Newswise — The first film screening that laid the foundation for the New Jersey International Film Festival was less than illustrious, but strangely appropriate. It was shown in an echoing classroom at Rutgers University with large windows that kept the space from being adequately dark. The projector’s extension cord was too short and caused half the film to spill off the screen onto a blackboard. But no one seemed to mind. “We were showing a series of Dada films by Man Ray, and Dadaist films were meant to irritate the viewer, so it worked,” says Al Nigrin, executive director and founder of Rutgers Film Co-op/New Jersey Media Arts Center. Nigrin has rolled with the changing cinematic landscape to bring New Jersey audiences provocative films from around the globe during the annual festival since 1996. This summer, the New Jersey International Film Festival will celebrate its 20th anniversary by screening 25 films from seven countries to an expected audience of about 2,500 from May 30 to June 14 in New Brunswick. Supported by the Rutgers University Program in Cinema Studies and public and private entities, the festival presents a lineup that ranges from documentaries to animations and shorts – all of which are receiving their local premieres. The international film festival, an offshoot of the New Jersey Film Festival, is the realization of a longtime goal for Nigrin, who has been captivated by movies since he saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in his youth. As a college student at Rutgers, he longed to see works by the likes of avant-garde artists such as Man Ray – and was sure he wasn’t alone. “Back then, there was no streaming video or DVD players,” says Nigrin, who started a modest film program at Rutgers with $300 while a graduate student in French literature in the 1980s, and who now is a cinema studies professor at the School of Arts and Sciences in New Brunswick. “If you wanted to see a film, you had to hope it would come on TV or rent it from a distributor.” Originally, the programming centered on revival films – movies from the 1920s to the ’70s and classic foreign and avant-garde pictures – shown several times a month at campus venues and eventually at the State Theatre in downtown New Brunswick. A partnership with the Rutgers Graduate Student Association broadened the scope, and in 1982, Nigrin launched the New Jersey Film Festival under the auspices of the Rutgers Film Co-op, an organization he started to manage the programs. As cinema evolved in the 1990s with the advent of multiplexes and the prevalence of home video, Nigrin knew the format had to change to stay relevant. “We started looking to show movies that could not be found elsewhere,” he says. The risks the co-op took put it on the map and paved the way for international attention. In 1991, it screened Daughters of the Dust, a historically precise film set in the early 20th century about a family in the Gullah community of coastal South Carolina. “There was a lot of buzz around this film because it provided programming to an underserved audience – African American women – but even the local art film houses were not showing it,” says Nigrin. “We could have played Daughters every day for 30 days and sold out every time.” Due to its innovation, the program started attracting notice of cinema heavyweights like Martin Scorsese, who volunteered to give a lecture about one of his favorite films, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, in 1994. Articles in The New York Times followed, as did more celebrity guests, such as Clerks’ director Kevin Smith and Paul Morrissey, a filmmaker known for directing some of Andy Warhol’s films. The co-op didn’t shy away from controversy – and neither did the crowds. “About 1,000 people came to our screening of Todd Solondz’s Happiness,” says Nigrin. “Since part of the plot dealt with pedophilia, no one else would show it, but it turned out to be the largest crowd we ever had.” The idea for an international version of the festival came as Nigrin saw the window between theater releases and home viewing becoming almost nonexistent. He sought avenues to show movies no one had seen. “I wanted to create a festival that was a true celebration of film based on a call for entries that would allow us to premier independent films rather than show second-run art house movies,” he says. That first year the co-op received 50 entries; today, that number has swelled to 400 submissions that undergo a rigorous jury process in which the films are culled by students, faculty, filmmakers and arts journalists. “We seek productions that are original, enlightening, challenging or fun. It’s obvious which films were made with passion and desire,” he says, citing one of this year’s entries, Forever into Space, which was made for $900 but has the quality of a $2 million film. Over the years, the international festival has premiered a number of breakout talents, such as Luke Matheny, whose short film Earano was screened in 2004 and who won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2006 for God of Love. After decades of viewing great films, do any still come along that surprise Nigrin? Absolutely. “When I watched Nocturne, which will be featured this summer, there was a smile on my face the whole time. It’s a smart, beautiful film – a true quirky original,” he says. “I thought: ‘This is the reason why I do this.’”

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