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 The media landscape continues to change rapidly around us, and the Mill Valley Film Festival continues to change with it. Since 1978, the Festival has kept pace with the demand for great films in a vibrant social setting that brings together audiences and filmmakers in a shared love for the medium and its limitless potential for informing and shaping our lives.
As a proud part of Bay Area and film culture at large, MVFF has reveled in its role as trusted curator of fine films, expanding to meet the needs of our audiences year-round with the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, the purchase of the historic Sequoia Theater in 2008 and, now, with our own distribution arm, which launched in 2010 with festival favorite Touching Home (2008) by Marin County’s own Logan and Noah Miller.
With CFI Releasing, we at the California Film Institute are doing our part to address the needs of filmmakers and film lovers in a changing market. We strive to stay out in front of the economic and technological currents affecting film exhibition and distribution. We may not know exactly what the future will bring, but rest assured we’ll be there when it unfolds.
For us, meanwhile, a film festival remains a place for film lovers and makers to gather, and a place for introducing our community to extraordinary but perhaps otherwise difficult-to-find films. Over the next 11 days, our audiences will choose from a broad range of 143 fiction and non-fiction films — 82 features and 61 shorts, representing 46 countries and 32 premieres — in addition to an array of panels, workshops, special programs, Spotlights and Tributes. Taken together, these films reflect both the wonderful diversity of our world as well as the universality of our most basic human values.
This year’s Festival opens with two remarkable dramas based on true stories: Conviction (starring Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell) and The King’s Speech (starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush). While their subjects couldn’t be further apart, both offer poignant examples of perseverance and accomplishment by persons facing life-altering challenges.
Closing Night features a special screening of The Debt — a thriller about a retired Mossad agent (played by 2006 MVFF Tributee Helen Mirren) plagued by a secret she has kept since a young woman (a role played by the glamorous and rising star, Jessica Chastain, who will be joining us). The party afterward is at Kerner Studios, one time home of Industrial Light and Magic. (And speaking of George Lucas, the Festival pulls out all the stops for a family-friendly 30th-anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back.)
Our Centerpiece film, Miral, is a moving and important look at the Israel-Palestine conflict from the perspective of a Palestinian woman, and comes to us from acclaimed director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and The Butterfly). We also offer Shlomi Eldar’s Precious Life, a documentary that follows a Palestinian family and an Israeli medical team trying to save a critically ill infant during the larger crisis in Gaza: a very different film, yet one that shares with Miral the potent desire for reconciliation and understanding.
Film’s power as a tool for education and social activism as well as entertainment remains central to MVFF’s vision. Our Active Cinema films inform and awaken us, challenging audiences to engage the most pressing issues of our time. One example is what acclaimed Scandinavian filmmaker Stefan Jarl calls his most important film ever, Submission, about the physiological and environmental impact of our chemical society. Submission has become a talking point in Sweden’s upcoming election, and has even been scooped up by the United Nations for a major international symposium in New York on hazardous chemicals and waste. Such is the power of film in the shaping of our discourse, politics and planet.
We take great pride in showcasing the unique sensibilities, concerns and talent of our Bay Area filmmaking community. This year, choose from 21 films by Bay Area artists.
Our much beloved Children’s FilmFest is back with a slate of whimsical and affirming family films that include EEP!, Twigson and The Crocodiles. These films unite the entire family, and advance the Festival’s goal of being a truly community-wide undertaking. New this year: Check out our Flex Pass!
This year the Festival proudly salutes two outstanding actors with Tributes: the inimitable Annette Bening, a three-time Academy Award–nominated actress with roots here in the Bay Area; and the astonishingly versatile Edward Norton, himself with two Academy nods to date, who will be on-hand with his latest film, Stone.
Our Spotlight program, meanwhile, honors (and welcomes back to MVFF) renowned Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, Babel) and presents his brilliant new work, Biutiful. Our second Spotlight honoree is the supremely talented James Franco, who appears in two Festival offerings, William Vincent, and 127 Hours, the latest from Academy Award–winning director Danny Boyle (whose Slumdog Millionaire screened at MVFF in 2008).
As always, I would like to extend thanks to everyone who has helped make our 33rd MVFF possible, including our generous donors and sponsors, dedicated staff, Board of Directors, hard-working volunteers and, last but never least, the outstanding artists whose work gives us all so much.
MARK FISHKIN
MVFF Founder-Director | 
