Film
Critic Notebook: Random
Screenings: A Modified Preview of 2007, Woodstock Film Festival
by
Jay Blotcher
LIBERTY
KID (Director: Ilya Chaiken) THE PITCH: A pair of Dominican men
struggle in Brooklyn against poverty and machismo. Tico is a hustler
with a thousand schemes and Derrick is more thoughtful if not equally
lost. As they fight to attain meaning in their lives, their paths
separate and each learns a bitter lesson about the world.
LOCAL
ANGLE: Larry Fessenden, who produced Liberty Kid is a longtime friend
of The Woodstock Film Festival, winning in 2001 for the mystical-horror
film Wendigo, which he wrote, directed and edited. In 2006, he screened
his film The Last Winter about environmental pollution and its consequences.
Fessenden
has operated the Manhattan-based production company Glass Eye Pix
since 1985. BACKSTORY: Fessenden had acted in Chaiken’s previous
film Margarita Happy Hour. “So I’d kept up with Ilya
after that, and have always admired her vision,” he writes
in an email interview. “She came to me with the script of
Liberty Kid because she’d heard I’d produced some films
recently and I liked the script very much.”
Fessenden
had great praise for Chaiken, a woman working in a field still dominated
by male directors. “Ilya has several strengths as a director:
she is very good with casting, she has a strong sense of what is
authentic. In both films the tiniest bit parts are memorable. As
a screenwriter, too, she has an ear for the real, whatever world
she’s depicting. And then she’s a very good editor.
These are the three essential skills in her type of neo-naturalist
cinema.”
CONTINUE...
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