The 35th Atlanta Film Festival will open with Azazel Jacobs’s "Terri," a delicate high school-set coming-of-age comedy starring John C. Reilly as a vice principal who helps an overweight boy embrace his outsiderness, and will include several world premieres among its slate of more than 125 films that will be screened April 28-May 7.
Other ATLFF highlights include the fest-closing "Africa United" from Debs Gardner-Paterson, a road movie through places where there aren't always roads, following a trio of soccer-mad Rwandan kids on a high-spirited, seven-country, 3,000-mile walk to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
As usual, the fest will include a wide array of narratives, documentaries, shorts and international films, with more than 100 filmmakers and industry professionals expected to appear at screenings. The titles, unspooling at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema, the Plaza Theatre and Lefont Sandy Springs, were selected from more than 1,500 submissions.
Also on the schedule:
- World premieres including Lisa Albright's "Coming Up Roses," starring Bernadette Peters as a troubled mom of two daughters who taps into the healing power of song; and Laura Newman's "We Are the Hartmans," starring Richard Chamberlain in a comedy about locals rallying to save a suburban Pennsylvania rock club.
- John Gray's "White Irish Drinkers," a drama about two brothers in 1975 who consider crime as a way out of their blue-collar Brooklyn neighborhood.
- Klim Shipenko's "Kto Ya?" -- a Russian-made drama-mystery.
- Justin Chadwick's "The First Grader," the story of a Kenyan villager and former freedom fighter who fights to go to school for the first time at age 84.
- Joni Steele Kimberlin's "Get Real! Wise Women Speak," a documentary on women working to improve the world in their golden years, featuring interviews with Jane Fonda, Della Reese and Nikki Giovanni.
- Celine Danhier's documentary "Blank City," exploring a wave of no-budget, do-it-yourself filmmaking in New York City in the late '70s through the early '80s.
The fest, second largest in Atlanta after the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, drew 15,000 last year. The full ATLFF slate will be announced soon at www.atlantafilmfestival.com. Tickets go on sale April 11.
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