If you thought Medford was just another small suburban town without much of a cultural history, you were wrong. The Doc Kountze Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, marking its 10th anniversary, for another yearly celebration of the city's contribution to the arts.
The two-day event, held in the library of the McGlynn Middle School, only a short distance from campus, will showcase twelve short and feature-length films, including "Stuttering" and "Making Contact," made entirely by Tufts students.
The festival is named in honor of the late journalist and historian Mabray "Doc" Kountze, a Medford native who wrote for various local newspapers and published two history books. An influential sports reporter, Kountze was the first African-American to receive a press pass from the Boston Red Sox, and called for desegregation in baseball.
Throughout the past 10 years, the form of the Doc Kountze Festival has evolved. It began by displaying storefront art by dozens of artists in windows across Medford Square. In 2004, it became a one-day performing arts festival, and in 2006 it changed into a film festival. The program director, Paul Lehrman, a lecturer in the Tufts music department, called Medford a "major film center in the 1910s and 1920s [that] is again a very fertile place for filmmaking."
The opening ceremony begins at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, where the Mabray "Doc" Kountze award will be presented to a distinguished Medford artist. Immediately afterwards, there will be a screening of Stanley Nelson's semi-autobiographical documentary, "A Place of Our Own," about the African-American community of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, where the director spent many summers during his youth. All of the other films will be screened on Sunday from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.; the complete schedule can be found on the festival's Web site.
They are all connected to Medford in some way or another. Many of the films were made by current Medford residents, including the documentary "Candyflip" and the stop-action animated short "Tony vs. Paul."
"Some of the films we already knew about, and we approached the filmmakers, and in some cases the filmmakers came to us," Lehrman said.
Participating in the festival as a Medford resident, Lehrman composed and performed the original score for "The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Real Story." The film documents a dark moment in American history, when enlistees during World War II were imprisoned for refusing to load munitions at a naval base in California after an explosion killed 320 of their co-workers.
The two films contributed by Tufts students were made for the Experimental College course "Making Films for Social Change," taught by Margaret Lazarus. Lazarus, who won the "Best Documentary" Academy Award for her film entitled "Defending Our Lives" (1994), encourages active citizenship in her students' work through the powerful tool of media.
"Stuttering," a collaborative effort by junior Michael Taub and seniors Stefanie Tiso and Tim Huang, chronicles Taub's experience with speech therapy days before his performance in a play. "Making Contact," by senior Allegra Anderson, sophomores Marisa Jones and Moshe Netter, and Tricia O'Neill, at the time a senior at Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, weaves its story around the staff and members of the Somerville Boxing Club, many of whom are troubled youth who choose to channel their aggression into a positive physical activity.
O'Neill said that she was "interested in having others see a world so vastly different than Tufts yet only two miles from campus."
She described her experience with the filmmaking process as "very democratic ... We all entered documentary topic ideas and then narrowed them down by voting on them."
The Doc Kountze Film Festival offers a plethora of documentaries and shorts, with variety of topics that range "from deadly serious to hysterically funny," Lehrman said.
