The International Monarch Film Festival, the Pacific Grove-based indie film fest founded by wife-and-husband team Cristiana DiPietro and Matthew Kalamane, turns 5 this year. And it’s showing its maturity.
It began in 2012 as a mid-week, two-day affair, occupying Wednesday and Thursday at Lighthouse Cinemas. It’s since moved up to a better time slot, now stretching out its 10 local and 24 international films across Thursday, Friday and Saturday, this Dec. 8-10.
“That seems to make a huge difference in our attendance,” DiPietro writes via email. She also notes that the previous five years have taught the team the finer points of running the floor, receptions, projectors and Q&As. Because they juggle three theaters projecting films at the same time, DiPietro says they’re being more mindful of the timing of showings.
Otherwise, it’s the familiar film festival we’ve come to know, broken down into multiple categories: documentary, local short, feature narrative, short narrative, student narrative, student short and, new this year, a block of CSU Monterey Bay Capstone films. Many of the films are accompanied by filmmaker Q&As.
Local feature film Monarch of Evening Time; A Living Poem by Johnny X Rook (5:40pm Thu, 3:50pm Sat), based on the poetry of Bryant L. Clifford, seemingly has everything thrown into its surreal mix: a band, mermaids, squirrels, mirrors, fire, an Andy Warhol wig, multiple locations, gold body paint. It might be easier to say what isn’t in the film. It played at Osio Theater recently and returns to boggle minds at the Monarch Film Fest.
The new CSUMB Capstone block of Cinematic Arts Department films (5pm Fri, 4:20pm Sat) reprises last year’s crop of students’ capstone shorts, including Solitude by Travis Robinson, about a man’s efforts to rally other homeless people like him to resist a Salinas ordinance that seeks to keep them uprooted. Grandma’s Card Night by Rose Mercurio, is an animated piece about two little girls who “cause mischief during their grandma’s card night with Death.”
The films come from more distant shores, too. “We get to watch films from everywhere – all over the world,” DiPietro says. “That experience is precious and gives us perspective.”
Like the perspective that comes from a documentary like Mele Murals by Tadashi Nakamura (5:15pm Fri, 5:40pm Sat). It looks like it can be a real-life companion piece to the Disney animated film Moana. It’s about two revered Hawaiian graffiti artists, Estria Miyashiro and John “Prime” Hina, using walls, spray cans and hip-hop culture to deliver deep troves of Hawaiian culture to kids from rural Waimea hungry to recapture their identities.
Choice of a Lifetime by Ethan Hill (12pm Sat) looks like a sweet, albeit blockier, Pixar animated short about a boy and a girl who court, graduate high school and marry, before life throws a curve ball. She’s pregnant, but he wants her to have an abortion.
That’s not very Pixar, but it does represent a kind of diversity of voices – in this case, a Christian voice subtly promoting a pro-life message – in that it shares the same room with Shen by Jace Alexander Casey and Abigail Flowers (12pm Sat), about a young woman who falls into a sexual fantasy mobius loop, and Don’t Tell Mom and Dad by Daniel Fieber and Cody Duvall (7:30pm Thu), about a teen boy coming out to his parents and friends.
DiPietro says she and her husband love running the festival for the visual storytelling, the way films allow audiences to inhabit the lives of other people.
“It’s very rewarding to hear the cheers after a film has finished playing and to see the pride on the filmmaker’s face from the projection room during the Q&A. You can’t beat that,” she says.
They say hard political times forge more activated and acute creative work from artists. It will be curious to see what filmmakers show up with next year, as they live through a year under a Donald Trump presidency. But DiPietro says that if she were to give a name to the overall theme in this year’s crop of films, the word would be hopeful.
“Although the subject matter of some of these films may seem morose, the underlying theme I’ve found is that collectively there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Hope. Catch it now at your local multiplex.
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