The Riverside International Film Festival (RIFF) is pleased to announce the prize winner and audience favorites for the 2005 festival, which took place February 25-March 6, 2005. The audience voted “Beyond Honor,” directed by Varun Khanna and produced by Riverside surgeon Dr. Harkareet Dhillon, as the favorite feature film. This intense drama of intercultural family conflict was filmed in Riverside, in part on the University of California, Riverside campus and at Riverside Community Hospital. Other highly favored feature films were “Tae Guk Gi,” a Korean film of brothers coming into conflict while fighting side by side in war time, and a twisted mystery of love and betrayal based in Milwaukee, “Lady in the Box.”
The audience’s favorite short film was the director Amyn Kaderali’s comedy “Call Center,” which speculates on what happens behind the scenes at the customer service phone number for problems with cable, computers, credit cards, and even a suicide hotline. Riverside audiences gave high marks to all the documentary features included in this year’s program; the audience favorite was “Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.” Directors Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller highlighted the activist career of history professor Zinn’s, from his early days of supporting students in the Atlanta lunch counter sit-ins, through a North Vietnamese release of American POW’s, to contemporary protests against the U.S. role in the Middle East.
At the opening gala, RIFF presented the first annual Harry Lawton Award in Screenwriting to Sherry Brandon, a University of California, Riverside graduate student. Another first for RIFF was a very well-received poetry night, with poetry on film as well as live readings.
RIFF also presented a new award from Digiquest Studio for the conversion to 35mm of a film existing only in digital format. This award carries a value of some $50,000. The winner selected for the RIFF 2005 Digiquest Jury Award is Paul Gilman, for his documentary “Ocean Odyssey.” Gilman is a composer of motion picture scores and the music director for the Palm Springs International Film Festival. In “Ocean Odyssey,” Gilman is driven by the insights of an Hawaiian shaman to begin a journey to oceans around the world to communicate with whales with a simple wooden flute. He was able to attract and interact with dolphins, humpback whales, and orcas, or killer whales. Extraordinary footage shows Gilman in the midst of a pod of orcas, with unique views of killer whales and dolphins sharing space together in their enchantment by Gilman’s flute.
The Riverside International Film Festival 2005 was the third festival of the group, and filled over 900 seats at the University Village theaters in its 10 day run this year. More than one third of the films had directors, producers, or actors present to participate in question and answer sessions after screenings.
Submission of films for RIFF 2006, to be held Feb. 17-26, 2006, will open August 1, 2005. Screenplays may also be submitted for the Harry Lawton Award in Screenwriting via the RIFF website. Further information on RIFF and the films shown is available at the website riversidefilmfest.org.
