Big Bear Film Festival to Launch in September, Led by Former Outfest Director Damien Navarro

The Big Bear Film Festival — formerly known as the Green Jack International Film Festival — is launching September 24-29, the brainchild of the newly inaugurated Big Bear Film Institute. The famed California mountaintop destination, which has been seen in numerous films and television shows dating back a century, will host what the BBFI is calling a 'boundary breaking celebration' that encompasses not just film, but animation, podcasting, gaming, stand-up comedy, Indigenous storytelling, experimental sound design, and AI.
CEO Damien S. Navarro, who previously served as the executive director of Outfest, noted that over 400 titles have used Big Bear as a backdrop, including 'Magnolia,' 'The Last of the Mohicans,' 'Creep,' 'Gone with the Wind,' and 'Old Yeller.'
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'Its alpine terrain has doubled for the Rockies, Appalachians, and even European forests —making it one of the most versatile and under-celebrated locations in film history,' Navarro said.
Festival features include a 'Peak Pitch' marketplace for original projects to connect with potential buyers, a 'Music Village & Audio Pavillion' lakeside retreat, an expo for gaming and animation content, an outdoor and drone cinematography showcase, and plans for a future 5-day 'Alpine Story Lab' residency.
'The Big Bear Film Festival is unapologetically built for the next generation of storytelling,' Navarro told IndieWire. 'Attendees can expect an eclectic mix: elevated genre films, climate-forward documentaries, Indigenous and Latinx voices, immersive experiences, gaming [and] animation showcases, audio storytelling, and outdoor/adventure films. We're especially excited about spotlighting IP across mediums — from podcasts to graphic novels to AI-created narratives.'
Navarro added that BBFI wasn't just launching a festival; 'we're launching a movement.'
'Backed by the newly formed Big Bear Film Institute and Film Office, this is a year-round ecosystem for creators and culture-shifters,' he explained. 'With partners like Utopia, we're planting a flag for what a future-forward, community-rooted film culture can look like. Think Sundance-meets-SXSW with boots, brains, and a view.'
BBFI's partner Utopia was founded by Robert Schwartzman in 2018.
'Our mission at Utopia has not only been to support how independent films reach audiences through direct acquisitions and full distribution support, but to provide filmmakers with alternative, empowering self-distribution tools and to challenge our industry by providing additional meaningful, viable outlets for monetization,' Schwartzman said in a press release. 'Partnering with the Big Bear Film Institute and Festival allows us to do exactly that — giving a range of creators and distributors a meaningful new environment to engage and launch their work within an energized and thoughtful community.'
For information, sponsorships, and submissions, visit the festival's website.
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Hidden Gem Movies To Stream On Hulu

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FrancoFEST, Something Else! Festival this weekend

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Boston Globe

11 hours ago

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‘Native Prospects,' a contemporary view of the American landscape through an Indigenous lens

Kay WalkingStick's 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow),' 2020. It's her take on Thomas Cole's famous work "View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm – the Oxbow,' from 1836. Image courtesy of Kay WalkingStick/JSP Art Photography/Hales, London and New York It's hard to even write those words, true though they may be. American art history offers a broader reading of American history writ large, if you read between the lines; and in the realm of landscape painting, what's left from the frame is often as significant as what's not. 'Native Prospects,' curated by Scott Manning Stevens, who is Akwesasne Mohawk and the director of Native American and Indigenous studies at Syracuse University, is an exercise in history much in need of revision. Importantly, and uniquely, the exhibition is not a simple point/counterpoint in the depiction of the American landscape — though there is that, and we're getting there — but a consideration of entirely different points of view: One colonial, one Indigenous, and the gulf, pictorially and historically, that exists between them. Advertisement The counterpoint is bluntly provided by the Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick, who can be relied on for such things; her lifetime project has been one of revision at its most provocative. Earlier this year at Thomas Cole's 'Landscape Scene from 'The Last of the Mohicans,' 1827. Thomas Cole/Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, Gift of Stephen C. Clark/Richard Walker Over decades, WalkingStick, now in her late 80s, has painted American vistas much as Cole and his peers did: as grand visions of an untamed wild. Often, she coopts their exact framing, a blunt reclamation of lost land from their gaze. But WalkingStick overlays her paintings with the specific patterning of the Indigenous people who live there, invoking a kind of seance for the land's rightful stewards, most often excised from the frame. In 'Native Prospects,' her one painting is a compositional replica of one of Cole's most famous works, 'View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm — the Oxbow,' from 1836. In her version, she softens the contours of land and sky and abandons the hand-of-God maelstrom of unearthly mist looming in the heavens, wraithlike and coal-gray. The title of the 2020 piece says much: 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks,' the tribe native to the region, conspicuously absent in his frame. WalkingStick calls them forth with a bright floral pattern tracking the bottom of the frame, an ancestral motif that stamps their presence on the land. Absence, meet presence. Enough said. Advertisement Kay WalkingStick's 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow),' 2020. Image courtesy of Kay WalkingStick/JSP Art Photography/Hales, London and New York But 'Native Prospects' is less about confrontation than it is assertion of difference, persistence, and a line drawn from past to present. That part matters: Indigenous artists here are contemporary, a declaration of a thriving culture that survived colonial deprivations of the land to flourish. Colonial artists in this exhibition are anchored in the past, often an ugly one, and tied to those deprivations: Cole's 'Solitary Lake in New Hampshire,' of a lone Indigenous man minimized against a glorious alpine scene, was painted in 1830, the same year as the federal Indian Removal Act went into effect, requiring all tribes east of the Mississippi to uproot and move west. His 'Landscape Scene from The Last of the Mohicans,' 1827, is the visual embodiment of James Fenimore Cooper's 'vanishing race' epic (the two were neighbors, and fellow aesthetic travelers). 'Native Prospects' connects Indigenous art on a continuum, from a faraway past to the here and now. How far? One image is a photo recreation of a Powhatan's Mantle, four deerhides sewn together and studded with shell and sinew to depict a human figure flanked by animals. Given to English colonists by Wahunsenacawh, the chief of the Powhatan Confederacy 400 years ago in modern-day Virginia, it's believed to be a kind of map — a depiction of land, and an expression of sovereignty. Jeremy Frey's 'First Light,' 2023. Jeremy Frey / Photography by Jared Lank Nearby, the immediate present: Teresa Baker's 2019 'Forest‚' an abstraction of green and gray — yarn and, poetically, astroturf — mimics the deerhide's scale. With strands of willow dangling from its surface, 'Forest' rebukes abstraction's central tenet of being unmoored in the physcial world; instead Baker, who is Mandan and Hidatsa, anchors her piece in the northern plains, where she grew up. Advertisement Just to the left of Powhatan's Mantle is Alan Michelson (Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River), "Third Bank of the River (Panorama)," detail, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Alan Michelson And Alan Michelson, who Boston audiences might know best from 'The Knowledge Keepers,' Next to it, Michelson's 'Third Bank of the River (Panorama),' from 2024, adopts the colored bands of the wampum belt in a broad photo collage, infusing its linear color scheme with the landscape of the riverbank of the Mohawk reservation strung along its crest. From the distant past to the here and now, land has meant sovereignty, and survival. In the eerie vista of Michelson's panorama, you can start to imagine the future. Advertisement NATIVE PROSPECTS: INDIGENEITY AND LANDSCAPE Through July 6 . Farnsworth Art Museum , 16 Museum St., Rockland, Maine . 207-596-6457, Murray Whyte can be reached at