Ashland Independent Film Festival Plans Biggest Academy Awards Party In S. Oregon Ashland... Ashland Independent Film Festiva

Ashland, Oregon - A 'red carpet' is only literally rolled out once a year in Ashland - for the Ashland Independent Film Festival's Oscar® Night Gala. Limousines will be rare and the celebrities less known, but the AIFF's annual Academy Awards® party at the Historic Ashland Armory, March 5 will be broadcast on two 30-foot screens in stereo sound. The evening will also feature a Mediterranean dinner from Pilaf and Primavera Catering, gourmet dessert, Southern Oregon wines and an Oscar ballot with the most correct answers winning a VIP pass to this year's festival.

The full slate of films for the 2006 festival has not been revealed yet as the staff is awaiting word on a few final selections. The final Oscar nominated film, the documentary feature Street Fight, was just confirmed Friday night.

"We are thrilled to have six of the nine Academy Award nominated documentaries in our upcoming festival," says Tom Olbrich, Executive Director of the AIFF. "Our first four years the most we had was ONE nominated film, so to have six and already have presented a seventh is a huge step forward for us - we have a great chance of having two winners to celebrate on March 5."

Now in its fifth season, the Ashland Independent Film Festival has evolved from humble beginnings to a critically acclaimed showcase. "It is a coup - an astonishing event. I felt Ashland was just as exciting for a film festival as Park City," said Jeannette Paulson Hereniko, a visiting filmmaker and Founding Director Hawaii and Palm Springs International Film Festivals.

"The Ashland Film Festival is well on its way to being one of my favorite American film festivals, period" said Ernest Hardy of the LA Weekly. "It's the almost perfect blend of programming, audience and location. They have an especially strong documentary section, and the locals -- politically savvy, largely progressive politically -- help create a rich, satisfying vibe in which to watch the films. And it's a gorgeous place to visit."

Last year the AIFF attracted record attendance, with two-thirds of the showings sold-out and over 90% capacity. 81 films have been selected for this year's festival, being held April 6-10, featuring world premiere screenings. The 2006 line-up includes a mixture of short and full length documentaries and feature films, student works, animation and more. This year's non-profit festival includes The Launch, a film competition with entries from local students.

AIFF's reputation continues to spread rapidly in the film industry, as films showcased early here have go on to receive national attention (What The #$*! Do We Know? and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill are two recent examples). An unprecedented nearly 700 entries from filmmakers from around the world were entered into this year's festival competition.

Three of the 2006 festival's selections were among the five nominated in the feature Best Feature Documentary Category: Street Fight, Darwin's Nightmare and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The aiff feature another nominee, Murderball, in a special screening in October of 2005.

In the Best Documentary Short Subject, the festival's selections include three of the four nominated. At the 2006 AIFF will be The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club, A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin and God Sleeps in Rwanda.

Directed by Alex Gibney, ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room is the inside story of one of history's greatest business scandals, in which top executives of America's 7th largest company walked away with over one billion dollars while investors and employees lost everything. Based on the best-selling book The Smartest Guys in the Room by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind and featuring insider accounts and incendiary corporate audio and videotapes, Gibney reveals the almost unimaginable personal excesses of the Enron hierarchy and the utter moral vacuum that posed as corporate philosophy.

The film comes to a harrowing dénouement as we hear Enron traders' own voices as they wring hundreds of millions of dollars in profits out of the California energy crisis. As a result, we come to understand how the avarice of Enron's traders and their bosses had a shocking and profound domino effect that may shape the face of our economy for years to come. ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room was nominated for the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards Best Documentary, the 2005 International Documentary Association's Best Documentary and the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize.

Darwin's Nightmare is a clear-eyed examination of the underbelly of Globalization and was named Best Documentary at the American Film Institute/Discovery Channel SilverDocs Festival and the European Film Awards. Feeling more like sci-fi/horror than documentary, the film is the stranger-than-fiction tale of two relentless killing machines: the Nile Perch which, over the course of a few decades, ate through everything that used to live in Tanzania's Lake Victoria; and the foreign capitalists who introduced that non-native fish in order to sell it to European consumers.

In a Darwinian sense the 'good system' won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them. In Darwin's Nightmare, I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this 'fittest' animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order.

The Death of Kevin Carter Each day Kevin Carter, left the security of white South African suburbia to capture nightmarish images that provoked outrage and contributed to the global condemnation of apartheid. Yet Kevin's most evocative image came from Sudan where he photographed a starving girl being stalked by a vulture. Back in Johannesburg, Kevin rejoiced as Nelson Mandela was elected president, but he soon found himself haunted by the decisions he made as a photojournalist¿and as a human being. Winning the Pulitzer Prize was vindication that his work had been worthwhile, but it did little to ease Kevin's torment.

Only weeks after being bestowed with the honor, Kevin carried out a terrible act of desperation¿an act that, 10 years later, seems to embody the anguish of an entire nation: whether to be a witness or a savior.

Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin On the evening of VE Day, May 5th, 1945, Norman Corwin presented a radio program which galvanized and electrified the nation. The broadcast, On a Note of Triumph, marked the end of a long national struggle. Today, Corwin is 93 years old and teaching a regular schedule of classes at USC. Although he has always had his admirers and still collects a regular steady stream of honors, few outside the radio industry are familiar with this visionary from the 'Golden Age of Radio'.

This film recounts the course of On A Note of Triumph, demonstrating the lasting effect it has had on our culture. It also takes a close look at a man who continues to hold the banner for a rare mix of high journalistic standards and artistry.

God Sleeps In Rwanda is narrated by Rosario Dawson of Rent and Sin City fame. In the 1994 Rwandan genocide as many as 1 million lost their lives in 100 days. With the focus of killing on men, the country was left nearly 70% female. This handed Rwanda's women an extraordinary burden and an unprecedented opportunity. Stepping into roles traditionally held by men Rwandan women changed their world. In a culture that historically prohibited women from performing even the most rudimentary of tasks, they are now becoming heads of households and business owners, mayors, legislators and ministers of state.

The movement is not just political but also deeply personal. The film won the Best Short Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Golden Gate award for best of documentaries, shorts, animation and others at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Street Fight chronicles the bare-knuckles race for mayor of Newark, N.J. between Cory Booker, a 32-year old Rhodes Scholar/Yale Law School grad, and Sharpe James, the four-term incumbent twice his age. The film follows Booker as he campaigns through Newark's housing projects and squares off against an old-style political machine - the kind now vanished from most of America - which uses police and code inspectors to crush opponents. By election day, the climate becomes so heated that the Federal government is forced to send in observers to watch for cheating and violence.

The battle sheds light on important American questions about democracy, poverty and - perhaps most important - race. In a surprising twist for an election between two African-Americans, the mayor accuses Booker of not being "really black," causing voters to examine how we define race in this country. "We tell our children to get educated," one Newarker says, "and when they do, we call them white. What kind of a message does that send?" Street Fight tells a story of democracy that is very different from those stories presented in campaign films like The War Room or Journeys with George.

In Newark, elections are not about spin-doctors and media consultants staging photo ops. In Newark, it is said, elections are won and lost in the streets.

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