Filmmaker returns to Geneva for opening of festival

When Ann Ruark was growing up in Geneva, she always figured she would become a nurse or a teacher or whatever the other girls were wanting to be someday. It was the 1970s, and "Hollywood producer" was simply not in her script.

"Rock star, celebrity chef, and filmmaker were not really career options when I was growing up," Ruark said, "but they definitely are now."

Ruark, who now makes her home in New York about half the year and the rest of the year "on location," took a few filmmaking classes in college and found her calling. The 1984 graduate of Aurora's Rosary High School now has producer credits on "Revolutionary Road," "Garden State," "Babel," "Frida," and others.

She has worked with directors that include Sam Mendes, Zach Braff, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and Julie Taymor, and with cast lists highlighted by Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, and Salma Hayek.

Ruark, 43, will make a visit to the Fox Valley this week to speak at the third annual Geneva Film Festival, which begins Thursday, April 15 and runs through Sunday, April 18. She will offer a one-hour take on how it all works, "how we deal with taking a film through the process of development and production and finishing it," she said.

Despite the glamorous sheen, the movie industry is built almost entirely of hardworking professionals, Ruark said. "There's an easier way to make a living than working 16 hours a day."

But this business also offers "many opportunities to work in a really creative, collaborative environment where it's project-driven and you're telling one story at a time," she said.

"I think that it's a really interesting kind of art. It's an opportunity to be meeting new people and expanding what you know," Ruark said. "As I get older, I wish that the hours weren't so rough, but other than that, I continue to get stimulated by it and engaged by it."

Two of Ruark's latest projects are "Biutiful," which will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and "The Beaver," a Jody Foster and Mel Gibson movie currently in the editing stage.

Ruark said she is "super excited" to be part of the Geneva Film Festival, and her talk will be based on experience rather than an academic presentation.

This may be the third year for the festival, but the ramping up from last year to this is like going from animated short to full-length movie.

The first two years, the Geneva Film Festival was just one day in one location, said Susie Sperber, event coordinator. "Now it's a four-day event, and it's a much bigger deal," she said. "We thought, 'If this is going to happen, let's make it big, let's make it fun, because everyone loves a party.'"

So this year they added a party. Sperber and vice president Scott Rolf are opening the festival with a kickoff reception tonight at Geneva's upscale Wildwood restaurant, emceed by Geneva Mayor Kevin Burns.

Many of the filmmakers entered in competition are flying in for the party, some from as far away as Europe. And with more people coming to town, the hotels, restaurants, and shops inevitably benefit. That's the reason Sperber, a hairstylist by trade, decided to take on this event.

"I live in Geneva and I work in Geneva and I want it to thrive," Sperber said. And with the level of excitement already generated by the expansion, she said, "it's working."

Besides the extra days and the kickoff, this year's festival features more screenings at more Geneva venues, bigger workshops, and, for the first time, national sponsorships.

All workshops take place Saturday at Riverside Receptions, with Dan Portincaso speaking about story writing at 8 a.m.; Ann Ruark on film production at 9 a.m.; Aaron Crippon on stunts and action shots at 10 a.m., and Schumaker Camera at 11 a.m.

A special screening of "Chicago Overcoat," followed by question-and-answer with the filmmakers, begins at noon. Awards will be presented Saturday night at a reception emceed by Matt Rodewald of NBC5 News Today.

Among the award candidates is Peggy Free, a Geneva native who is a newcomer to filmmaking and actually followed a different career track entirely.

Free, who lived in Geneva from the time she was 7 until graduating from college in 1983, is an avionics systems engineer in Los Angeles who designs user interfaces for air crews - a world apart from the world of "lights, camera, action!"

"I am kind of an oddity at work," she said, "but I do work in a systems group where we're expected to have some creativity."

Her festival entry, "A.W.O.L. (A Way of Life - after breast cancer)" has already been featured at the Los Angeles Women's International Film Festival and was nominated in Geneva as best documentary feature. Free herself was nominated as the best emerging documentary filmmaker.

And all because she once took a weekend crash course in how to make a movie. And because she knows what it is to have cancer.

A few years ago, Free was at a weeklong, pampering retreat for breast cancer survivors, which led to an opportunity to go on safari in Africa. From the wildlife footage she shot, Free created a documentary and showed it to retreat organizers.

"Francine (Zorehkey) said she'd been thinking about asking film students to film the next retreat, 'but how about if you do it?'" Free said. "The whole idea is to advertise the retreat and hopefully gain some funding."

Free said she was happy to bring her camera and newfound skill to document the esteem-restoring retreat from start to finish. But she also saw it as an opportunity to "make a real movie and maybe realize this dream of becoming a real filmmaker."

The dreams of many film artists will be represented in Geneva this weekend, with four narrative features, three documentaries, 21 shorts in four categories, and six screenplays scheduled to run. Submissions came in from nearly a dozen different nations.

For information about the weekend events, visit genevafilmfestival.org.