Woodstock Film Festival to honor Mira Nair and Peter Bogdanovich
The Woodstock Film Festival (WFF) will recognize acclaimed filmmaker and activist Mira Nair as this year’s honorary recipient of the 3rd annual Meera Gandhi Giving Back Award, and acclaimed director, actor, producer, film historian and writer Peter Bogdanovich will receive the honorary Maverick Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to accepting this honor, Bogdanovich will star in the film Cold Turkey by Will Slocombe, which will make its New York premiere at this year’s festival.
“I’m happy with the unexpected honor,” Nair says. “To have my work be recognized as one that is unafraid to show that the path to peace is complicated – that makes it more than a ‘normal’ award. I have to hope that films can have some way of entering our hearts and minds – after all, we have only one life, and if we close our eyes to the world, what is the point? I believe in peace, I strive for it. To achieve peace, we must learn to see the world through the eyes of the other.”
In addition to accepting the award, Nair will participate in the annual BMI-sponsored Music For Film chat at the festival along with Mychael Danna, the Academy-Award winning film composer who recently won Best Original Score for his work on Life of Pi. In the past, Danna has worked with Nair on her feature films Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair. Danna also worked with Nair on her segments in the 2009 film New York, I Love You. The discussion will be moderated by Doreen Ringer-Ross, the Vice President of Film/TV relations at BMI.
“I am particularly honored to receive the Woodstock Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award from an organization that promotes artists and culture, as these pertain to film,” said Bogdanovich. “The spirit of Woodstock couldn’t be closer to my own sensibilities and I am looking forward to returning to the area where I was born.”
One of Bogdanovich’s most recent starring roles is in Will Slocombe’s feature film and Official WFF 2013 Selection, Cold Turkey. The film tells of an eccentric Thanksgiving get-together for the Turner family, presided over by eminent scholar and patriarch, Poppy (Bogdanovich), which turns into a train wreck when his “insane” daughter Nina pays her first visit home after 15 years. A big messy dramedy, the film stars Bogdanovich and Cheryl Hines along with Ashton Holmes, Alicia Witt and Sonya Walger.
This year’s festival will take place from October 2-6 in Woodstock, NY and the neighboring towns of Kingston, Saugerties, Rhinebeck and Rosendale.