Film Festival Drew Bigger Cast of Thousands

The fledgling Newport Beach Film Festival appears to have broken even this year while expanding its audience, organizers say.

Gregg M. Schwenk, festival director, said attendance was about 17,000 for the 56 feature screenings and 14 programs of short films that made up the festival. That was about 2,000 more than last year’s inaugural event.

“It exceeded our expectations; we’re very pleased,” Schwenk said Friday. The eight-day event, at Edwards Island Cinemas in Fashion Island, ended Thursday.

More telling for the festival’s future than the immediate attendance and budget numbers, Schwenk said, will be the reaction of prospective individual and corporate donors who attended and are deciding whether to be backers.

“Money is the only factor that limits the growth and sophistication” of the festival, Schwenk said. “We will know more in about a week or two” whether some of the donations will materialize, he added. The festival budget was $500,000, including about $100,000 in cash and the rest in donated goods and services.

Schwenk already is thinking of expanding some offerings next year, especially the series of free seminars with professionals that were held last weekend at the Newport Beach Public Library. The screenwriting panel, which included “Gladiator” Oscar winner David Franzoni, drew a turn-away crowd, organizers said.

On the artistic side, the big winner was “Making Love” (Canone Inverso), an Italian-made film in English starring Gabriel Byrne. It swept both the jury and audience awards for best feature. The film focuses on the emotional connections that Byrne, portraying a violinist, forges through his music.

“Hopefully, [the awards] will lead to some word of mouth and we’ll get distribution so people will be able to see it,” said Paula Kahlenberg, a Los Angeles-based representative of producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori. She said the Newport Beach showing has led to one upcoming meeting with a distributor.

The other double winner was film and TV star Rob Morrow (“Quiz Show,” “Northern Exposure”), who took best director and best screenplay awards for “Maze,” his first feature as a filmmaker. Morrow also plays the title role of Lyle Maze, a sculptor with Tourette’s Syndrome who becomes involved in an emotionally thorny love triangle. “Maze” previously reaped honors at the AFI International Film Festival in Los Angeles and the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.

“Keep the River on Your Right,” about a 78-year-old New Yorker who travels to the jungles of Indonesia and Peru to live with indigenous people, won the jurors’ award for best documentary. The audience award for documentary was “Amargosa,” about a reclusive 76-year-old painter and dancer living in Death Valley.

“The Annihilation of Fish,” featuring James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave as aging eccentrics, won for cinematography.