By Elliot V. Kotek
(Moving Pictures, Spring/Summer issue 2010)

For the past decade, the Newport Beach Film Festival has been a fantastic venue for filmmakers. Full houses of dedicated audience members lap up the prior year’s best cinematic offerings with unbridled enthusiasm and prep smart Q’s for the post-screening Q&As.

NBFF’s location, at just an hour south of L.A., ensures many of the filmmakers can be present for their showings and for the sophisticated after-hours events that showcase the area’s fine food purveyors. Supported by a spectacular space in the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) and Edwards Cinemas, the festival fosters a community feeling; audiences can connect to the filmmakers and “adopt” them for future returns.

Crafted by director of special programs Leslie Feibleman, NBFF has earned a reputation in recent years for programming the year’s key architecture and design films, a series that stretches to special screenings supported by the Orange County Film Society and OCMA throughout the year. This year features a savvy spotlight on this pantone.

While the schedule had yet to be announced at press time, the lineup does feature documentaries that will run the gamut from inspirational fest-favorite “My Run” (narrated by Billy Bob Thornton), about Terry Hitchcock’s marathon run across the States in 75 days to raise awareness of single parenting, to the similarly numerical but completely experimental documentary “140,” for which Irish helmer Frank Kelly put out a call on Twitter to find 140 filmmakers around the globe willing to simultaneously shoot 140 seconds of footage.

With the flourish of Australian movies enjoying festival runs, it is only appropriate that Newport Beach is spotlighting the southern continent with a special event around a presentation of Rachel Perkins’ ridiculously enjoyable musical road-trip “Bran Nue Dae,” starring Geoffrey Rush and Rocky McKenzie.

But the biggest news for filmmakers looking for potential offers of distribution at this year’s fest is the onsite presentation of the Moving Pictures Film and Television Awards — Movies that Matter! Take the drive down and join us!

RELATED
See all our reviews and From-the-Filmmaker articles from the 2010 Newport Beach Film Festival