It is perhaps a sign of a film festival’s “coming of age” when it dares to present films acclaimed in the world of art rather than merely at the box office. Such is the case with the Aruba International Film Festival’s invitation to three world renown directors of sophisticated, powerful art cinema and documentary creations. They all will participate in the AIFF Film Lab series, In Conversation With…

Academy Award winning director Jonathan Demme will discuss his latest films at the “In Conversation With…” series and introduce his documentary ‘The Agronomist’, a moving portrait of the late Haitian radio personality who campaigned for democracy, Jean Dominique. Demme has been able, in his career, not only to make box-office blockbuster films, but to take on intriguing subject matter as well, and to make it absorbing and entertaining.
The Silence of the Lambs won him the Academy Award for Best Director and is one of only three to win all the major Oscar categories. Philadelphia garnered Tom Hanks a Best Actor Oscar. Since them Demme’s films have included an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and remakes of two popular films: the Truth about Charlie, based on Charade, and The Manchurian Candidate, with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep.

Milcho Manchevski is the creator of four widely recognized pieces of art in the world of cinema. AIFF 2011 will screen two of them to acquaint theatergoers to his unique vision and style. His first film, Before the Rain, (1994) not only won an Academy Award nomination in the US, but thirty other awards from around the world, and is included on the New York Time’s list of the best 1000 films ever made. The second AIFF presentation will be his latest work, Mothers. The very structure of the film itself becomes part of its message, as fiction and documentary blend and emphasize the fine line between truth and fiction.

Another director who will be explaining the connections between film and the visual arts at AIFF 2011 is Polish born Lech Majewski . In addition to being a filmmaker, he is an artist, a poet, an author and a stage director. He is known for his films Wojaczek, (1999) Angelus (2000) and The Garden of Earthly Delights (2004), which was based on the 1503 Hieronymous Bosch painting of the same name. He was honored in 2006 with a mid-career retrospective at the famed Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. In The Mill and the Cross , he examines the famous painting by Pieter Bruegel “The Way to Calvary”. Majewski focuses on a dozen characters depicted in the painting whose life stories unfold and intertwine in a panoramic landscape populated by villagers and red-caped Spanish horsemen. It invites the viewer to live inside the aesthetic universe of the painting as we watch it being created.