AIFF 2010: Free Pre-Festival Movie Tonight

The Festival starts officially tomorrow night but you can get a head start with a free film at the Anchorage Museum tonight at 7pm.  There are still tickets left.  You can order online now.

Click here to reserve Nightjohn tickets

Here's what the Museum says Nightjohn by Charles Burnett, who will be there:

The film, about a slave who risks his life to teach other slaves to read, was called the "best American movie of 1996" by the New Yorker.

The New York Times wrote:

Lest we forget, knowledge is power, and for slaves in the antebellum South, learning to read was forbidden. Some slaves who dared to become literate were punished by having a finger chopped off in front of the whole slave community. Or worse. . .


Although narrated in the simple, straightforward style of a typical family movie and filmed with a picture-book prettiness, ''Nightjohn'' is no cop-out when it comes to confronting the day-to-day horrors of slavery. Its representative slave owner, Clel Waller (Beau Bridges), is a conscienceless brute who terrorizes his field workers with beatings and humiliations and bullies his squeamish young son, Jeffrey (Joel Thomas Traywick), into following his example.  .   .

Burnett has a second free movie showing Thursday night.  You can reserve your ticket at the same link. 

And tomorrow night the Wild Hunt opens the Festival at 7pm at the Bear Tooth.  It's $30 for the event. (It says on page 8 of the printed program.) You can also see the movie for $8 on Tuesday at 7:45pm at the Bear Tooth.