“The Film Prize Nobody Wants for a Subject Nobody Will Talk About” read the ad that Terra Nova Films placed in this year’s Chicago International Film Festival program book. Terra Nova is a 26-year-old Chicago-based distributor and producer of film and video that deals with the subject of aging. Development director Ed Menaker says the ad for its annual Silver Images Generations Award was “supposed to be a joke,” a wink at cultural denial of aging. But when the festival came and went (it ended October 17) and the $2,500 award—the only cash prize on the roster—was never conferred, the ad took on an extra layer of irony. It looked like Silver Images had become the award CIFF didn’t want to give.
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CIFF has its own version of what happened. According to managing director Ryan Jewell, Terra Nova wanted to give its prize to the festival’s closing film, The Savages, even though no one at Terra Nova had yet seen it. The movie, directed by Tamara Jenkins, stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as two siblings dealing with their father’s dementia; it sounded like a great fit with Terra Nova, Jewell says. But CIFF was never able to get studio approval for the award (and the studios control every aspect of their films’ public image). By the time Terra Nova requested a screening for half a dozen other candidates, he says, it was “a week before the festival started and we were in full swing. We couldn’t drop everything to arrange it.” Jewell says CIFF suggested “several other options” besides The Savages early on, including a chance to honor Malcolm McDowell, but Terra Nova turned them all down. “They wanted the big, glamorous closing night, and that’s something we couldn’t give them,” says Jewell.
Molly Klapp of Allied Advertising, which is handling local publicity for The Savages (opening in theaters later this month), says she asked the studio, Fox Searchlight, if it wanted the award on September 30, and the studio gave its final answer in the week before the festival’s close. The studio declined the award, she says, because Terra Nova had never seen the film. But the organization wasn’t notified of the two press screenings of The Savages held by Allied, the last on October 11. “At this point,” Klapp wrote in an e-mail to me, “we had not heard back from Terra Nova on if they had seen the film yet, and did not have a direct contact with them as we were going through the festival.”
The Tem in Kartemquin
Sat 11/10, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800.
