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<FONT FACE="Verdana"><B>This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...<BR>
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University of Idaho Women’s Center presents<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Lunafest<BR>
</H2></FONT><FONT SIZE="5">2006 Film Festival <BR>
</FONT>Proceeds will support scholarships for women.<BR>
<B>Thursday, March 23<BR>
7:00 PM<BR>
</B>$5/adult, $3/student or senior<BR>
<BR>
Doors open at 6:45, films start at 6:45.<BR>
Food provided by One World Cafe.<BR>
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<BR>
<B>An evening of bluegrass featuring<BR>
</B><FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Prairie Flyer &<BR>
Grangeville Bluegrass Co.<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>Friday, March 24<BR>
7:00 PM<BR>
</B>$12/adult, $8/child under 13<BR>
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<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Transamerica (R)<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>Saturday & Sunday, March 25 & 26<BR>
4:25 & 7:00 PM<BR>
</B>$5/adult<BR>
<BR>
Regular movie prices: $5/adult, $2/child 12 or younger<BR>
KFS series pass prices: $30/10 films, $75/30 films.<BR>
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!<BR>
<BR>
For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a schedule, visit www.kenworthy.org<BR>
<BR>
<B>Coming in April:</B> <I>Sirius Idaho Theatre</I> presents A Walk in the Woods & Collected Stories; The Celestine Prophecy; The Best of Youth; Cache; Why we Fight.<BR>
<B>* * *<BR>
Next week at the Kenworthy-<BR>
</B><BR>
University of Idaho presents<BR>
<H2>American Indian Film Festival<BR>
</H2><B>March 29 - April 1<BR>
</B><BR>
MOSCOW, Idaho “American Indian Activism and Leadership” is the theme of this year’s American Indian Film Festival hosted by the University of Idaho. <BR>
<BR>
The films selected for this year’s festival bring to light national and local issues and concerns, including dam removal, young tribe members struggle with pop-culture and American Indian leadership representation. <BR>
<BR>
The four day festival begins March 29 with ceremonial opening with remarks by Rebecca Miles, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe, and the first female elected chairman in the tribe’s history, and ends April 1 with a presentation by John Trudell, American Indian activist and actor. <BR>
<BR>
<B>The free films, partially funded by the Idaho Humanities Council, will be shown at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre at 7 p.m. each day, with panel discussions following the screening. <BR>
</B><BR>
The following is the film schedule with brief descriptions: <BR>
<BR>
<U>Wednesday <B>March 29<BR>
</B></U><B><BR>
</B>Film: “Thunderbird Woman-Winona LaDuke”<BR>
Filmed on the White Earth Reservation: A story of Winona LaDuke Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), a leading figure in the struggle for American Indian land rights and sovereignty, vice-presidential candidate, novelist, environmentalist, anti-nuclear activist and mother.<BR>
<BR>
Panel: American Indian women leaders and activists, including Rebecca Miles. <BR>
<BR>
<U>Thursday <B>March 30<BR>
</B></U><B><BR>
</B>Film: “Doing it?”<BR>
An abstinence-education documentary. Three Nez Perce high school students are influenced by the images and messages they see on television and want to find out if everyone is “doing it”. Filmed in Lapwai in March 2005, it was produced by Nez Perce Tribe Students for Success Program.<BR>
<BR>
Film: “Surviving Lewis and Clark: The Nimiipuu Story”<BR>
This documentary focuses on the contributions of the Nez Perce people to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Highlights the major events that have contributed to some of the social and economic difficulties in today’s Nez Perce homeland.<BR>
<BR>
Panel: Dialogue with filmmakers and actors<BR>
<BR>
<U>Friday <B>March 31<BR>
</B></U><B><BR>
</B>Film: “Unconquering the Last Frontier”<BR>
This documentary chronicles the Elwha Klallam Tribe’s struggle to survive in the midst of hydroelectric development in Washington. <BR>
<BR>
Film: “The Snowball effect”<BR>
Film explores the controversy surrounding the recently proposed ski resort expansion and snowmaking with wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks. American Indian tribal officials, spiritual leaders, Forest Service officials and concerned citizens discuss the issues of economic misconceptions, threats to the environment, global warming, sacred lands protection and public health concerns associated with groundbreaking studies on wastewater. <BR>
<BR>
Panel: Native Americans and non-Native Americans working with treaty rights, salmon preservation, sacred land, economic development and private property right issues.<BR>
<BR>
<U>Saturday <B>April 1</B></U><B> <BR>
<BR>
</B>5 p.m. - 8 p.m. UI Native American Student Association will be selling Indian tacos outside the Kenworthy. <BR>
<BR>
Film: “Trudell - The Movie”<BR>
A documentary about American Indian activist John Trudell, a poet, singer and powerful voice of the human spirit. His work began as an activist for American Indian rights and freedoms and was the national spokesperson during the Indians of All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969. He assisted in the formation of American Indian Movement (AIM) in the ‘70s and has appeared in several movies, including “Incident at Oglala,” “Thunderheart,” “On Deadly Ground” and “Smoke Signals.” <BR>
<BR>
Presentation / Question and answer: with John Trudell.<BR>
<BR>
Contacts: Katie Dahlinger, UI Communications and Marketing, (208) 885-7251, <FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><I><U>kdahlinger@uidaho.edu<BR>
</U></I></FONT><B>* * *<BR>
<BR>
This week’s movie review-<BR>
</B><BR>
<FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Transamerica<BR>
</H2></FONT><BR>
Written and directed by Duncan Tucker<BR>
Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has nudity and obscenities. <U>Advisory</U>: This film contains full frontal nudity, strong language, drug use and a false penis.<BR>
Running time: 103 minutes.<BR>
<BR>
<B>Academy Award Nomination</B>: Best Actress in a Leading Role: Felicity Huffman<BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by Mick LaSalle writing for the San Francisco Chronicle<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
"Transamerica" provides the frame and the occasion for one of the year's best performances, Felicity Huffman's as a woman trapped in a man's body who's passing for female while awaiting a sex-change operation. The film is not about the sex change but about an adventure that presents itself about a week before the operation: She finds out that she is a father and that her teenage son is in jail in New York.<BR>
<BR>
Though Huffman is not the only good thing in the movie, she brings so much to it and subtly enlivens it to the extent that it's difficult to imagine it without her. Her performance requires that she, in essence, play someone who is playing someone else. She is really Stanley, but she has become "Bree" thanks to a series of surgeries, a daily regime of hormones and rigorous self-discipline. She is rigid with control, consciously moderating her voice and tone and presenting only the facial expressions that she has mastered in the mirror. Huffman's shoulders carry the weight of a life spent being careful, so as to pass, so as to avoid getting beaten up, so as to avoid being treated like a freak.<BR>
<BR>
Significantly, Huffman does this across the sex divide. That's important to remember. She is a woman playing a man playing a woman, which requires that she not ease into playing the woman side of her own nature, even as she's playing a man who's doing everything he can to seem womanly. And that's just the beginning of what Huffman does. The gender ramifications are just part of the story.<BR>
<BR>
There's also the way Huffman depicts Bree reacting to her circumstances. This is a person of obvious intelligence, who is middle-aged and from a reasonably well-off family. Yet we see her working in menial jobs. What happened? Were there lost years? A drug problem? We never know, and yet again, that history is in Huffman's tense shoulders and her weary expression. She has the essence of someone who has gone through life as an alien, desperate to be known and yet hoping not to be noticed -- someone who at the same time has come into a certain self-knowledge and dignity, through mistakes and quiet suffering. This isn't critical fantasizing. This is all in the way Huffman looks, talks and moves, and she's extraordinary.<BR>
<BR>
What's more, it comes as a relief to find this performance in such a relaxed, human film, and not a social polemic. For most of the way, "Transamerica" is a quirky comedy. <BR>
<BR>
The gulf between Bree's bizarre appearance and her church-lady manner and aspirations provides the source for much of the humor. But the movie is never mean to her. It's equally understanding of her family, including her horrified mother (Fionnula Flanagan) and rowdy, ne'er-do-well sister, who's played with self-deprecating wit by Carrie Preston. The film's intelligent compassion also extends to the son (Kevin Zegers, who is as handsome as the young Alain Delon). The son could have been just another aggrieved young wise guy, but instead we're aware of his real need for parental love.<BR>
<BR>
In American mythology, from Mark Twain's "Roughing It" through "Thelma & Louise," taking off on the open road has always been an occasion for self-discovery. While Bree is not the usual hero or heroine, the road has the same salutary effect on her, and it's interesting to watch Huffman register the progress of that inner transformation.<BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Times<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
"Transamerica" stars Felicity Huffman as a man who feels compelled to become a woman. The surgery is only a week away when Sabrina (Bree, for short) learns that 17 years ago she fathered a son. Margaret, her therapist, was under the impression that as a man named Stanley, her client was a virgin. "There was this one girl in college," Bree muses, "but the whole thing was so tragically lesbian I didn't think it counted." Well, it counts now: Margaret (Elizabeth Pena) insists that Bree must meet the son and come to terms with him before the final surgery.<BR>
<BR>
Bree reluctantly leaves Los Angeles and travels to New York to meet young Toby (Kevin Zegers), a brooding street hustler who wants to improve himself by becoming a porn star. This career choice is distressing to Bree, a ladylike middle-class conservative. Unwilling to reveal her real identity, Bree poses as a Christian caseworker who specializes in converting sex workers to Jesus. Toby agrees to drive back to L.A. with Bree, mostly because he needs the ride.<BR>
<BR>
By this point in the plot description, I have the attention of readers who fired off e-mails about "Brokeback Mountain," informing me that homosexuality was "a sin promoted by the liberal left." I responded that most people are gay or straight before they can talk, let alone vote. In any event, surely my correspondents would approve of those who go to the length of gender reassignment surgery to be sure their genitals match their orientation?<BR>
<BR>
My own impression is that most transgender people have little interest in homosexuality; if they did, they'd be "pre-op" forever. Bree seems to have had little sex of any kind, working two jobs as she does to save up for her operation. She's not a terrifically exciting person, dresses like Mary Worth, is terribly nice and needs to get out more. In the early stages of their automobile journey to Los Angeles she spends a lot of time correcting Toby's grammar.<BR>
<BR>
Toby: "I'd probably be, like, disemboweled by a Ninja."<BR>
<BR>
Bree: "You needn't say 'like.' Probably 'disemboweled by a Ninja' is sufficient."<BR>
<BR>
There is a quiet strain of humor throughout "Transamerica," but this is not so much a comedy as an observation about human nature. I am grateful to Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com for pointing out something I simply did not notice: The movie assumes a transsexual will be more welcome in a blue state than a red one, and that when a man is attracted to Bree, it is an American Indian named Calvin Two Goats (Graham Greene). "He's allowed to be open-minded," she writes, "because he's a Navajo -- in other words, a spiritually open-minded outsider, as opposed to your typical Middle American." (It is significant that Bree works in L.A. as a waitress in a Mexican-American diner; Mexicans, like Indians, apparently have a genetic tendency to open-mindedness.)<BR>
<BR>
The movie works, and it does work, because Felicity Huffman brings great empathy and tact to her performance as Bree. This is not a person who wants to make a big point about anything. She (we might as well recognize Bree's nature with the pronoun) has spent a lifetime living in a body that does not fit, and just when deliverance seems at hand, she is suddenly supplied with an ungrateful son. How ironic, as Wordsworth did not quite observe, that the mother is father to the child.<BR>
<BR>
That "Transamerica," written and directed by Duncan Tucker, works as a film is because Bree is so persistently and patiently herself. If she had been wilder, stranger, more extroverted, the movie might fly off the rails. It is precisely because she is so conventionally sincere that the movie gathers power in deep places while maintaining a relative surface calm. How does she respond to the undeniable interest of Calvin Two Goats? Reader, she blushes.<BR>
<BR>
This is all new for her, too. What Felicity Huffman brings to Bree is the newness of a Jane Austen heroine. She has been waiting a long time to be an ingénue, and what an irony that she must begin as a mother. But she is a good person to the bottom of her socks, and at the end of "Transamerica," you realize it was not about sex at all. It was about family values.<BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by A. O. Scott writing for the New York Times<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
To call Felicity Huffman's performance in "Transamerica" persuasive would be an understatement, as well as somewhat misleading. Her character, Bree (short for Sabrina), is a pre-operative transsexual who lives in a modest bungalow in Los Angeles and in a condition she refers to as "stealth." In other words, though still technically male, Bree passes for a woman, though there is nothing very stealthy about her elaborate, almost theatrical displays of femininity. In her tasteful pink outfits and meticulously applied makeup, she presents an image of womanliness that harks back to an earlier era. <BR>
<BR>
In this debut feature by Duncan Tucker, who wrote and directed it, "Transamerica" sets out to affirm Bree's dignity, to liberate her and others like her from any association with camp or freakishness. That the film succeeds without slipping too far into sentimentality or didacticism is in no small measure the result of Ms. Huffman's wit and grace. The challenge Ms. Huffman faces here is complicated: she must convey the layers of Bree's identity and the spaces between those layers. It is not just that the actress must play a man who is playing a woman - that much is a matter of technique (with some prosthetic assistance, to be sure) - but also that she must impersonate a performer in the midst of learning a complicated role. Her performance is a complex metamorphosis, and it is thrilling to watch.<BR>
<BR>
Mr. Tucker is a subtle and conscientious writer; he takes care to treat Bree as a person rather than a case study. Ms. Huffman carries herself with such sensitivity and authority that you never doubt Bree for an instant.<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2><BR>
</H2></FONT><I>Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart<BR>
<BR>
</I><B>* * *<BR>
<I>Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
</I>508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho<BR>
</B>208-882-4127<BR>
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by logging onto our website <BR>
<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U>http://www.kenworthy.org<BR>
<BR>
</U></FONT>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<BR>
PAMELA PALMER, <B>Volunteer<BR>
</B>Mailto:ppalmer@moscow.com<BR>
Film and Events Committee <BR>
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
<BR>
http://www.kenworthy.org<BR>
To speak with a KPAC staff member, <BR>
call (208) 882-4127<BR>
Mailto:kpac@moscow.com<BR>
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