RiverRun Film Festival Announces Lineup

The RiverRun International Film Festival returns to the Triad beginning April 4th.

The festival has been racking up accolades in recent years. USA Today listed it as “One of 10 Amazing Film Festivals Worth Traveling For.”

This year will feature a diverse collection of over 170 films.

WFDD's Neal Charnoff spoke with RiverRun Executive Director Rob Davis about the lineup.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

On the opening night documentary, This Changes Everything:

It's a really powerful film and it really centers on the issue of gender disparity in Hollywood in the present day, and it has a number of current stars, directors, individuals behind the scenes, speaking to this issue, where we are, where we need to be going.

On this year's Masters of Cinema honorees:

Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss will be here. They actually met when they were both acting students at Northwestern University, and Paula has had a very distinguished career acting for film, stage and television, and then Richard has had a very distinguished acting career, but then he became a film director, and he's actually directed some 20 feature films ... we're just delighted that they're going to be here to receive their awards. 

And then our 3rd Master of Cinema honoree is an industry leader, Mike Medavoy. Mike was at one time Senior V.P of Production at United Artists, but he also was a co-founder of Orion Pictures as well as Phoenix Pictures, where he currently is, and chairman of Tri-Star Pictures, and Mike in his career has been involved with over 300 films, and seven of those have won the Best Picture Academy Award.

On the importance of film festivals in the age of streaming:

RiverRun gives you the chance to see [the film] on the big screen, the way it was meant to be seen. And second, we take great pride in the number of filmmakers that we bring to the festival to engage with our audiences in Q and As after the screenings ... and I think that the ability to talk with the filmmaker and really investigate and learn about his or her role in developing the film and how the story got to the screen, that's just an amazing experience.