desert magic
Anything could happen at the newly resurrected Marfa Film Festival, set forsummer 2013
Prada Marfa is a permanently installed sculpture outside of Marfa, created byartists Elmgreen and Dragset.Wikipedia Commons
A Marfa Film Festival screening in conjunction with the Alamo Drafthouse.
El Cosmico luxury Airstream in Marfa.Photo courtesy of El Cosmico
West Texas landscape.Photo by Andrew Collins
After a two-year hiatus and three-year legal dispute, the Marfa Film Festival will be resurrected in June 2013. Festival creator and director Robin Lambaria plans to make the fourth iteration of the festival more experiential, attracting a wide swath of people to the remote West Texas town with a roster of more than 50 features, shorts, music videos and experimental works programmed by herself and "a trusted group of filmmakers and programmers from around the world."
Although there is no prescribed theme for films submitted to the Marfa Film Festival, Mercer Black Declercq, festival press relations, tells CultureMap, "I think of it like a long set of songs — a ballet of films — with emotional highs and lows."
The team behind the Marfa Film Festival eschews the distinctly digital-age notion of "nowness" and describes a refreshingly noncompetitive outlook.
"We will share anything regardless of its date of creation," says festival director Robin Lambaria. "Good films never lose their potency."
"We will share anything regardless of its date of creation," Lambaria says. "What we're interested in are stories and perspectives that speak to our audience now. I personally believe that art is timeless, and good films never lose their potency."
And what better place to watch a film, new or old, than under the stars of Texas' vast skies, against Marfa's alluring desert backdrop?
