A Spectacular Year for the Middleburg Film Festival

In year 13, the Middleburg Film Festival founded by Sheila Johnson continues to delight, astonish, and inspire. This year featured a dazzling array of films that are certain to add to the previous years’ record of 63 Oscar nominations for predecessors on the festival schedule. George Clooney’s “Jay Kelly,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, Sidney Sweeney as boxer Christy Martin in “Christy,” Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, the new “Knives Out” movie “Wake Up Dead Man,” Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” a re-imagining of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabbler,” Cannes Grand Prix winner “Sentimental Value,” and Jeremy Allen White in “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” were among the most talked-about.

The festival’s audience award was a tie this year, the winners Hikari’s gentle, touching “Rental Family,” starring Brendan Fraser as an American actor living in Japan who goes to work for a company that provides people to act as family members or friends or proxies for those to whom they cannot say what they want, and “Hamnet,” the story of the death of Shakespeare’s young son.

The documentary award went to “The Cycle of Love,” the story of PK Mahanandia, a 23-year old Delhi street artist who in 1977 set off on a 6000-mile cross-continent bicycle ride to find Lotta, the woman who had captured his heart on a visit to India. And the International Awards went to  Ben Hania’s film, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” based on the voice recordings of a six-year old who came under fire as she and six members of her family tried to flee Gaza City. The film is Tunisia’s official selection for the Best International Feature Oscar. 

Many of the filmmakers and performers were there, including “Frankenstein” costume designer Kate Hawley, who was interviewed by Variety’s Jazz Tangcay after the film, and actress Nina Hoss, whose performance in “Hedda” as Eileen Lovborg is based on a male character from the original play. Composer Nathan Johnson told us about developing different tones and themes to match the genres of the “Knives Out” movies.

I was honored to be included on the annual “Talk Back to the Critics” panel with my friends Travis Hopson, Tim Gordon, Jen Chaney, Roxana Hadadi, and Mae Abdulbaki.

As always, the highlight of the festival, along with the unmatchable gorgeousness of fall in Virginia’s hunt and wine country, is the unique annual tribute to a composer, accompanied by a full orchestra. This year it was Kris Bowers, who brought clips from films that included “Green Book,” “Origins,” and “The Wild Robot,” to show us how his music enriched the stories with emotion that only music can touch.