By Colleen Creeden '02

Jonathan Demme with his Mid-Life Achievement Award at the 2002 Maine International Film Festival in Waterville.

It's day six of the fifth annual Maine International Film Festival, and festival programmer and Railroad Square Cinema partner Ken Eisen '73 leads a caravan of cars out of the dusty theater parking lot to a dinner party at his home in Fairfield. Eisen occasionally turns to chat with his passenger and dinner guest, who is in town to receive the Mid-Life Achievement Award later that night at the Waterville Opera House.

The guest: Oscar Award-winning director, producer and screenwriter Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Something Wild, Stop Making Sense). Unlikely company in Central Maine? Perhaps, but in Waterville, where Demme chatted at length with filmgoers after the U.S. premiere of his new documentary, The Agronomist, nobody acted star struck. In fact, in the four years since Colby last checked in on the festival, the presence of filmmakers of Demme's stature has become de rigueur.

Director Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line) and actress Sissie Spacek (In the Bedroom) are among those who have come to Waterville to accept Mid-Life Achievement Awards in previous years. This has helped build the Maine festival's reputation in the film world. "Jonathan Demme was very familiar with us and honored to get the Mid-Life Achievement Award," Eisen said. "That sort of lets you know you're somewhere."

And where are they? Central Maine, of course, but also at the hub of what is increasingly a favored stop for movie buffs. This year filmgoers from 26 states and 11 countries converged on Waterville to take in the offerings of a festival that is truly international.

Demme's The Agronomist, a work in progress, follows the life of Jean Leopold Dominique, the Haitian journalist and founder of Radio Haiti Inter. The May 2000 assassination of Dominique remains unsolved.

This year's program included unusual films from Iceland, Japan, Hungary, India, Denmark and France. Audience members voted the Tunisian film Satin Rouge as best film of the festival. Also featured were nine Vietnam-related films and a concert performance by the Billy Bang Sextet, a jazz band partially composed of vets, and a Vietnam War symposium that opened up a lively political discussion.

Audiences opened themselves up as well. "Movie audiences are far more conservative and cautious in what they go to see [during the year]," Eisen said. "Film festivals, conversely, have been a way in which people are willing to throw caution to the wind--try things out and just experience--so therefore they're seeing great films. And that's fantastic. That's all you could ever ask for as a film programmer."

Or as the founder--with Gail Chase '74 and Leah Girardin (then an audiovisual specialist at Colby) and others--of a cinema that was built in an unused warehouse, burned flat once and rebuilt thanks to an outpouring of support from the community.

That support continues to grow as an ever-widening circle of friends endorses the cinema and the summer film festival associated with it--run by the nonprofit Friends of Art and Film in Central Maine. The festival delivers "the sustenance of art," which "keeps us in any way sane and growing and human," Eisen said. And that means more than just a summer blockbuster movie.

Last summer it meant packed houses for the festival, highlighted by Demme's appearance. The night Eisen took Demme home for dinner in Fairfield, guests included the Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat, author of Krik! Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory, and the late Dominique's surviving daughter, Natalie, visiting from Haiti. Also in the group was Francois Bugingo, a journalist with Reporters Without Borders, an organization participating in the search to uncover the parties responsible for Dominique's death.

The guests are artists and passionate professionals, not celebrities--a distinction Eisen, who teaches film during Jan Plan at Colby, is well aware of. "We don't ever want to be a Sundance," he said. "That's definitely not a goal. We have no desire to have lots of glitzy stars and the starlets in bikinis on the beach--that isn't here, that isn't going to happen."