LAKE PLACID — The 23rd-annual Lake Placid Film Festival starts today with a full slate of features, shorts, seminars and showcase events.
An Opening Night Party gets underway 5 p.m. at the High Peaks Resort, fest headquarters at 2384 Saranac Ave., Lake Placid.
Attendees can meet filmmakers, presenters, and special guest celebrated photographer Nathan Farb, and then scurry to catch a 20th anniversary screening of “Miracle” at the Palace Theatre, 2430 Main St., Lake Placid. Buzz Schneider, a member of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team which defeated the Soviet Union, will participate in a Q&A following the movie.
“I am excited that we have a lot of people,” Gary Smith, festival director/Adirondack Film chair, said.
“One of the early outreach efforts was Upstate New York Women in Film & Television. I got excited about that because I thought we could maybe create a space up here where people from around the state could come up and do what they love in like a girls’ weekend away. Be with people they enjoyed being with. Doing things they enjoyed doing.”
Smith developed that UPWIFT initiative when he took the Adirondack Film reins in 2018.
“We still have them with us this year,” he said.
“They’ve done comedy panels. They’ve done horror panels. This year, they have a women’s director panel and we got Barbara Kopple on that panel. Barbara is an Academy Award winner. She’s here along with others.”
The “Women in the Director’s Chair panel meets at 1 p.m. on Saturday and includes Sarah Pirozek, award-winning writer/director/producer; Amy Adrion, Emmy Nominated writer/director; and moderator Sunny Edelman, actor/Casting director and president of Upstate NY Women in Film and Television (UPWIFT).
Three blocks of “Your Shorts Are Showing” screen during the festival.
“We got RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology, screening a series of short films here,” Smith said.
“UPWIFT is screening short films made by their members. 518 Film Network is up here screening films, and they are all participating in the seminars and panels like Made Upstate, which is about filming a film crew in the North Country so we can be more proficient in attracting films being made in the area.”
AF collaborated with the Adirondack Center for writing to present Friday at 12:30 p.m., “The Art of Adaptation” with panelists Nathalie Thill, ACW executive director, and Jacob Krueger- WGA winning screenwriter, LPFF Artist in Residence , at the High Peaks Resort.
“(They’re) helping to teach or coach people how to take their novels or their nonfiction pieces or their memoirs or whatever and convert them to screenplays to give then another outlet for work,” Smith said.
“We’re working with the State of New York on building training and job education programs on modifying the skill sets of electricians, carpenters, hairdressers, makeup artists to be able to support films being made in the Adirondacks. We have quite a few now that are on track for next years. That’s been a lot of the excitement and a lot of the work of it.”
Students get a festival immersion in the AF initiative, Student Summit.
“They write essays,” Smith said.
“They have coaches or mentors write recommendations for them, why they’re interested. We choose a group of students that apply.”
To augment the immersion, the Society offers Artist In Residence for two creatives.
“They are coming in to work with these students and anybody who is looking to move efficiently from where they are to where they want to be,” Smith said.
“We’ve got Jacob Krueger this year, who is working with filmmakers to really learn to write and learn to build these screenplays and how to pitch these screenplays, these films, to buyers, to distributors. How do we get noticed? How do we paid? How do we prepare product so that it is market ready? The other one is Jonathan Burkhart.
“Jonathan founded the Nantucket Film Festival. He is a filmmaker. He is a producer. He is a director. But Jonathan is picking up where Jacob’s kind of teachings leave off. We started with the notion, what do you do after the best day of your life? The best day of you being the time that somebody calls you and says, “I really like your stuff. I want to buy it.’ How do you choose a film crew? How do you choose a director? How do you manage a set? How do you protect your idea? How do you finance this thing? What does financing look like? So we’re trying to deliver a full gambit of sort of touchstones — where you can go, where can you find help, where you can do this stuff. All of that is going on in addition to what we talked about earlier.”
LPFF hosts the North American premiere of “Nathan Farb and the Cold War” by director Nathaniel Knop st 3:30 p.m. on Sunday. Following the screening will be a Q & A with Knop and Farb.
“I’m excited about Nathan’s film,” Smith said.
“His director is coming in from Germany for that. That is running ahead in ticket sales so far because Nathan has worked really hard on it.
“We have other upstate filmmakers that have done films in Sri Lanka, Peru, Senegal. We have a lady (Louise Woehrle) coming in from Minneapolis, who wrote a film called ‘A Binding Truth,” which is a story of two friends, a white and Black man, who discovered that one had been the owners of the other’s family way back when, and the friendship that developed and the common roots of those two individuals.
“So, we’ve got a lot of that kind of stuff too, plus award winners from Cannes, Telluride, TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), and that stuff going into the feature films.”