What are Your Favorite Films?
As PFF 2015 kicks off, we encourage you to Find YOUR New Favorite Movie … there are SO many amazing films to choose from! See the complete schedule here. We have asked filmmakers who will be screening their films at this year’s festival about some of their favorite movies.
Frank Ferendo is co-director/producer of PFF 2015 Feature Competition Film ANGEL OF NANJING. Frank and co-director/producer Jordan Horowitz are here at PFF, and will be attending all three screenings, with a Q&A after each. Check screening times here. Frank recently shared some of his favorite films with us, and began by telling us …
For my favorites, I limited it to just this year... otherwise I may have a brain aneurysm trying to pick even my top five in each category. But this year was really quite easy for me. I gage my favorites on emotional impact. I want to be moved in some way.
- Favorite Comedy
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: Struck a cord with my childhood sense of adventure.
- Favorite Drama
WHIPLASH: The writing is superb, Miles Teller's playing is fantastic, and J.K. Simmons is mesmerizing.
- Favorite Documentary
POINT AND SHOOT: Blurs the lines between documenting and participating.
- What film(s) are you looking forward to seeing at PFF 2015 (besides your own of course!!)?
BAD EXORCISM: I am currently working on a paranormal thriller that involves demonic possession and revolves around a group of high school kids. I'm curious to see a comedic approach to the genre.
- What is a favorite film that you think most people have never seen, but should? IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE: Yes we have all seen it on TV while flipping through the channels during the holiday season. However, most people have never really sat down and watched it from beginning to end... and they should.
- Do you have a favorite film poster?
I've only ever had one movie poster that I really ever cared about … FIGHT CLUB. Perhaps there are other posters out there that I think are much better designed; however, this one was on my wall because it is my favorite movie of all time.
ANGEL OF NANJING
The Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing is one of the most famous bridges in China. It is also the most popular place in the world to commit suicide. For the past 11 years, Chen Si has been patrolling this bridge, looking to provide aid for those who've gone there to end their lives. Incredibly, he has saved over 300 people since he began - nearly one every two weeks.
Frank tells us that after PFF he is switching gears completely and starting to work on a feature narrative. He has written three scripts in the past year, and is hoping to shoot one of them in the next year.
You can check out what’s in development at:
– Laurie Smith
Gorman Bechard is the writer/director/editor of PFF 2015 Feature Competition Film A DOG NAMED GUCCI. He will be in attendance for Q & A sessions at 
Kurt Kubicek is the director of 1/10 of a Second, a PFF 2015 Arizona Feature Film. He is currently writing a biography that he tells us is in the same vein as WOLF OF WALL STREET for a client, and he is also writing and developing a television mini-series.
Squid and the Whale. Starring Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney and Owen Kline, and based on the true childhood experiences of Noah Baumbach and his brother, The Squid and the Whale tells the touching story of two young boys dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980s. 
On Tuesday, March 31 at 7pm, we will be showing Kicking and Screaming starring Josh Hamilton, Eric Stoltz and Samuel Gould. After college graduation, Grover's girlfriend Jane tells him she's moving to Prague to study writing. Grover declines to accompany her, deciding instead to move in with several friends, all of whom can't quite work up the inertia to escape their university's pull. Nobody wants to make any big decisions that would radically alter his life, yet none of them wants to end up like Chet, the professional student who tends bar and is in his tenth year of university studies. 
Finally, our closing night film on Thursday, April 2 at 7pm is Baumbach's latest film While We're Young. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts are Josh and Cornelia Srebnick, happily married middle-aged members of New York's creative class. They tried to start a family and were unable to and have decided they're okay with that. But as Josh labors over the umpteenth edit of his cerebral new film, it's plain that he has hit a dry patch and that something is still missing.
Enter Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a free-spirited young couple, who are spontaneous and un-tethered, ready to drop everything in pursuit of their next passion retro board games one day, acquiring a pet chicken the next. For Josh, it's as if a door has opened back to his youth or a youth he wishes he once had. It's not long before the restless forty-somethings, Josh and Cornelia, throw aside friends their own age including Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz in a sly supporting role to trail after these young hipsters who seem so plugged in, so uninhibited, so Brooklyn cool. "Before we met," Josh admits to Jamie, "the only two feelings I had left were wistful and disdainful." But is this new inspiration enough to sustain collaboration and friendship with a couple twenty years their junior?
While We're Young is an openly funny cross-generational comedy of manners about aging, ambition and success, as well as a moving portrait of a marriage tested by the invading forces of youth. No film has better captured the weird, upended logic of urban sophisticates: the older ones embracing their iPads and Netflix, the young ones craving vinyl records and vintage VHS tapes. 
