Virginia Film Festival 2013

Overview

Kluge-Ruhe brought two films by Indigenous filmmakers to the 2013 Virginia Film Festival: an Australian Aboriginal drama about a boy who saves his home and an Inuit film about family and brokenness. Writer/director/producer Catriona McKenzie accompanied her film at the screening for a Q & A. Artist Sam Welty created the mural featured in the video below on the Community Chalkboard in Charlottesville, Virginia to promote the screenings.

For Family Day, Kluge-Ruhe partnered with the UVA School of Architecture to offer a full-day workshop called “Dreaming in Animation” for middle school students to use Pixar-style animation software. Each middle school participant was mentored by a UVA student and taught the basics of Autodesk Maya, a comprehensive 3D software program. Each mentor-mentee pair created a character for an Aboriginal Dreaming story about Jiddelek, a frog who drinks all the water in Australia.

About the Partners

Catriona McKenzie

Doris Paton

UVA School of Architecture

Sam Welty

Featured Films

In Satellite Boy, Pete lives with his grandfather in an old abandoned outdoor cinema in the desert. When the old drive-in is threatened with demolition, ten year old Pete takes off to the city with his best mate Kalmain, to save his home. But the boys get lost in the Australian outback. Starving and thirsty, Pete has to remember some of the old bush skills his grandfather taught him to survive. Finally Pete and Kalmain reach the city, they save the old cinema and return home as heroes.

Uvanga is a story about Anna, who becomes nervous when she and her son, Tomas, arrive in the small, close-knit community of Igloolik, in the Canadian Arctic so she can reconnect him with his father.