Film screens at Savannah Film Festival

by Lynn Hamilton

The Savannah Film Festival finished with a bang with a screening of In America, Jim Sheridan's intensely personal film about an eccentric Irish family dealing with the death of a child. Dedicated to Frankie Sheridan, this film follows the fortunes of an Irish couple and their two daughters as they follow the American dream to New York city. All the cliches of rags to riches immigration stories are burst as they move into a tenement famous for its violent drug addicts and proceed to work illegally on their visitor's visas.

On the level of a modern immigration story that doesn't hold back any punches, this film is brilliant. To that is added a profound understanding of grief. When you first see this family, they seem to be recovering from their tragedy and moving on with their lives. But, as you watch, you find that, as in real life, it's not that easy. Unresolved sorrow bursts out when you least expect it, even as the family is prepared to welcome a new baby into their ranks.

The film is organized around the eldest daughter's belief that her dead brother can grant the family exactly three wishes. Films that are narrated by children, as this one is, so often fall flat and end up being simple minded and maudlin. This film is one of those rare successes that actually captures the complex emotions of childhood which can include the feeling that the child is fully responsible for the family's welfare.

The film festival also features an independently made film, Assisted Living, which takes place in a nursing home in which a shiftless young man employed by the home to mop floors and run errands befriends an old woman drifting into Alzheimer's. Assisted Living is not really a fun film. There's too much truth about nursing homes and too many unattractive characters, satirically realized. At the same time, because it gets right in the face of something we're all trying to avoid looking at‹old age, helplessness, and death‹ Assisted Living illustrates the need for film festivals where one can see films that will never make it the suburban Carmikes.

Assisted Living which showed on the last day of the festival won an award for professional film making at the closing awards ceremony. Other independent films, including Anime, The Vest, and Tupperware" also won awards. In accepting her award, the director of Tupperware thanked the festival noting that this was the only award the film had won. She also remarked that the success of the film was given a boost when three bus drivers took a group of children bound for a field trip to the wrong location. They ended up seeing her film which greatly added to its audience numbers.