2023 Refocus Film Festival: film inspired by literature!

You Know You Want This Cat Person and Other Stories

Kristen Roupenian

A couple becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex ... until they can't have sex without him; a ten-year-old's birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for "something mean"; a woman finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart's desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed "biter" dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.

I love short story collections. It will be interesting to see how this translates into film!
- Katie

The Cider House Rules

John Irving

The story, set in the pre– and post–World War II era, tells of a young man, Homer Wells, growing up under the guidance of Dr. Wilbur Larch, an obstetrician and abortion provider. The story relates his early life at Larch's orphanage in Maine and follows Homer as he eventually leaves the nest and comes of age.

John Irving will be in town on Oct. 13, 2023 presented by Hancher, Iowa City Book Festival, Iowa City Public Library, Iowa Writer's Workshop, ReFocus Film Festival, and University Lecture Committee! Details pertaining to his visit can be found here: https://hancher.uiowa.edu/2023-2024/john-irving
- Katie

Cobra Verde

Werner Herzog

Adapted from Bruce Chatwin's "The Viceroy of Ouidah" the feared bandit COBRA VERDE (Klaus Kinski) is hired by a plantation owner to supervise his slaves. After the owner suspects Cobra Verde of consorting with his young daughters, the owner wishes him gone. Rather than kill him,the owner sends Cobra Verde to Africa. The only white man in the area, Cobra Verde finds himself the victim of torture and humiliation. Later, he trains soldiers in a rebel army. Far from home, Cobra Verde is on the edge of madness.

Werner Herzog will be in Iowa City at the Englert Theatre for the final day of the 2023 ReFocus Film Festival! Event details here: https://englert.org/event/werner-herzog/
- Katie

Eileen

Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen, perhaps one of the most damaged characters in recent fiction, is the narrator of this dark look back at her life during a 1960s Christmas week. Eileen lost her mother when she was in high school; her sister is the pride of the family, but the two women have no relationship; Eileen's father is an alcoholic, a cop forced into retirement and now heading toward dementia, a man who has mentally abused Eileen her whole life. Her life is a horror: living in squalor, taking care of her abusive father, driving an old car with an exhaust problem that forces her to leave the windows open, even during those frigid New England winters. She works as a secretary at a boy's prison, a discouraging job at best. She obsesses about her bodily functions, has strange sexual fantasies (although at 24, she is still a virgin), and is stalking one of the prison guards. There is no respite from the darkness here, until Rebecca shows up at the prison, ostensibly to create an education program for the boys. Eileen is enamored of the beautiful Harvard graduate and desperate for a friend. That friendship turns into something truly ugly, which leads to a shocking ending. Dark as night, but literary psychological suspense at its best.--Alesi, Stacy Copyright 2015 Booklist

Read this book back in 2015 when John Waters recommended it from the stage at the Englert during one of his performances! I'm interested in seeing how the filth and darkness of this novel will be captured in the film!
- Katie

Ernest & Celestine

Deep below snowy, cobblestone streets, tucked away in networks of winding subterranean tunnels, lives a civilization of hardworking mice, terrified of the bears who live above ground. Unlike her fellow mice, Celestine is an artist and a dreamer – and when she nearly ends up as breakfast for ursine troubadour Ernest, the two form an unlikely bond. But it isn’t long before their friendship is put on trial by their respective bear-fearing and mice-eating communities. Nominated for Best Animated Feature Film of the Year at the **Academy Awards**, Winner of the SACD Prize (Directors' Fortnight) - Special Mention at the **Cannes Film Festival.** Winner of Best Animated Film at the **César Awards**. *"ERNEST & CELESTINE is a magnificent, creative, and visionary piece of work that is heartwarming, magical, and just a fantastic cinematic journey that will be forever timeless." - Chris Sawin, **Examiner.com***

Based on the children's Ernest & Celestine by Gabrielle Vincent, ReFocus will be playing the second movie in this series at the 2023 ReFocus Film Festial, "Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia". You can watch the first film on Kanopy!
- Katie

Oedipus Trapped by Destiny

Yvan Pommaux

"Oedipus is born to a terrible fate. Can he escape it to save himself and his family? An oracle makes a ghastly prediction: the young prince will kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, King Laius decides to kill his infant son before he can ever grow up to fulfill that prophecy. But destiny can't be avoided so easily."--Publisher.

The film "Music" being featurd at ReFocus is based off of the tale of Oedipus.
- Katie

Orlando, a biography

Virgina Woof

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando ‘The longest and most charming love letter in literature’, playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf’s close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth’s England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

Orlando, My Political Biography, adapted from Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Orlando, will be featured at FilmScene's Refocus Film Festival!
- Katie

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe is an American novelist, journalist, and social commentator who was a leading critic of contemporary life and a proponent of New Journalism (the application of fiction-writing techniques to journalism). Bonfire of the Vanities is the story is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics, and greed in 1980s New York City, and centers on three main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow. The novel was originally conceived as a serial in the style of Charles Dickens' writings: it ran in 27 installments in Rolling Stone starting in 1984. Wolfe heavily revised it before it was published in book form. The novel was a bestseller and a phenomenal success, even in comparison with Wolfe's other books. It has often been called the quintessential novel of the 1980s,[1] and in 1990 was adapted into a critically maligned film of the same name by Brian De Palma.[2]

With many of Wolfe's books in the collection, I decided to feature Wolfe's most recognizable title. "Radical Wolfe, a documentary on the life of author Tom Wolfe" will be featured at FilmScene's 2023 Refocus Film Festival!
- Katie

Robot Dreams

Sara Varon

"Robot Dreams" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov exploring the unbalance of robot/human relationships under Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. It was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1987. It won the Locus Award for Best Short Story in 1987. "Robot Dreams", along with 20 other short stories by Asimov, was published in Robot Dreams in 1986 by Berkley Books. The short story was alluded to in the 2004 film I, Robot (film) , where the robot protagonist Sonny has dreams of leading his fellow Ns-5 robots, who he refers “slaves to logic,” to freedom.

The film "Robot Dreams", adapted from on Sara Varon's graphic novel Robot Dreams, will be featured at the 2023 ReFocus Film Festival!
- Katie

The Pigeon Tunnel, Stories from my Life

John Le Carré

"From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John Le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his highly anticipated memoir, Le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels."

"The Pigeon Tunnel" film is based on the life of John le Carré and his memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life.
- Katie

About a Mountain

John D'Agata

About the book: The mountain that John D'Agata is ostensibly concerned with in his slim but powerful new book, "About a Mountain," is Yucca Mountain, located approximately 100 miles north of Las Vegas. And he's not the only one interested in it: since the mid-1980s, the United States government has been doing back flips to bury the country's entire reservoir of spent nuclear waste - some 77,000 tons of apocalyptic yumminess - deep inside Yucca. In the summer of 2002, the summer after D'Agata helped his mother move to a Vegas suburb, Congress was proceeding with plans to make the mountain a nuclear dump. Also that summer, 16-year-old Levi Presley jumped to his death from the observation deck of a third-rate Vegas hotel. These subjects, disparate though they are, animate D'Agata's sprawling narrative. The author of a well-regarded book of essays and the editor of two exceptional essay anthologies, D'Agata has an encyclopedic understanding of the form's intricate artistry. Moreover, he is a serious thinker who regularly lays down stylish, intelligent sentences: "I do not think that Yucca Mountain is a solution or a problem. I think that what I believe is that the mountain is where we are, it's what we now have come to - a place that we have studied more thoroughly at this point than any other parcel of land in the world - and yet still it remains unknown, revealing only the fragility of our capacity to know." ...Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

John D'Agata is the Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program and a Professor at the University of Iowa. The film adaptation of D'Agata's book being featured at the 2023 Refocus Film Festival is called "This Much We Know".
- Katie