By Caroline Roosevelt
Contributing Writer 

Nina Simone said it best. “An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.”  

If that is the artist’s duty, it is also the duty of a film festival’s curators, jurors and sponsors to amplify that reflection. 

At the 19th West Chester Film Festival at the Uptown! Knauer Performing Arts Center this past weekend, the films and thoughtful curation paid homage to that, from the kick-off party on April 25 to a weekend of workshops, film blocks, panel discussions, and networking opportunities.  

I provided coverage of this event for the first time last year and will insist on keeping this festival  on my roster for the foreseeable future as the quality of work, and breadth of emotion, opinion, and experience exceeded my expectations. As has become the festival’s trademark, filmmakers from all over the world participated in this year’s event, presenting a stunning array of cinematic styles and genres. 

“Our submissions open in August every year, and we accept submissions from all over the world, all genres, 30 minutes or less,” said Festival Coordinator Victoria Rose. “We usually get a few hundred submissions, then we have an independent screening committee who watches every single film and then scores them. Then we all get together and once we select the films that come in. We have an independent jury, who are all filmmaking professionals, and they select those films who receive awards.” 

Accompanied by a nearly full house, I attended Saturday afternoon’s block of films that served as a cinematic lineup that was as diverse in message as it was in poignancy. The first film, An Orange From Jaffa, is set at one of the many check points between Israel and Palestine and focuses on the conversation between a Palestinian man attempting to get cross into the West Bank without proper paperwork, and the reticent Palestinian, taxi driver who accepts him out of a sort of kinship obligation. The two are met with scrutiny by the IDF at the border, and what ensues is 15 minutes of tension, uncertainty and a bit of humor as they remain in the car while awaiting their fate.  

The film, which I had anticipated to spill into darker territory, managed to present a reality and a humanity to an increasingly volatile current event. 

The next film, The Circle, filled the experimental film genre in this block. Director Evgenii Bakirov documents tattoo artist Herman Devyashin’s first AR (augmented reality) based tattoo. The concept is derived from Devyashins’ artistic existential crisis of bearing the burden of infinite repetition in his work - and his desire to create beauty without relying on the banality of routine. We watch his model, draped over a velvet couch, preparing for her session in which he uses his AR headset to provide the stencil and thus free him from the stenciling portion of the process. Once finished, the artist shows off the model’s back torso on which a black and white floral tattoo blooms. Stylistically, the film had all the vibes of a Nine Inch Nails music video. 

The Hunters’ Lament presented a subtle, and artfully apolitical account of a school shooting and a parallel memory of an uncle and nephew going on their first deer hunt.  

The block also featured the Iranian film In The Shadow of The Cypress, a wordless and animated visual of PTSD and the effect it has on the individual and their families through the analogy of a beached whale. I found the film moving and beautifully crafted. 

Fear not, the film bock ended on a comedic note with locally produced film Viaticum, in which a priest arrives at a home to offer the last rites to an aging man who confesses on his deathbed that he committed a murder several decades before. His dying wish to a visiting priest is to receive the sacramental wafer dipped in his sons’ homemade BBQ sauce, but his nurse, gob smacked by her patient’s confession, sets out to deny him a bite of the sweet and saucy wafer. 

After the film block, I attended the panel “Based on a True Story,” which was led by Devorah Hope Palladino, a documentary producer for CNN and National Geographic, along with Dr. Dyan Neary, a West Chester University professor and investigative journalist; filmmaker Frederick Taylor; and filmmaker H. Paul Moon. 

Each panelist had informative and enlightening recommendations and reflections on finding stories, paying respect to the subjects, and navigating the complex legal side of telling a true story. I found it to be a riveting and very important discussion in a world where the truth tends to get muddied on social media, and a place where filmmakers and journalists alike must wade through the swamp to find, tell and share real stories. 

The average life span of a smaller film festival is five years. As the West Chester Film Festival is preparing to celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2026, I know for certain that I will be occupying an aisle seat, because it will be well worth the wait and well worth my – and your - visit. 

To learn more about the West Chester Film Festival, visit www.WestChesterFilmFestival.com.