newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — In James Stugart’s 3-minute Claymation film “Anger,” an indistinct figure struggles to enter a room with undulating walls and a frustratingly hard-to-open door. He turns red with rage and tries to break in, with undesirable consequences.

Organizers for this year’s Fairbanks Film Festival showed Stugart’s piece at Pioneer Park on Sunday. The culture on display through the films including “Anger” — a work done, as festival organizers put it, in the tradition of Czech animation — contrast with the authentic, old-time-Fairbanks feel of the park and its cracking wood shingles and historic railroad car and steamboat.

The film festival, in its third year, is an offshoot of a cinema committee at the Fairbanks Arts Association, which hosts the annual festival.

“And it’s getting better every year,” John Kohler, a member of the Alaska State Council on the Arts, told the crowd at Sunday night’s festival showing. “The bar just keeps getting raised.”

The festival serves as one sign of the creative filmmaking energy in Fairbanks. Alaska has other film festivals — Pioneer Park also plays host to the Far North Conservation Film Festival — but, of those, festival veteran Katie Pride said, the Fairbanks Film Festival’s “homegrown” use of only Alaska-based films could help filmmakers here develop a niche in the larger marketplace of independent films.

Not to suggest filmmaking in Alaska is neglected. Gov. Sarah Palin recently signed a bill to create an Alaska Film Office, which would set up incentives to attract film companies to the state. And assistant professor Maya Salganek said the University of Alaska Fairbanks is roughing out plans for the first film degree in the state.

As a work of Claymation, the fine-tuning at work in “Anger,” like the other award-winners shown Sunday, displays a level of technical skill notable for a group of filmmakers consisting largely of students and amateurs.

The Arts Association has added more film and performance events to its visual- and literary-heavy schedule in recent years after receiving a grant from the Fairbanks North Star Borough. Tatiana Piatanova, a program director at the association, said the festival is the only such juried event in Alaska that limits itself to in-state submissions. And Pride, a judge at this year’s event, suggested the work submitted in Fairbanks is often stronger than what is screened at major festivals outside the state.

“That,” she said, “will help it grow and be unique and diverse.”

The association is restarting its classic film series this fall, beginning Oct. 23 with Orson Welles’ “‘F’ For Fake.”