Revolving

If the films at the second Revolve Film and Music Festival have a common thread, director and founder Shalini Chatterjee thinks it's that they are about creating something, she said.

Creating cultural history -- there's a documentary about the iconic 1960s hippie rock musical, Hair.

Creating music -- there's a documentary, Mellodrama, about the Mellotron, a quirky early electronic keyboard embraced by musicians from the Beach Boys to Kanye West. And there will be a panel discussion with Don Dixon and Mitch Easter, Chatterjee's husband. Dixon and Easter produced
Murmur, the pivotal REM album released in 1983.

"I was searching for certain kinds of movies," Chatterjee said. "Maybe it's what I was subconsciously thinking."

And if you really want to get all deep and thoughtful about it, it kind of speaks to Chatterjee's own experience -- creating a film festival of nothing and sending it on its way out into the world for the first time last August.

The 2009 edition of Revolve -- which will kick off Friday and run through next weekend -- will be smaller and leaner, a downsized version, if you will, but Chatterjee is confident that the festival will survive.

This year's festival will have about half as many films and fewer events, she said --12 instead of last year's 21.

"In this economy, we're lucky we're showing anything. So I feel actually quite fortunate to be able to present a good festival this year. Little peanuts like us and (other) small nonprofits are really suffering. It's more of a shoestring than ever. But we'll be OK."

Part of that has been creative programming and making-do.

One sponsor, Annie Chun's, couldn't donate money -- but it could donate packaged bowls of noodles as door prizes to people who come to see Milky Way Liberation Front, a Korean comedy, set for May 23.

There will be a filmmaker Q&A with Dianna Dilworth, who made Mellodrama, on May 21 -- but it will be by Skype, the Internet voice and video service, from Dilworth's home in New York. It eliminates the cost of having her here in person, Chatterjee said.

She said she knows that people like to meet filmmakers face-to-face, but such solutions are compromises given that, well, money is tight.

With that in mind, Chatterjee has tried to keep prices low for filmgoers while being fair to filmmakers. All but one of Revolve's screenings are $5, well under the cost of a ticket to a mega-multicineplex. "It's like a little cheap summer movie," Chatterjee said. "I think these are so worth seeing I want to make it as easy as possible. The offerings are good; they're just fewer."

Two Revolve films that Chatterjee has shown over the past year during the festival's monthly screenings, The Wrecking Crew and Four of a Kind, will be shown again on the last day of the festival.

But there will plenty of new things to see, too.

Revolve will open Friday at Salem College with a screening of Playing in the Shadows, an Australian documentary that follows a group of kids who live in a notorious housing project, Woolloomooloo, in Sydney. They join an after-dark basketball team (and just because these kids are chubby-cheeked and freckle-faced doesn't mean they're not tough, tough, tough).

Next week, the festival will continue at Wake Forest with Hair: Let the Sun Shine In, a documentary about the 1968 Broadway musical, Hair. The musical is widely credited with breaking new ground for its anti-war, pro-sexual, counter-culture stance. "I think all of these things tie people to important moments of their youth," filmmaker Pola Rapaport said.

Rapaport's documentary aired first in 2007 on the French cultural channel, ARTE. And a Hair
revival is currently on Broadway and was nominated earlier this month for several Tony awards, including best revival. The Age of Aquarius resonates today, Rapaport said.

"It isn't just a show," she said. "It is a very important experience in people's lives."

Rapaport was in ninth grade when she saw the original Broadway production of Hair
. "It changed my life. I loved it so much. It was for me all about liberation. When I was in school, my classmates and I knew all the lyrics to all the songs."

Filmmaker Dianna Dilworth's first film was about Michael Jackson fans. Her second film, Mellodrama, is about the Mellotron and the Chamberlain, two electronic keyboards that achieved a kind of cult status among musicians in the 1960s and on, used by musicians from the Beatles ("Strawberry Fields Forever") to Radiohead, REM and Alicia Keys.

"I'm kind of interested in these ideas of little stories behind big cultural icons," Dilworth said. "I'd say most people have heard about the Mellotron, but they don't know what a Mellotron is. They know the songs but don't know what's making the sounds.

"As a music fan, I love this kind of thing," she added. "I think music culture is fascinating."