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The Three Rivers Film Festival is inching back toward its pre-pandemic scale — and it’s doing so with help from locally made films.
The 42nd annual festival is organized by Film Pittsburgh, the nonprofit that took it over in 2020. Yeah, we know, rough timing — but Film Pittsburgh executive director Kathryn Spitz Cohan acknowledges the festival’s 2021 return to in-person screenings was a little too ambitious. Too many films chasing too few cinephiles as yet willing to attend in-theater screenings.
The 2022 edition scaled back to 19 feature films and drew more guests per screening, Spitz Cohan said. Since then, other Film Pittsburgh showcases, like JFilm, have been attracting more ticket-buyers. So this fall, Three Rivers booked 22 features and added a third theater (Waterworks Cinemas) to last year’s venues, the Harris Theater and the Lindsay Theater.
As always, the festival is a mix of new domestic and overseas narrative and documentary features, many unlikely to show up on major streaming services, let alone in commercial theaters. That means the festival, which runs Wed., Nov. 8, through Nov. 15, might be your only chance to see them.
Of course there are exceptions, including the opening-night screening of Alexander Payne’s comedy “The Holdovers,” with Paul Giamatti, which opens in theaters two nights later. Other higher-profile selections include “Perfect Days,” the new one from arthouse legend Wim Wenders, and “Double Down South”, a con-game thriller from writer and director Tom Schulman, who won a screenwriting Oscar for “Dead Poets Society.” “Black Barbie: A Documentary” is also likely to draw attention.
Still, this edition of the festival is defined partly by its locally sourced content.
Opening night, for instance, also includes the world-premiere screening of “Unsinkable,” Pittsburgh-based filmmaker Cody William Hartman’s period drama about the U.S. Senate’s inquiry into the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
Hartman said the film — adapted from a play by area playwright Eileen Enright Hodgetts — was five years in production, including two years lost to the pandemic. It was shot entirely in the area, including flashback scenes set in the icy North Atlantic that were staged in an Olympic-sized pool in Ligonier.
The cast includes Fiona Dourif, Karen Allen, Jayne Wisener and Pittsburgh-based Cotter Smith, with several other local actors in supporting roles, including Daina Michelle Griffith and Sam Turich.
Another locally shot feature is “Two Lives in Pittsburgh.” Writer, director and lead actor Brian Silverman graduated from Mount Lebanon High School in 1986 and later took up acting and moved to Los Angeles. He first ventured into filmmaking more than a decade ago, and “Two Lives” is his debut feature. It was partly inspired by his day job teaching special education, where he recalls how enthusiastically his young students supported a classmate who came out as trans.
“Two Lives” is about a blue-collar guy, played by Silverman, facing both his mother’s illness and his young child’s exploration of gender. He’s coming to terms with the distance between “who he needs to be” and “who he’s always been,” said Silverman.
The film was shot for less than $200,000, mostly in South Hills towns like Dormont and Mount Lebanon. But it’s already got a nice track record at festivals, winning the Audience Award for feature in competition at the prestigious Dances With Films, in Los Angeles; the Audience Award for best narrative feature at OutSouth Queer Film Festival, in Durham, N.C.; and best narrative feature at the Arlington International Film Festival, in Massachusetts.
None of this is to forget the Pittsburgh Shorts Film Festival, Film Pittsburgh’s companion showcase, running Nov. 16-19, with all screenings at the Harris.
The 15 programs (six of them virtual only) include 119 short films. Some of them are also of local origin, including “Eulogies,” by Pittsburgh’s Steve Parys, best known as the veteran first assistant director on local productions like season 2 of “American Rust” and Billy Porter’s debut feature, “Anything’s Possible.”
First assistant directors plan each day’s shoots and run the crew. Directing “Eulogies” gave Parys a chance to make more creative calls. “Eulogies” is an 11-minute drama set in the bathroom of a funeral home where three young men help to prepare a fourth to deliver the eulogy for a friend. The script is by Portia Lannak, a Columbia College Chicago student who won a Pittsburgh Shorts screenwriting competition last year.
With attendance at commercial theaters edging upward but still well below pre-pandemic levels, it will be interesting to see how this fall’s festivals fare. Film Pittsburgh’s Spitz Cohan said pre-sales for the Three Rivers Film Festival were very strong. (Both screenings of “Unsinkable,” for instance, are already sold out.)
“I’m really hopeful that this is a good omen,” she said.
