Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and will be screened at the Milwaukee Film Festival.
The Milwaukee Film Festival continues to grow. The 2018 MFF will occupy theaters on all ends of town—south (The Avalon Theater), north (Fox Bay Cinema Grill) and west (Times Cinema). At ground zero, in the heart of Milwaukee’s East Side, MFF will occupy all three screens at the Oriental Theatre plus a new venue, the Jan Serr Studio Cinema on the top floor of UW-Milwaukee’s Kenilworth Open Studios.
“Four screens within a block of each other. It’s an exciting development,” says MFF’s artistic and executive director, Jonathan Jackson. And that’s not all. By securing the lease on the Oriental Theatre earlier this year, MFF was able to shift its dates back a month, enabling it to program first-release films that would otherwise have been booked at the venerable New York Film Festival. “The overlap with New York was a serious restriction on our content,” Jackson continues. “I’m happy to report that moving our dates has allowed us to get more premiere films from the fall festival season. Sprinkled through this year’s festival are award winners from other festivals as well as some possible Oscar contenders.”
Among the plums at this year’s MFF are Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and another Cannes favorite, Burning by South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong. MFF also secured Everybody Knows by Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi, starring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. “These are films the industry and critics will be talking about through the Oscar season,” Jackson says.
Several new programming tracks have been added to MFF this year. Das Kino focuses on emerging German cinema and GenreQueer on LGBTQ films. Of special interest is the series that programming and education director Cara Ogburn developed with an intern from Public Ally, Gregory Thomas, called Teen Screen. According to Ogburn, a committee of 10 Milwaukee teenagers watched and discussed nine films and selected four of those submissions for the festival.
“They spoke very eloquently about their goals,” Ogburn says, recalling her discussions with the teens. “They wanted to find stories that were not clichés—with unexpected characters that reflect their own lives. They wanted films that saw beyond school into family lives, workplaces. Some of those films don’t exist yet. And they are not afraid of subtitles!”
Some 300 films from many nations and genres will be screened during MFF 2018. Numerous filmmakers will be in town for the event and many special events are scheduled. And yet there are some people, the same ones who mindlessly declare that print is dead and retail is dead, who wonder about the future of cinema in the era of Netflix and Amazon Prime.
“They were worried about the same thing when television became widespread,” Ogburn says. Jackson expands on the theme. “The art house cinema audience is increasing annually. It’s not declining.” He adds, “For film festivals, it’s also a matter of the celebration, the community, the vibrant atmosphere, the special guests. It’s such a coming together of people from all walks of life. And there’s nothing like seeing movies on a big screen.”
Milwaukee Film Festival runs Oct. 18-Nov. 1. For more information, visit mkefilm.org.
See all of our daily previews of what's ahead at the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival here.
Since 2015, Associated Bank has partnered with Milwaukee Film to help bring cinematic entertainment and education to the greater Milwaukee area. To learn more about how you can give back to the nonprofit Milwaukee Film every time you make a purchase, visit associatedbank.com/mkefilm.
