Indie Focus: Making sure the Anaheim International Film Festival is no Mickey Mouse operation

When talking about the world’s most prestigious film festivals, a few names immediately spring to mind: Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, Sundance. Even smaller, regionally focused events like those in Seattle and Sarasota, Fla., have made their mark on a crowded circuit. One location that hasn’t appeared on the map is Anaheim.

But Jo Moulton, executive director of the Anaheim International Film Festival, is hoping to bring serious film culture to an area heavy on multiplexes. The festival, which runs Wednesday to Oct. 17, also marks the first programmed by the team of Festworks, a company of film fest professionals that was founded after key contributors left the Los Angeles-based AFI Fest early this year.

“I just assumed that Anaheim had a film festival,” said Moulton, who has a long-standing relationship with both the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Temecula Valley International Film and Music Festival.

Actor Josh Bednarsky initially approached Moulton about creating an Anaheim-centered festival — “I really did not give him the time of day,” Moulton said of their first meeting. But the persistent Bednarsky attracted interest from local businesses and the city, and found a venue. At that point, Moulton took the reins, bringing in much of the operations staff she uses at other festivals and contacting the Festworks team to help establish the event.

With headquarters at the UltraStar Cinemas at the Anaheim GardenWalk shopping center, the festival will use seven of the theater’s 14 screens, with rooms ranging in size roughly from 50 to 300 seats. The festival will screen 127 features and short films.

In an unusual move, the opening night will include five feature film screenings: “Wild Target,” directed by Jonathan Lynn and starring Bill Nighy, Rupert Grint and Emily Blunt; the documentary “Monica & David,” the sports film “Going Vertical: The Shortboard Revolution,” the Japanese animated film “Summer Wars” and John Hughes’ teen classic “Sixteen Candles.”

The festival will feature a competition section, an animation section, a selection of sports films, a cult section, films devoted to new media, documentaries and a group of international festival highlights. “Inhale,” directed by Baltasar Kormakur and starring Dermot Mulroney and Diane Kruger, will serve as the closing night film, and Lynn and actor Hector Elizondo will receive inaugural Anaheim Film Honors.

“If you’re not a festival that has the stature of staging world premieres,” said Robert Koehler, a founding member of the Festworks team and programming consultant for Anaheim, “what you really should do is seek out excellent films that have a good, solid festival pedigree, so you bring the audience a flavor of what the festival circuit year was like.”

Koehler and AIFF director of programming Matt Bolish say the event will also give moviegoers the opportunity to catch up with certain titles that have been screened in Southern California but might have been overlooked. Alejandro Adams’ “Canary,” the bee documentary “Colony,” the Russian stop-motion animated film “The Ugly Duckling” and the South Korean film “I’m in Trouble” were all highlighted by the programming team as ripe for rediscovery.

The Festworks team also has its second festival, in Santa Fe, N.M., opening only a week after Anaheim. Koehler is quick to note that each program has been tailored to the needs of its community.

“The necessities of Santa Fe are completely different from Anaheim,” said Koehler. “That festival has a history, so they do know the nature of their audience.”

“I think we’ve created a program that’s … broad by design and I think it has to be as the festival defines its voice,” added Bolish of the lineup for the first Anaheim fest. “For all we know, we’ll have a cinephile audience lined up around the block or maybe we need more Chilean action films. We don’t know.”

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