Author: Michael Witthaus

Wild & Scenic Film Festival returns

It’s hoped that when the final short of this year’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival is finished audience members will have a newfound commitment to conservation and an expanded awareness of the microcosmic world. A few of the selections may lead to a heretofore unknown fondness for timber rattlesnakes, as well as sloths and mussels.

Mostly, the festival’s organizer envisions the nature-centric collection of films as a call to action.

Admission to the Friday, March 29, event at Concord’s Bank of NH Stage includes a free one-year membership in New Hampshire Rivers Council (NHRC), the environmental group sponsoring it.

“It’s where inspiration meets activism,” the Council’s president, Michelle Tremblay, said recently. “What we want to do is inspire people to get more involved.”

Tremblay, who is also principal of Naturesource Communications (pronounced nature-resource), brought the festival to New Hampshire. In past years it was held at Red River Cinemas and routinely sold out, with backed-up waiting lists that couldn’t be satisfied.

The decision to move across the street, made after three years spent online due to the pandemic, means capacity is now doubled.

“We decided to come back big,” Tremblay said. “We have the entire facility … we’re able to offer our members, and new members, places that they can spread out, roam and socialize; and also, very comfortable seating.”

An extension of the weeklong Wild & Scenic Film Festival hosted by SYRCL, the South Yuba River Citizens League in California, the event offers regional groups a “best of” selection from each year’s entries. Tremblay said NHRC decided to focus on short works.

“We don’t have the whole week to show the film festival, so we carefully curate films that normally people wouldn’t be able to see,” she said. “You can go to a theater, you can watch full-length films, but finding good shorts which normally kind of fly under the radar, those are harder to access.”

This means lots of films, covering a wide range of topics, she continued. “We’re also able to offer something for everyone. The shorts range the gamut from water to land to animals, and we have films from all over the globe as well as some that are a little closer to home. So we really do try to curate with that in mind.”

SYRCL, affectionately called “The Mothership” by NHRC, does offer a pre-curated “festival in a box,” Tremblay said. “But we decided to do our own because we really feel like we know what the New Hampshire audiences have liked in the past, and we want to make sure that we’re able to continue to serve that.”

Along with shorts about reptiles, shellfish and sloths are “some wonderful films that give a Native American perspective and make people really think differently about natural resources,” she continued, adding she hopes that two “very abstract films that give kind of a micro view of different aspects of our natural environment … will really get people thinking about not just seeing something from a distance.”

PLACE – People, Lamprey, and Cultural Ecology is a short from Jeremy Monroe and David Herasimtschuk that Tremblay believes will resonate with Northeasterners. The SYRCL website describes the eight-minute film as following a Cayuse Tribe member while revealing “the connections between migratory fish, urban forests, and community stewardship … and the work one group is doing to rebuild the strength of these connections for future generations.”

The New Hampshire economy depends on its natural beauty. Asked how that affects NHRC’s mission, Tremblay replied that rivers are “the last populist water body…. They’ve always been the place where everyone can go to them. But they’ve also been hit hard. They receive our waste, hopefully treated; they get withdrawals for drinking water, for farming and for other purposes. Rivers really do work hard, and we work hard for the rivers.”

14th Annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival
When: Friday, March 29, 6 p.m.
Location: Bank of New Hampshire Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $25 ($20 members) at eventbrite.com
Video on Demand available, $15

Featured photo: Fresh Water Lamprey. Courtesy photo.

Symphony NH performs Game Over(ture)

By Michael Witthaus
mwitthaus@hippopress.com

For many years, video game companies operated like old-school movie studios. Everything was done in-house, including the music. That began to change in the late 1990s, a shift that would impact the life of Austin Wintory, a young composer studying at USC. A lifelong gamer, Wintory had always been intrigued by the scores of Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda, but he had no interest in working 9 to 5 at a tech company.

“The whole appeal of being a composer is you make your own hours,” he said in a recent phone interview. “You pursue your own opportunities … perpetually take swings and gambles, and bet on yourself. It’s an entrepreneur-type path, like running a small business.”

One day, a fellow student invited him to work on a game he was developing. Wintory recalls it as “very humble, tiny little project” that itself went nowhere, “but it led to him introducing me to some of his classmates … in particular was this guy named Jenova Chen, who was working on his master’s thesis video game project.”

Flow, the game Chen was developing and recruited Wintory for, became an online hit in 2006. Its success led Sony to hire them to code a version for the PlayStation, which had more music composed by Wintory. It became a hit on that platform, as did a sequel (that he didn’t work on).

In 2009, the team reunited to make Journey, a game that “exploded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination,” Wintory said. “It essentially made me a so-called video game composer, even though I’ve never seen myself that way… I was always passionate about games, and always wanting to be a composer. In hindsight … they were always on a collision course.”

Journey became the first video game to be nominated for a Grammy, shoehorned into the “Score Soundtrack for Visual Media” category. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score for Girl With the Dragon Tattoo took the prize, but Wintory set a precedent that led to the creation of a video game category 10 years later. He’s been nominated both years it’s existed.

He responds with humility at the notion that he’s some kind of trailblazer.

“I honestly find it baffling; I don’t claim to be the one who should have been the first,” he said. “Many iconic scores came before me that simply weren’t nominated.”

Over the years, Wintory has become friendly with Symphony NH Music Director Roger Kalia, and on March 23 and March 24 he’ll guest conduct music from Journey, along with the Final Fantasy Seven’s climactic finale “One Winged Angel,” a piece he sheepishly requested Kalia let him lead at the concert.

“It’s always fun to conduct more than just my own music, but I am the guest, it’s Roger’s show; I’m not trying to pull focus or steal undue podium time,” he said, adding that his selection recalls operatic works like Verdi’s Requiem. “Carlos Orff’s ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana. It’s a piece in that kind of a vein, an absolute massive grand symphonic statement. It’s a real popular one because that game was just such a landmark.”

Kalia, he continued, has conducted Journey himself several times — on the West Coast where Wintory lives, and with the Evansville Symphony Orchestra. Wintory considers the Game Over(ture) concert, which will also include music from Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers and Prince of Persia,an ideal way to help expand the reach of classical music.

“What I love about these kinds of shows is they’re a real celebration of … cultural touchstones that people are likely to be imminently familiar with,” he said. “I’m a believer in the preservation of the classical repertoire, and the solemn duty orchestras consign themselves to. Making sure that this massive, particularly orchestral canon is well looked after, taken seriously, performed and continuously exposed to new audiences.”

Beyond that, though, is a need for “showcasing the music audience members are likely to have some kind of contact with or familiarity with on a day-to-day basis; not just appeal to so-called classical music lovers. Roger has a very similar mind and is a great advocate of that sort of programming. I’m incredibly lucky and grateful to be a periodic beneficiary of it.”

Game Over(ture)
When: Saturday, March 23rd, 8pm
Location: Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $20.75 and up at symphonynh.org

Also Sunday, March 23rd, 3pm, Keefe Center for the Arts, 117 Elm St., Nashua ($10 and up)

Featured photo: Avatar of Austin Wintory created by Angela Bermúdez. Courtesy photo.