Splice of Life

The local entry in the Living Room Cinema program comes from Frank DiFranco, a New York television producer who relocated to Miami in the early Sixties. His color home movie shows his wife and some friends cruising the Miami River on their boat in 1963. In the background is the Miami of yesteryear, and the soft focus of the footage matches the nostalgia in DiFranco's voice when he says, watching the film, "I wish I was back there in those days." As if in harmony with DiFranco, another beautiful color film gives a brief glimpse of 1955 Havana, as seen from the back seat of an old convertible Cadillac cruising the Malecón. The Bacardi sign and the towers of Hotel Nacional pass by, and, eerily, the drive terminates at Columbus Cemetery before picking up another thread.

The sleeper film of Saturday's program, according to Sherer, also travels to Cuba. Harris vs. Castro: Fact vs. Fiction is a twin bill of films that chronicle the same historic event, Miami businessman Irwin Harris's battle to collect an unpaid debt from Communist Cuba in the early Sixties. One is the real Miami news footage from the time, and the other is a 1963 G.E. True TV series reenactment of Harris's struggle against Castro, sponsored by General Electric and narrated by none other than Dragnet's Jack Webb. As a result, the fictional version takes on the gruff superiority complex of postwar America. Castro is shown as a smoking cigar, and Che Guevara looks like a homeless man in a beret. Irwin Harris himself will be on hand at the screening to re-inject reality into the story.

The final day begins at 1:00 p.m. with avant-garde legend Jonas Mekas's home movie Notes for Jerome, and continues at 2:00 with husband-and-wife avant-garde filmmakers Mark and Susanne Boswell, as they show clips and give a talk on the use of "found footage" in film history. The festival wraps up with a return to the act of restoration: a new print of the 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma, which, coincidentally, is coming out this fall as a remake starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. The script was based on a story by local pulp legend Elmore Leonard, and the new version supposedly retains the dialogue of the original. "[Leonard] writes so fresh and vivid that they didn't have to change much," Sherer says. But, as the festival proves, you can never make the same movie twice.