Middleburg Film Festival 2023 Wrap – Nell Minow reports

The highlight of the Middleburg Film Festival every year is not a movie. It is the annual tribute to a film composer, with the Loudoun Symphony’s full orchestra playing the music. Festival founder Sheila Johnson was a music major in college, and she always reminds attendees of the vital importance of a score in guiding the emotions of the film audience.

This year’s awardee, Michael Giacchino, attracted such an enthusiastic crowd that the staff of the festival had to rush to bring in several more rows of chairs. Giacchino told us that because he was considered just a composer for video games, no one would hire him for movies or television until one day he got a call from J.J. Abrams. He composed the themes for Alias and Lost, and then Abrams’ films Mission Impossible III, the three Star Trek films, and Super 8. He also composed the score for Pixar’s Up, Inside Out, and The Incredibles, Disney’s Coco, Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, and the upcoming Next Goal Wins.

The State Department worked with the festival to bring five Ukrainian filmmakers to Middleburg as a cultural exchange and symbol of US support. That was part of the festival’s always-strong international presence, including two affectionate but very different films made by women writer/directors of Iranian heritage about their mothers, AWFJ’s Movie of the Week The Persian Version and Noora Niasari’s Shayda.

Other festival highlights included a women filmmakers lunch hosted by Saks Fifth Avenue, with each table named for a female movie star, and a panel of entertainment writers predicting the awards season.

The featured films included:

Nyad, presented by screenwriter Julia Cox, is based on the remarkable true story of distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida on her fifth attempt, at age 64. Annette Bening in the title role gives a performance of endless vitality and courage, and Jodie Foster is outstanding as Nyad’s quieter, concerned best friend and coach.

Shayda is Niaseri’s re-visiting of her experience as a six-year-old, in an Australian women’s shelter. Her family had come from Iran so her father could study there, but when he became abusive, her mother found a safe place for them to stay.

I conducted a conversation with Niaseri following the film. She said she asked her mother to write a memoir of that time “to fill in those gaps” of what she did not understand and what was kept from her as a child. “She spent six months on it and we cried a lot together and had a lot of difficult conversations but she gave me that gift. I learned so much about my grandmother, our family, the hardships she went through. It was like uncovering the issue.” Asked what she learned from making documentaries that helped her with her first narrative feature, she said, “observing and letting things play out. That is how I am with actors. I don’t like to dictate; I give them a framework and sometimes they surprise me or challenge me. Listening, observing, letting things play out is very much from my experience making documentaries.” I noted that Leah Purcell, who plays a key figure in the film, is also a writer/director who made a film about her maternal ancestor, The Legend of Molly Johnson. It took her a year to find Selina Zahednia, the six-year-old girl who played her character. “She just walked in with this charisma and spring in her step and confidence – which I never had as a child! She was kind of the opposite of me. She was full of joy and did not have the trauma like that in the film.” She said she went “to great, great lengths” to protect the young actor. “In a way I was protecting my inner child.”

Dream Scenario stars Nicolas Cage as a mild-mannered professor who somehow starts appearing in dreams of thousands of people, even those who have never met him. Julianne Nicholson, always so wonderfully precise and vulnerable in her performances, plays his wife, and Michael Cera is outstanding as head of a viral marketing firm called Thoughts.

American Fiction, based on the novel Erasure, by Percival Everett, is sure to be one of the most talked-about films of the year. It is a brilliant directorial debut from Cord Jefferson (a writer on Succession, Watchman, Master of None), who also wrote the excoriatingly satiric screenplay. Jeffrey Wright has one of his best roles as a literature professor whose novel written in a heightened voice of a stereotypical Black criminal as a joke is taken seriously by the white literary establishment. The cast includes exceptional work from Sterling K. Brown and Tracy Ellis Ross as his siblings, Leslie Uggams as his mother, John Ortiz as his agent, and Erika Alexander, luminous as his girlfriend, a public defender.

All of Us Strangers is a heartbreaking love story, not just romantic love but also love for family. Andrew Scott is Adam, a lonely writer still devastated by the loss of his parents, who were killed in a car crash when he was 11. As he is beginning to write about them, he meets Harry (Paul Mescal) and they begin to have a relationship. Somehow, Adam finds a way to return to his childhood home, which is unchanged, his parents still there as he left them, and he is able to tell them about himself in a way he could not before they died.

Maestro is the story of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, played by Bradley Cooper, who also wrote, directed, and produced. It does not pretend to be a straight bio-pic of Bernstein’s extraordinary career. Instead, it focuses on his decades-long love story with his wife, Felicia, a gorgeous performance by Carey Mulligan. They adored each other and their three children. They hurt each other deeply. Exceptionally cinematic storytelling and skillful use of Bernstein’s music as the score make it both epic and intimate.

The Lady Bird Diaries is a documentary about the woman who was handed a tape recorder as she moved into the White House following the death of President Kennedy. To hear her story in her voice, always honest, thoughtful, and utterly dedicated to her family and the American people, is extremely moving, and the selection of archival footage to illuminate her memories is outstanding.

The Holdovers reunites director Alexander Payne with his “Sideways” star Paul Giamatti, who plays a teacher of classics at a boys’ boarding school in 1969, disliked by the students and faculty. He is ordered to stay on at the school over the Christmas holidays with the boys who could not go home to their families, alone with just the janitor and head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the relationships evolve and adventures occur. The cast is superb, including newcomer Dominic Sessa as the brightest and bitterest student.