| Arts & Entertainment - Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Local filmmaker's work screens at Cinequest Film Festival
by Renee Batti
It's her shortest narrative film yet — only four and a half minutes long — but Kari Nevil put a lot of her heart and soul into "Crickets," which was filmed entirely at Bayfront Park in Menlo Park.
The film, written and directed by Ms. Nevil, will be screened at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 5, and noon Saturday, March 8, at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose. Both screenings will be at the Camera 12 theater at 201 South Second St.
Ms. Nevil wrote "Crickets" as a response to the deaths of two people close to her — sister-in-law Yvonne Brown, who died of ovarian cancer, and journalist Steven Vincent, who was kidnapped and killed a year later in Iraq while covering the war.
"I was trying to come up with a story to help me make sense of losing these two young people," she said last week. They were people "the world needed," she said, adding that she struggled to answer the question: Why would they be taken from us?
Describing the film as "allegorical, metaphysical and dreamlike," she said it also embraces hope. "In this time of war, it's important for us to latch on to hope," she said.
In a written statement, Ms. Nevil said, "This film is my hope that Yvonne and Steven may have encountered each other again ... on the painless side of horrific deaths."
Ms. Nevil's company, JuneBug Films, was located in Menlo Park for years before moving recently to Princeton-by-the-Sea, just north of Half Moon Bay.
"Crickets" is the fourth film Ms. Nevil has directed, and the fourth to be screened at Cinequest; the others are feature films "Your Guardian" and "Planting Melvin," and a feature documentary, "Car Stories."
"Crickets" premiered on Feb. 1 at the Through Women's Eyes International Film Festival in Sarasota, Florida. Next month, it will be screened at the California Independent Film Festival in Livermore.
Ms. Nevil is in the pre-production stages of JuneBug Films' next narrative feature film, "Jonathan's Wedding," and has just begun shooting a feature documentary called "Infidelity: The Movie," according to a press release.
For more information about the Cinequest Film Festival, call 408-295-3378, or log on at cinequest.org.
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