As the end of the ski season is approaching Vail is getting ready to host one of the most anticipated events of the spring - the Vail Film Festival. This year the festival celebrates women in film. Among the celebrities coming to town are two of Hollywood's leading female filmmakers and actors Julie Delpy and Christina Ricci. As a tribute to her outstanding achievement in film, both in front of and behind the camera actor, writer, director, and two-time Oscar nominee Julie Delpy will be presented with the Vail Film Festival Vanguard award. Golden Globe®, SAG®, and Emmy® nominee Christina Ricci will be honored with the 2017 Vail Film Festival Renegade Award for her great contributions to the film industry. The 2017 Film Festival will screen an impressive array of 51 films, including narrative and documentary feature films as well as short and student films. A list with the titles included in each category is included below and the schedule of events for each day can be found here.
Feature
A SIBLING MYSTERY
A brother and sister become consumed with investigating a mysterious woman they suspect has stolen their winning lottery ticket, endangering their summer party plans.
ALL WE HAD
A young mother and her precocious teenage daughter, living out of their car, find an unlikely home and makeshift family in small town America. When their new life begins to unravel, they hold fast to each other to overcome their circumstances together.
THE ARCHER
Archery champion Lauren Pierce has just landed in Paradise Trails, a brutal juvenile correctional facility in the wilderness. When Lauren learns how deep corruption runs at Paradise Trails under the rule of warden and bow-hunter Bob Patrice, she makes her escape, traversing the wilderness with rebellious inmate Rebecca Rolinski. They fight to survive both the elements and a desperate Bob, who’s hunting his prey to make sure his secret stays buried… even if he has to bury them with it.
CARRIE PILBY
A person of high intelligence struggles to make sense of the world as it relates to morality, relationships, sex and leaving her apartment.
CUSTODY
Legal proceedings and intimate family dynamics dovetail in Custody. Starring Viola Davis as an embattled family court judge with a fraught marriage of her own; Hayden Panettiere as a recent law-school grad flung into a custody case; and Catalina Sandino Moreno plays the single mother at the center of the case who risks losing her two children over an ill-timed argument.
LIKE COTTON TWINES
Micah Brown, an African American volunteer teaching in a small Ghanaian village, must confront a new form of slavery when his 14 year old student, Tuigi has to become Trokosi, a practice of religious servitude to atone for her father’s crime. He battles church and state to give Tuigi a life outside tradition.
LITTLE PINK HOUSE
A small-town nurse, Susette Kelo, emerges as the reluctant leader of her working-class neighbors in their struggle to save their homes from political and corporate interests bent on seizing the land and handing it over to Pfizer Corporation.
SOME FREAKS
A one-eyed boy and a plus-size girl begin a charming romance during their senior year of high school. However, when college arrives and these two outsiders are separated, they both choose to radically alter their appearances, forcing them to confront whether their relationship will survive these drastic changes.
STICKY NOTES
STICKY NOTES is a heart-wrenching journey of growing up told with ample moments of humor and levity, candidly illuminating father-daughter relationships and the role reversals that take place between parents and their children.
THE TREE
Inspired by an actual friendship between the director's mother and his mother's best friend, 'The Tree' is a poignant, heart-warming story about an 88 year-old widow (Dorothy Thorp) who takes a road trip from Wamego, Kansas, back to Terre Haute, Indiana, to visit her oldest and dearest childhood friend. Along the way, Dorothy meets hurting individuals from several walks of life, and imparts the wisdom of long years and the comfort of her beautiful spirit to one and all.
Documentaries
BE RELENTLESS
On May 4, 2014, Norma Bastidas, a single mother and fearless survivor of human trafficking, sexual violence, abuse and addiction, shattered the Guinness World Record for longest triathlon by running, biking, and swimming 3,762 miles (6,054 km) from Cancún, Mexico to Washington D.C. as her stand against human trafficking. Be Relentless is the binational, bilingual, feature-length documentary that captured every grueling step of Norma’s record-breaking expedition across two countries.
BURQA BOXERS
In a culture that values beauty, delicacy, refinement and submission as the prized traits to the ultimate feminine career fulfillment, marriage, young Muslim women in Kiddirpur, Kolkata challenge stereotypes, learning boxing with Razia Shabnam one of the first Indian women to become a boxing coach and an international referee. Burqa boxers is the story of Ajmira Khatoon, Taslima Khatoon and Parveen Sajda as the pursue their dreams while negotiating poverty and tradition.
CITY OF JOY
The Democratic Republic of Congo has endured 20 years of devastating violence. Rape has been used as a weapon of war to destroy community and access precious minerals. Congo is often referred to as “the worst place in the world to be a woman.” CITY OF JOY tells a different story of the region.
FACES OF SANTA ANA
The story of an inspired painter, Brian Peterson, whose journey of love started with the befriending of a homeless man in his neighborhood of Santa Ana but grew into something greater than he had imagined.
FREE TO LAUGH
Free to Laugh is about the power of comedy after prison.
THE GATEWAY BUG
Following the rise and dramatic fall of edible insect start-ups in America, this film exposes America’s disconnect with food as climate catastrophe, uncovering daily habits individuals can alter to fix the broken food system, one meal at a time.
I AM HER
Out of the limelight, under the streetlight, enter the world of NYC’s transgender underclass. One church opens its doors to provide meals, clothing and sometimes, a little drag show magic.
LITTLE STONES
From a graffiti artist speaking out against domestic violence in the favelas of Brazil to a dancer rehabilitating sex-trafficking survivors in India, LITTLE STONES follows four women from around the world who use art to empower women and girls.
OUR IRAQ
OUR IRAQ dismantles caricatures of Iraqis and Muslims in the United States: an Iraqi-American sculptor rebuilds what extremists have destroyed, Muslims pray at a Catholic church in Minneapolis, refugees own a St. Paul neighborhood grocery, and a public school administrator becomes the first Muslim woman to win an election in Minnesota.
RELOCATION, ARKANSAS - AFTERMATH OF INCARCERATION
In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which sent nearly 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, to hastily built prison camps. Two of those camps were in Arkansas: at Rohwer and Jerome, both rural communities located in the Mississippi River Delta, a land of already deep racial divide. Relocation, Arkansas explores the events that forever altered the lives of American citizens imprisoned in the Deep South, the irony of prejudice, and the power of reconciliation.
RISING SONS
Rising Sons is a short documentary film about a radical and unique approach to end the rampant raping of women in The Democratic Republic of the Congo: by healing the wounds and beliefs of men.
VISIONS OF WARRIORS
In "Visions of Warriors," four veterans from the Vietnam War era to the Iraq War participate in the groundbreaking Veteran Photo Recovery Project at the VA Menlo Park and use innovative photography therapy to treat their mental illness.
Hong Kong Showcase
I AM SOMEBODY
Extras struggle to get their big break in the film industry.
SWORD MASTER
Hong Kong cinema giants Derek Yee and Tsui Hark join forces in this martial arts epic, about an elite swordsman who is haunted by his skill, and a challenger who aims to take his place at all costs.
THREE
When a police sting goes bad, a master criminal makes a desperate choice: he forces the cops to shoot him. Once there, he refuses treatment, instead waiting for his cohorts to break him out. Caught between an obsessed cop and the troubled surgeon assigned to save his life, the hospital is now a taught-and-tense situation that could turn into a bloody battleground at any moment.
WEEDS ON FIRE
In the year of 1984, Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed and the future of Hong Kong became unclear. In the stream of history, this story of a baseball team beneath the Lion Rock had gradually been forgotten: In that year, 'Shatin Martins', the first Hong Kong youth baseball team, was formed.
Shorts
BIRD DOG
Growing up in Wyoming, ten-year-old Rose is happily at home out hunting birds with her family. However, when she rises to her older brother’s dare and swallows the heart of a mourning dove while cleaning the day’s take, she begins to worry that the heart in her belly will sprout into a fully formed dove. The burgeoning conviction that she is carrying a bird around in her stomach alters the entire experience of the hunt, and drives her to confront her fears about growing older and shedding her tomboy skin.
BOYCOTT BAND: THE RETURN OF ONE MORE WISH
A washed-up boyband in North Carolina rides House Bill 2 to fame and fortune.
THE FIXXERS
Agents from the future are sent back in time to find a hidden genome placed in unsuspecting Los Angeles residents by the Russian Government.
HIT & RUN
An alcoholic desperate to end his life encounters a prostitute desperate to start hers. After an initial repulsion to each other they soon discover each has something to offer the other.
JACK AND JILL
Two best girlfriends take a small town by storm on what could be their last weekend together.
THE JULIE STORIES
Staten Island, New York, 1993. Big Julie has been a bus driver for 25 years and wants his piece of the American Dream. When he sees an infomercial for a new franchise business, he quits his job and sets out to get rich! But door-to-door is not his thing, and his family must step in to help him avoid utter failure.
MODERN HOUSES
Modern Houses is a psychological-thriller about the creative process. Following a breakdown, architecture’s celebrated young star is finally ready to unveil the model that will be her greatest design. With the client at the door and her face staring back at her from the cover of Architectural Digest, she hears a whisper.
QUICK FIX
After a traumatic experience on the subway, Scotty finds much more than he was looking for when he visits an old friend.
SCHMOOLIE THE DEATHWATCHER
A Jewish teen spends his first night alone guarding a body awaiting burial, and ends up fighting for his own life.
THINK FAST
A business woman on a tight deadline must choose to either hang up on a wrong-number caller in crisis -- or commit career suicide.
VALENCIA
While driving to the reading of her father’s will, Catherine is faced with an anomaly on the side of the road.
THE VISIT
During an encounter with his aging mother, a man must face the unimaginable consequences of his dubious past.
WASTE
Roger lives a grim and detached life, picking up medical waste for a living, but looks forward to his evening conversations with his quirky roommate and foodie, Olive. But as the meals become increasingly strange, and push the limits of curiousity, Roger must ask himself how far he will go for love?
Student Films
DARK MACHINE
A mysterious phone call gets a lonesome photographer involved with a seductive woman and her enigmatic husband.
GARDENERS OF THE FOREST
For generations, Laos was known as the Land of a Million Elephants. Today, there are around 400 elephants left in Laos.
ICARUS
When a Mars colony's communication satellite is damaged, Emilia Riley embarks on a seemingly harmless repair excursion. A shuttle malfunction cuts connectivity to the ground and Chris, her son, makes the knee jerk decision to go after her.
MY COUSIN KLARA
Two young girls on the run, get a ride from a dangerous man.
ROCKET
Rocket tells a bittersweet fairy tale set in the world of 1950's dirt track racing. With a legacy traditionally passed down from father to son, Annie Pankratz strives to build a destiny all her own.
STILL SOPHIE
Four and a half years ago, young talent Sophia Salveson’s life changed forever. Doctors said she may never walk again, may never talk again...may never perform again. They were wrong.
VISITORS
A broken and divided family struggles to survive after a group of uninvited visitors invade their farm.
