Coming up in Philly film: Festivals and major repertory roll

The indie film community in Philadelphia appears to be in a full-blown renaissance as May brings a third consecutive month with multiple film festivals and major repertory retrospectives around town.

Philadelphia Independent Film Festival (PIFF) returns for its 11th season at the Gershman Y, May 2 through 5. Boasting more than sixty independent features, shorts, music videos, and animation from filmmakers nationwide and abroad, the festival will also include web series for the first time this year. Of particular interest is the Philadelphia premiere of musical documentary short Dangerous Crossings. Using song to describe the perilous journey that African refugees take through the Red Sea to reach Yemen, which is also in crisis, the film is part of a United Nations campaign to bring awareness to their plight. Several of the filmmakers and artists featured in the film are expected in attendance for a Q&A after the 4:20pm screening on Saturday, May 5.

Another highlight of the festival: filmmaker workshops on Friday, May 4, at 3:30pm and 5pm, covering strategies for crowdfunding and how to pitch a story. Led by representatives from film-specific crowdfunding platform Seed & Spark, the workshops are free and open to the public, located in the PIFF Filmmakers Lounge (downstairs at the Gershman Y). Look online for tickets and the full schedule.

eX-Fest and Sumatra

On Saturday, May 5, Exhumed Films returns to the Lightbox Film Center to host eX-Fest, Part VIII — their annual 12-hour marathon of exploitation films, promising a wide array of genres spanning spaghetti Western, kung fu, blaxploitation, and more, starting at 11am. The titles will be kept secret until each film is projected, with all films screened from their original 35mm prints. Tickets ($25 for Lightbox members; $35 general admission) are likely to sell out.

If short-format content is more your pace, Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival will be hosting a free community screening at the Indonesian Philadelphia Praise Center (1701 McKean Street) on Saturday, May 5. Starting at 5pm with a screening of Ahu Parmalim, an intimate, short documentary portrait of a rapidly developing village on the rural Indonesian island of Sumatra, filmmakers will be in attendance for a Q&A followed by a sampling of North Sumatran cuisine prepared by Chef Beth Yu of Sky Café.

Love and baseball

Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival continues its weekly spring showcase with films on the first two Mondays of May. On May 7, check out French-Belgian co-production Mr. & Mrs. Adelman, a Francophone dramedy about love, lust, and infidelity in four decades of marriage. It screens at 7pm at Ritz East, with Swarthmore College associate professor of French Carina Yervasi introducing the film (tickets cost $13 to 15; free for students with a valid ID).

The following Monday, May 14, check out the series closer Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel, a feature documentary about the Israeli national baseball team as they competed in the 2017 World Baseball Classic for the first time in history. Hosted at National Museum of American Jewish History, the film will screen twice that evening. Pre-sale tickets for the 5:30pm showing ($15) are still available, but the 8pm screening ($20; including a post-film panel discussion and reception) is currently sold out, with a night-of rush line if you want to try your luck in person.

Finally, Lightbox Film Center’s May program will include a five-film retrospective of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, a seminal figure in the Cinema Novo movement that transformed Brazilian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Spanning May 12 through 25, each of the films will screen from 35mm prints, with tickets ranging from $8 to $10. My pick of the series is Andrade’s 1966 debut feature, The Priest and the Girl, about a young priest torn between his faith and love for a beautiful girl in his small village parish, screening Thursday, May 17, at 7pm.

Above: 'The Priest and the Girl' screens at Lightbox on May 17. (Image via IMDB.)