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Rochester International Film Festival opens Sunday

Rochester International Film Festival.

The actors are on the cusp of recognition: Peter Riegert and T.J. Thyne. The film, "Extra Innings," is a mere 8 minutes and 34 seconds. In that short time, the audience watches a cliché-filled interview between a reporter (Why are reporters always portrayed as scruffy-looking?) and the gruff manager of the Boston Red Sox.

And then, “all of a sudden,” says Josephine Perini, “if you are not attentive, at the last couple minutes, you missed the whole thing.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwMbg3rNA8I

Indeed, "Extra Innings" is a bittersweet twist of a story, perhaps familiar to anyone with an aging parent. The film is one of 28 that have been selected for this year’s Rochester International Film Festival, which opens Sunday and runs through June 27.

Of course, the execution of such events has taken on a new look in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Rather than showing in May at the Dryden Theatre, the usual host for the RIFF, this year several dates were considered for what will be a virtual event.

Otherwise, the festival operates as it always has. Now in its 62nd year, it claims to be one of the longest-running short-film festivals in the world. And free, as the not-for-profit festival always is. Operating through grant money, donations, and volunteers who -- at least before this COVID-19 year -- house and feed the filmmakers who come to Rochester to see how their work is received by audiences.

Rochester is rife with film festivals. The High Falls Women’s Film Festival. The One Take Film Festival. The Deaf Rochester Film Festival. The ImageOut Rochester LGBT Film Festival. The Rochester International Children’s Film Festival. The Upstate New York Horror Film Festival. Anomaly: The Rochester Genre Film Festival. All are juried; the filmmakers’ work must pass through a gantlet.

“At the end of the film,” says Perini, who’s been with the RIFF for more than four decades, “we have a discussion, sometimes heated, as to the merits of the film.”

The longest of this year’s films is 29 minutes, the shortest two minutes. They range from tender to bizarre. 

Perhaps heading the latter category is "My Dinner With Werner," which supposedly re-creates an actual dinner with the seriously disturbed director Werner Herzog and the star of several of his films, the seriously disturbed Klaus Kinski. 

The relationship was remarkably contentious but resulted in some remarkable filmmaking. “I had a rifle,” Herzog says of Kinski’s threat to leave the jungle set of one of their films. “It was actually his Winchester. I told him he would only get as far as the next bend in the river before I had eight bullets in his head. The ninth would be for me.”

“Some of the films, like from the Asian countries, Korea and so on, they have…” Perini says, pausing to consider her review. “It’s not the typical American beginning, middle, end. They have more of, like, you have to think…

“And sometimes there’s some viewers that don’t get it. And so they say, ‘I didn’t understand what that meant,’ and this is where you have to step back and look at it from a different point of view.”

That might be "The 44 Scarves of Liza Minnelli." About a man who goes to an auction and buys 44 scarves belong to Minnelli.

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“And then he sent them to 43 friends -- he kept one -- and they each did a little piece on it,” Perini says. “That’s an interesting one, I guess. I said to him, ‘Did you ever talk, talk with Liza?’ He said no, he thinks that perhaps she’s a bit embarrassed at having to sell her things, and I thought that was interesting.”

As the narrator of "The 44 Scarves of Liza Minnelli notes," Minnelli lived by the credo, “You owe people a certain amount of drama.” So make what you will of a shot of a chenille scarf draped around a rocking horse sitting on a diving board overlooking a swimming pool.

These films come from Russia, sometimes with subtitles, as documentaries and fantasies. Comedy? Not so much.

“People say, ‘Oh, it’s kind of heavy, it’s kind of dark, where are the comedies?’ ” Perini says. “But we only can use what people send in.

“I guess we live in a heavy, serious world, which is what the filmmakers do.”

Register for the free showings starting June 21 at rochesterfilmfest.org.

Jeff Spevak is WXXI’s Arts & Life editor and reporter. He can be reached at jspevak@wxxi.org.

Jeff Spevak has been a Rochester arts reporter for nearly three decades, with seven first-place finishes in the Associated Press New York State Features Writing Awards while working for the Democrat and Chronicle.