Camden International Film Festival marks eighth year

CAMDEN – Documentary filmmakers are descending on midcoast Maine to take part in the latest incarnation of the Camden International Film Festival, taking place in and around Camden from Sept. 27 through Sept. 30.

CIFF is entering its eighth year and in that relatively short time has become one of the preeminent documentary film festivals both in the United States and in the world. The festival aims to provide a fully immersive theatergoing experience. Not only is the festival offering screenings of 70-plus films spread across four primary venues (the Opera House and Bayview Street Cinema in Camden, the Strand Theatre and Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland), but they also offer a variety of Q&A sessions with filmmakers, as well as related events such as the Points North Forum and Panoptic.

SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Somewhere on the Maine coast, a middle-aged man, Rusty, shouts, “It was a freak accident, Maynard! When are you going to get over that?!”

Maynard, seen in the film’s frame from behind, grabs Rusty.

“You’ll never know what it’s like to see your only son’s baseball cap float away with the tide, will ya?” he says, as Thom Willey, the production’s first assistant cameraman, shifts the focus from Maynard to Rusty’s face, which now dominates the frame and whose expression responds to Maynard’s anguish.

New school year begins with a brand new high school

HAMPDEN - It's been an exciting start to the school year for high-schoolers living in SAD 22 who began the 2012-2013 school year in a brand new building off Western Avenue. The new school has been in the works for some time, and now its hallways and classrooms, filled with fresh paint and supplies, are finally bustling with students, staff and faculty.

"The whole building is just fabulous," said Principal Ruey Yehle. "I think the opportunities this building will bring to our students are definitely an improvement over the opportunities the old building brought them."

a fall 2012 TV preview

Being a television executive is much like being a professional gambler: It’s a business built around taking huge risks. Sometimes, those risks pay off hugely. More often, they don’t. So it is with new network television shows. For every breakout hit, there are half a dozen flops. And that doesn’t even count the scores of filmed pilots that ultimately fail to find a home.

Still, hope springs eternal, even in the entertainment business. The network dial is riddled with new offerings this fall. Any one of them could conceivably capture the public’s imagination and become a mainstay for the next five years. Of course, that just means the rest of them will be boring, bland and ultimately forgettable – assuming they aren’t epically terrible. We can probably count on at least one of those as well.