Upstate Independents May 2010 Meeting Agenda

I.      Announcements

II.   Film Screening with Q & A:

A.)    “Confinement”: 30 minutes

Written, directed, and edited by upstate NY filmmaker John McCarty

Confinement is a modern re-telling of the classic macabre, feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). It is about a woman whose physician husband has determined she is suffering from depression following the birth of their only child and has installed her in the upstairs bedroom of their rental house to recuperate. There, she becomes fixated on the color and design of the paper that surrounds the room. The film, which is currently making the festival rounds, portrays the impact of this confinement on her mental state and feelings about marriage and motherhood. www.confinementmovie.com

B.)    UI Member John Holser will be screening his demo reel.

III.             A 15-minute Networking Break

IV.           Guest Speaker-of-the-Month:  Kathleen Carroll, Artistic Director & Co-Founder of the Lake Placid Film Forum

Kathleen Carroll was a film critic for the New York Daily News for nearly three decades. Variety described her at one point as “the critic who picks pix people like.” While at the News, she interviewed almost all of the leading directors and actors of the late ‘60’s,‘70’s, ‘80’s and early ‘90’s, including Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Natalie Wood, Federico Fellini, Jane Fonda and even Gloria Swanson. She regularly covered the Cannes Film Festival, co-producing as well as appearing in a documentary called “Diary of the Cannes Film Festival” (which featured the very last interview with actor Peter Sellers). She presented film programs at the Toronto Film Festival and the Sarasota Film Festival. She also attended film festivals in Tehran, Hong Kong and Karlovy Vary. She served on the juries of the Berlin, Montreal and Santa Barbara film festivals. She was a featured programmer, along with Roger Ebert and Richard Corliss, on the Floating Film Festival. A three-time chairperson of the New York Film Critics Circle, she has written for numerous publications. She was an adjunct Associate Professor at St. John’s University and an advisor to the university’s Communication Arts division (1972-1983). In addition she taught film courses at New York University and Marymount Manhattan. A native of Lake Placid, she is both the co-founder (along with novelist Russell Banks) and the artistic director of the Lake Placid Film Forum.

Q & A session to be held thereafter