It’s a wrap. The 20th annual Cucalorus independent film festival showcased talented independent filmmakers from around the world and honored the late Dino De Laurentiis, the man who brought film to Wilmington 30 years ago.
Like De Laurentiis’ own body of work, the feature, short and documentary films screened during Cucalorus represented a wide variety of subjects and genres.
There was everything from award-winning foreign films like the Swedish Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize winner “Force Majure,” a commentary on familial structures and paternal roles set in the French Alps, to a locally produced western short, “Times Like Dying,” and everything in between.
Directed by Evan Vetter and written by a host of writers including Anthony Reynolds, “Times Like Dying” was Reynolds’ vision of a classic Western set in the Antebellum South.
“My first movie in 1993 was a western out in Los Angeles and I fell into a niche in my career playing cowboys, cops and killers,” Reynolds said. “I always wanted to do another Western and I had never seen one done east of the Mississippi … and we just wanted to tell a good story.”
After a bank robbery the film follows three outlaws off to save the family farm. A fourth outlaw left behind returns seeking retribution and all of the stolen money.
“I really like how this was ultimately a story about good people doing the wrong thing and having to deal with the consequences of that,” Vetter said. “That really resonated for me in terms of the times we live in now and I think that is what is neat about a period piece is it gives you an interesting way to look at where we are now.”
The short film also featured local actors like Cullen Moss and Myke Holmes, and was shot on location around southeastern North Carolina.
Sixty local actors, all new to the world of feature acting, were cast in the Cucalorus special program, “N.C. Sixty,” directed by Erica Dunton. The program started as an acting workshop in which each of the actors brainstormed ideas for a scene. Then, Dunton wrote the scripts for each scene with each actor playing both a lead role and a supporting role.
The project took a year to complete and included actors from ages 9 to 93.
Dunton said each of the characters was one step away from the actors who inspired them and the short scenes dealt with everything from death and illness to dating and middle school gossip.
The screening of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group’s “Crimes of the Heart,” with veteran actresses Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek, provided the intro to a discussion and remembrance of De Laurentiis following the film.
De Laurentiis’ wife, partner and fellow producer, Martha De Laurentiis, was joined by other key players in the founding of the Wilmington film industry like casting director Mark Fincannon and cameraman Chunky Huse.
The British-born Huse remembered having second thoughts about the move after coming to Wilmington for the first time to work for De Laurentiis.
“I remember when we arrived we came in a hedge hopper and landed at Wilmington airport … got in a car, drove out of the airport and the first thing we saw was a prison … then you turned left and past the sewer plant and nothing else on North 23rd Street,” Huse said. “I said to the boys, ‘Looks like we better find a place to have some fun,’ and we did find it at DEG Studios.”
Martha De Laurentiis said her first memory of the area was coming to scout Orton Plantation as a location for “Firestarter.” One of her favorite memories of her husband while in Wilmington was during the fall of 1984 when Hurricane Diana hit Wilmington and the entire crew at DEG Studios on 23rd Street rode the storm out in the studio. De Laurentiis said her husband always insisted on having the studio commissary stocked with Italian food and during the storm he and his Italian chef Guiliano cooked for the entire crew.
“There was no time to evacuate because we had so much stuff at the studio so we stayed,” De Laurentiis said. “There were probably about 70 of us at the studio … and with the electricity going out we had to get rid of all this food so Dino and Giuliano made pasta and we just did what we could. That was Dino, making the most of a situation and making other people feel comfortable and happy.”
Looking back, she said, “I truly do believe Dino loved this area very much and we built our home here to stay,” she said. “We always kept the house because that is where his heart was. He didn’t think he was the father of the industry here but he certainly knew the effect he had.”
The local community’s continued support of Cucalorus and the festival’s international reach landed it on MovieMaker Magazine’s Top 25 Coolest Film Festival’s in the world for a second consecutive year. The 20th Cucalorus recorded 15,743 in attendance and generated $63,513 in box office sales.
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