SUN JUL 9, 2023 7:00 PM Actors Panel + A FLASH OF GREEN / RACHEL HENDRIX $10.00 (member) ; $15.00 (general admission) Aero Theatre | Actors Panel with Ashley Judd, Lori Singer, Ed Harris and Todd Field. Moderated by Jim Hemphill. ‘Victor Nunez: An American Cinematheque Retrospective’ Tickets are no longer on sale for this event.
ABOUT THE EVENT: 7:00pm | Actors Panel with Ed Harris, Todd Field, Ashley Judd and Lori Singer 8:00pm | Screenings + Introduction by filmmaker Victor Nunez Start times are approximate. ABOUT THE FILMS: A FLASH OF GREEN, 1984, Dir: Victor Nunez, 121 Minutes, USA. Ed Harris, Richard Jordan, and Blair Brown star in Victor Nunez’s engagingly offbeat adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s novel about a reporter (Harris) in early ‘60s Florida who takes a job as a press secretary for a slick politician (Jordan). Motivated partly by his longing for a friend’s widow (Brown) who is fighting local development with which the politician is involved, the reporter soon finds that he has made a deal with the devil and deals with the emotional and physical consequences for both himself and his community. Harris gives one of the best performances of his career in a movie squarely in touch with (and in opposition to) the zeitgeist of the Reagan era, and Nunez continues to display his rich sense of how we’re all defined by the places in which we live, and vice versa. FORMAT: DCP RACHEL HENDRIX, 2023, Dir: Victor Nunez, 119 Minutes, USA. Lori Singer stars in Victor Nunez’s latest exquisite portrait of a woman in a state of transition and reinvention, drawn loosely from the writer-director’s own experiences as a widower and an educator. Rachel (Singer) is a creative writing professor struggling to deal with the death of her husband — a struggle made all the more difficult by the fact that her job requires her to be an inspiration to others at the very moment when her life is defined by malaise and confusion. Rachel’s gradual willingness to let others into her life while she is still haunted (both literally and figuratively) by her husband recalls Peter Fonda’s Ulee, but RACHEL HENDRIX is an expansion of Nunez’s work, not a repetition — here we find the writer-director at his most complex, provocative, and poignant, in a late career masterpiece with another stunning performance at its center. FORMAT: DCP Program notes by film historian Jim Hemphill.