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 Entertainment | December 2007 
¡Que Milagro!
 Emiliano Garcia-Sarnoff - Santa Fe Reporter
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| | The Best Indigenous Film Award at the Santa Fe Film Festival’s Milagro Awards Ceremony brought down the house. (Gabriella Marks) |
The 2007 Santa Fe Film Fest, with a hitch or two, goes off splendidly.
The Screener’s schmoozing expeditions at this year’s Santa Fe Film Festival revealed several consistent themes.
First, nearly every visiting filmmaker seemed to honestly adore it. Second, the City Different’s festival, with its focus on women filmmakers and filmmakers of various ethnic backgrounds, was a Festival Different - and that’s a truly good thing.
Mayor David Coss, who appropriately presented the Audience Choice Award (to the jump-rope documentary, Jump!) at the Milagro Awards Ceremony, said it most succinctly when he told SFR, “The festival was so eclectic and so very New Mexican.”
Dean Storm, who made the short Attack of the Killer Duct Tape, echoed many other filmmakers’ sentiments when he said, “They really treated the filmmakers first-class.”
Duc Nguyen, the Vietnamese filmmaker behind Bolinao 52, described the festival as “the first I’ve been to where I get to enjoy myself as a filmmaker and a filmgoer.”
Filmmakers and attendees also seemed universally impressed by the festival’s diversity. “This is the America I’ve been looking for,” Daniel Taye Workou, the Ethiopian director of Menged, said. “In the food, in the architecture and at this festival, diverse cultures are celebrated.”
Cinematographer John Bailey, who was one of this year’s Luminaria Tributees, told SFR, “It’s unlike any other film festival in that it’s in touch with a diverse and multi-ethnic group of filmmakers, not just a bunch of privileged Hollywood types like us.”
There were several glitches, though. For instance, a short played without sound and one of the biggest Gala features, Control, was out of focus and had a damaged reel that played in sepia.
“We have some technical issues, admittedly, to iron out,” Deputy Festival Director Stephen Rubin said. “We have grown so unexpectedly that it is time for our infrastructure to grow, too.”
The winners at this year’s Milagro Awards Ceremony, which was co-hosted by actors Ali MacGraw and Raoul Trujillo, included Marjane Satrapi’s excellent coming-of-age animated tale, Persepolis, which won Best in Fest. Kieran Fitzgerald’s The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez, about a goat herder who was killed by American soldiers patrolling the Texas/Mexico border, won for Best Documentary. Albuquerque filmmaker Billy Garberina took home the Tamalewood Award for Best New Mexico-Made Film for his zombie-romp, Necroville. The Best of the Southwest Award went to Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa, Jeremy and Randy Stulberg’s documentary about a middle-of-nowhere community in northern New Mexico.
The most moving moment of the Milagro Awards Ceremony - and there were several very touching scenes - was the acceptance of the award for Best Indigenous Film. Billy Luther, the director of the winning film, Miss Navajo, could not attend, but accepting on his behalf were three former Miss Navajo contestants who were in the film, including the 2005 first runner-up Crystal Frazier (who was on hand to pass out the awards as well) and Luther’s mom, Miss Navajo 1966 Sarah Luther. As the three spoke of the importance of preserving their language and of the sense of honor they were experiencing, they choked back tears. So did nearly everyone in the audience and, as the accepters walked off the stage, the entire audience stood and applauded.
Sarah Luther later told SFR that she was “overwhelmed,” and “very moved for my son.” The stirring moment, which was supposed to be in the middle of the festival but, because of a production snafu, became the conclusion, truly summed it all up. |
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