A pair of players on the area film scene, programmer David Kleiler and producer Laura Bernieri, have helped to launch the Circuit, a plan to showcase films that have won a festival audience but failed to secure distribution.
The first Circuit offering will be “Gift of the Game,” a documentary about Cuban baseball by local filmmakers Bill Haney and John MacNeil. It will screen at the Firehouse Theatre in Newburyport on Wednesday. The Circuit’s official launch will take place in early fall at the Museum of Fine Arts with the release of “100 Days,” an award-winning film about the Rwandan genocide, directed by Nick Hughes. After that, the plan is to offer 30 venues a menu of 30 films, half of which will be directed by New England filmmakers. “Gift of the Game,” winner of best documentary at the 2002 Woods Hole Film Festival, will show at 7:30 p.m. at the Firehouse, One Market Square, Newburyport. For more information, visit www.firehousecenter.com or call the box office at 978-462-7336.
GOOD WORDS: Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital will host a benefit premiere screening of “After Words,” a documentary about aphasia, a communication disorder that often results from a stroke, today at 4 p.m. at the Wang Center.
Directed by Vincent Straggas, the documentary features members of Boston’s Aphasia Community Group as well as actors Julie Harris and Patricia Neal, both of whom have battled aphasia following strokes. Also featured in the film are mezzo-soprano Jan Curtis, actor-playwright-director Joseph Chaikin, and musician Bobby McFerrin, whose father, a baritone, sustained a stroke.
The screening benefits the Aphasia Community Group of Boston, founded in 1990 to raise aphasia awareness and advocate for people who are often unable to communicate themselves. Tickets may be purchased at the Wang Center box office or by calling 617-573-2920.
AWARD ANNOUNCED: The Boston Film & Video Foundation announces a new award named for local filmmaker and founder of Blackside production company Henry Hampton (“Eyes on the Prize”). The Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Documentary, according to the BFVF, is “intended to serve as a reminder of Hampton’s belief, and ours, that inclusion, courage, and craft are all part of the true documentary process.”
The award, which includes a $5,000 cash prize, will go to an American documentary film/
videomaker “whose work addresses important social issues and whose work process explores these issues through collaboration among people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds and different life experiences and perspectives.” The winning film will screen during the closing night of the 29th annual New England Film & Video Festival, which will be held in March 2004.
All entry information, including deadline, entry fee, and mailing address, will be on the BFVF website, www.bfvf.org, beginning today.
PAGE AND SCREEN: Da Capo Press of Cambridge, publisher of “The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films” (edited by former Globe film critic Jay Carr), has just published “Ghosts of the Abyss,” a companion to the 3-D movie of the same name. The film, directed by James Cameron and playing at the New England Aquarium IMAX theater, explores the wreck of the Titanic.
Written by Don Lynch and Ken Marschall, the book matches photos taken for the film with archival photos to convey the Titanic then and now. Lynch is historian of the Titanic Historical Society and an authority on the Titanic’s passengers and crew. As a member of Cameron’s team on the “Ghosts of the Abyss” expedition, he made several dives to the wreck and kept notes and a daily journal that were used in writing the text for this book. He is also the author of “Titanic: An Illustrated History.”
SCREENS AROUND TOWN: Local comic Kim Davis and Cambridge Fringe Productions will show three unaired TV pilots and comedy shorts by local filmmakers each Wednesday at Cambridge’s Lizard Lounge. On Wednesday, Davis will show episodes from Beth Lapides’s “Other Network,” including “Next” by Bob Odenkirk, who worked as a writer for “The Ben Stiller Show,” and “Me and My Needs,” a sitcom pilot by Judy Toll, whose credits include “Sex and the City.”
LA-based comic Lapides and producer Greg Miller collected TV pilots that were rejected by network execs. The pair first screened its collection eight years ago in Los Angeles, then expanded to showings in New York and Washington, D.C. For a full schedule of “The Other Network” screenings, visit www.cambridge fringefest.com.