Filmmaker: Jay Craven
Film: Disappearances
October 30 - November 8, 2007
About the filmmaker:
Jay Craven is an award-winning director, writer, and producer whose narrative films include High Water, Where the Rivers Flow North, A Stranger in the Kingdom, In Jest, The Year That Trembled, and Disappearances. Craven’s films have played in 345 U.S. cities and towns; 52 countries; and more than sixty international film festivals, including Sundance, Seattle, South By Southwest, Vienna, Vancouver, Nantucket, Avignon, Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Havana, Savannah, and The American Film Institute’s AFI Fest. His work has also had television broadcasts on the Disney Channel, Sundance Channel, Starz, Encore, PBS affiliates in eleven states, and syndication to more than 150 commercial U.S. TV stations.
About the film:
Jay Craven’s North Country Prohibition Era thriller Disappearances may be set in the frigid Vermont, but it has echoes of a Faulkernarian drama, complete with mysterious family relations, eerie mystical realism, and a fascination with things past or passing. The story is based on the novel of the same name by Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher. Mosher sets many of his novels in the fictional Kingdom County, Vermont, which, like Faulkner’s imagined Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi is populated by a variety of compelling native characters.
In Disappearances, Craven brings a number of these characters to life on the silver screen: Kris Kristofferson as Quebec Bill Bonhomme, a wild irrepressible “feral patriarch” with a history as both a smuggler and abuser of alcohol; Charlie McDermott as Wild Bill Bonhomme, his young son eager to take up the same path as his father; and Genevieve Bujold as Cordelia, Wild Bill’s enigmatic and prophetic aunt who seeks to save her grandson from the terrible fate she sees for him. These characters and others dance through gripping tale of high stakes whiskey smuggling along the Vermont Canadian border, involving mysterious French backers, dangerous bandits, and the Bonhomme family’s mysterious history.
Disappearances was selected in 2006 by the American Film Institute to be one of 8 U.S. and 11 international films for its first-ever AFI : Project 20/20—a year-long global cultural exchange to U.S. and international venues, sponsored by the AFI, The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The President’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the State Department, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Opening Short:
Wood Diary
Directed by David Meyers (Experimental)
Follow a less-than-ordinary man over the course of one day and discover what it takes most people a lifetime to learn.
Tour Dates & Locations:
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