly after his inspiring performance in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

Another premiere is “Tlaxcala Dreams,” Sebi Medina-Tayac’s look at a small town in rural Mexico — many of whose residents now live in Fair Haven.

Then there’s Jim O’Connor’s new film “Food Haven,” which celebrates something very near and dear to our stomachs — New Haven’s culinary scene.

Jennifer Abod’s “The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen” celebrates the life of longtime New Haven resident Bowen, a classical dancer, teacher and black feminist activist who came out as a lesbian.

Other highlights include “High School 9-1-1,” about a year in the life of the only ambulance service in Darien that happens to be run by high school teenagers; festival co-director Gorman Bechard’s longlost 1987 documentary experiment “Twenty Questions”; and “Elegy for the Time Being,” inspired by the life of Hu nh Sanh Thông — the first Vietnamese scholar to arrive at Yale University in the 1950s.

There are 20 documentary features and 40 shorts in the festival, this year focusing on cinematography, guerilla filmmaking and funding through crowdsourcing.

• New Haven’s Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Karyl Evans has a 40-minute film running June 5 at 6:30 p.m. at Whitney Humanities Center. It’s the first documentary ever produced about nationally renowned landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, who is considered the most important female landscape architect in the first part of the 20th century.

“The Life and Gardens of Beatrix Farrand” is about a woman born into privilege but determined to make a name for herself in the male-dominated profession of landscape architecture, Evans says. Farrand went on to design some of the country’s most important landscapes, including Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.; the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden; and the East Garden at the White House.

Farrand was also the first woman to be hired as the landscape consultant to Yale University and worked in that capacity from 1922-1945. During that time, she designed plans across the campus, from the Marsh Botanical Gardens to landscape plans for the Yale Medical School.

• Fred Cantor’s short film “The High School That Rocked!” will be screened at NHdocs on Saturday at 10 p.m.; it recently won the Jury Award for Best Regional Documentary at the SENE Film, Music & Arts Festival in Rhode Island.

“The High School That Rocked!,” narrated by former Register writer and editor Fran Fried, tells the story of how six legendary bands in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame all performed at Staples High School in Westport from 1966-68, creating indelible memories for local students.

The Doors, Cream, Sly & the Family Stone, the Rascals, the Animals and the Yardbirds (with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page) all played at Staples in a two-year span. Cantor, a Staples and Yale graduate, previously co-created/produced the documentary about The Remains, “America’s Lost Band.” He once took a Yale film course with Standish Lawder, he said in an email, and attended numerous screenings held by the Yale Film Society and the Yale Law School Film Society.

“So the screening, to be held on the Yale campus, will be a homecoming of sorts for me,” he said. Cantor did not personally attend the legendary concerts at Staples, saying, “My first concert was actually in New Haven at the Yale Bowl to see the Four Tops and Supremes in 1967 (on an outing with my summer camp).”

• The film fest is partly under the banner of the International Festival of Arts and

Ideas, particularly in closing out NHdocs with a three-day retrospective of documentaries by award-winning D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus — who are credited with a crucial role in revitalizing the cinema verité tradition in the digital era. The filmmakers will be present to discuss their films over the June 9-11 weekend.

For more information, and the full screening schedule, visit nhdocs.com.

• Almost concurrent with the New Haven film fest is the Connecticut LGBT Film Festival in Hartford June 2-10. “The Center of My World, a romantic drama about a gay German teen and his very unconventional family, opens the festival on Friday. Most screenings will be at Cinestudio on the campus of Trinity College, except for a closing Saturday matinee at Real Art Ways, and closing Saturday night programs in downtown Hartford.

Also at the LGBT festival will be “The Lavender Scare,” a film about President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency when, with the United States gripped in the panic of the Cold War, the president deemed homosexuals to be “security risks” and ordered the immediate firing of any government employee discovered to be gay or lesbian.

PETER HVIZDAK — NEW HAVEN REGISTER FILE PHOTO Henry Green, an actor, music artist and teen mentor, shows the surgical scars from a pointblank gunshot to his abdomen. At rear is filmmaker Stephen Dest, who made a film about Green that will be shown at NHdocs.

CONTRIBUTED The poster for “High School 9-1-1.”

CONTRIBUTED The Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, designed by the subject of the film “The Life and Gardens of Beatrix Farrand.”