Wineries Uncork a Film Fest

There are international film festivals (Cannes, Berlin), national film festivals (Chicago, Los Angeles) and there are local film festivals. Very local.

On a cloudless, breezy Saturday morning, a knot of two or three dozen people, sitting on blankets or folding chairs, are gathered in one corner of Petaluma’s pretty, shady Walnut Park to discuss screenwriting. Petaluma also hosts the national wrist-wrestling championship and a celebrated ugly dog contest; the movies fit right in.

Elsewhere in the park, a local cycle club is gathering for its weekly sprint; kids are playing, dogs are chasing about, drifters with bedrolls are catching some sun-warmed Zs.

An oil-cloth banner stretched between trees declares the third annual Wine Country Film Festival to be in session. The other park people are regarding the film folk with benign indifference.

Local film festivals survive, if they do, on volunteerism, forgiveness and an indefatigable love of the movies on the part of participants and consumers. Survival is not easy. After two seasons, the Monterey Film Festival drowned last year in a sea of red ink reportedly $250,000 deep.

The Wine Country festival, organized by Steven Ashton and partially funded by a coalition of local wineries, operates on a shoestring that is frayed even as shoestrings go. A local paper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat last week reported grumblings of discontent from firms that supported the festival previously but, for various reasons, no longer do, or will. There are moments when the festival appears to proceed by improvisation, loping from crisis to crisis.

But, with continuing support from American Airlines, the Red Lion Inn and other suppliers as well as the wineries, the festival manages to do what a local festival ought to do, which is bring to town films and videos that, for the most part, would not otherwise be visible within miles, maybe hundreds of miles.

This year’s festival was evenly divided between Healdsburg, where the excellent, imaginatively programmed Raven Theatre was the principal venue, and Petaluma, where the Palace Theatre, which had been dark in recent weeks, was the major site.

The offerings were as varied as “When Harry Met Sally . . .,” the current hit that was the opening-night film, and “Bloodhounds of Broadway,” the closing film, which is based on some Damon Runyon short stories and stars Rutger Hauer and Julie Hagerty in a large cast. “Bloodhounds,” made on a minimal budget, is said to have been the last project OK’d by David Puttnam before he left Columbia. The studio’s release plans for it are still uncertain.

The other offerings included “sex, lies and videotapes,” the smash success and Gold Palm winner at Cannes, and “The Raggedy Rawney,” the remarkable anti-war fable that Bob Hoskins (“Pennies From Heaven”) wrote and directed and in which he acts.

The luminous guests included Michael York, who came with “Heat of the Day,” a World War II thriller in which he stars with Peggy Ashcroft, Patricia Hodge and Michael Gambon (“The Singing Detective”). Oscar-nominee Sally Kirkland gave a very lively acting workshop that even attracted Petaluma’s peppy mayor, M. Patricia Hilligoss, who in one of the exercises was persuaded to sing “On a Clear Day” as if she were Barbra Streisand. It was a smash.

Lynn Redgrave appeared with “Death of a Son,” a co-production she did for BBC television, which aired it early in the year to phenomenal ratings, and Center Films, which is still negotiating for American distribution.

It is based on the true story of Pauline Williams, whose son died of a drug injection administered by a user-pusher friend. The government refused to prosecute. After a four-year struggle, Williams, who had never finished the equivalent of high school, amassed enough medical lore to discover an error in the inquest findings and launch Britain’s first successful private prosecution for manslaughter.

Williams was slashed by a drug-thug for her efforts but has become a national heroine. Redgrave’s performance is beyond question her most unforgettable since “Georgy Girl” nearly a quarter-century ago. Home from the inquest, she stands at the kitchen stove, back to the camera, moaning like a wounded animal.

It a moment of extraordinary intensity; it is also the bottom of an arc that takes her from black defeat, despair, anger, rising curiosity, frustration (always frustration), renewed determination and a damn-the-bureaucrats drive and that leads ultimately to triumphs tentative and then total.

“Death of a Son” is a first feature for director Ross Devenish and scriptwriter Tony Marchant, and I hope it finds its way to American audiences because it has the doubled power of reality as art; and it affirms, from reality, the scarce but welcome truth that one person can still make a difference.

Whatever its financial and administrative problems, a festival, if it works at all, is its own kind of affirmation of the impact and the rewards of film.