Woods Hole Film Festival Has Cape Connections

     The Cape may be known for many things, but filmmaking is not one of them.
     Kristin L. Alexander of Woods Hole can vouch for that. Her short film “Portrait of a Master,” which will screen at the Woods Hole Film Festival, is a prime example. It was shot on a shoestring budget and, as for its production crew, she was responsible for everything from lighting to camera work to audio.
     Her work represents the essence of independent filmmaking, Ms. Alexander said. “It is terribly independent,” she said. “There are not that many filmmakers on the Cape. I try and collaborate when I can, but a lot of this is done by myself.”
     However, the Woods Hole Film Festival, which begins tomorrow and runs through Saturday, August 2, is trying to change that.
     For many years, executive producer Judy Laster said, the festival has been encouraging those from Cape Cod to film and submit work that otherwise may not make it onto the big screen. It is a way to promote the medium and help establish an industry, albeit small, in the area.
     The festival has a Cape Cod section devoted to area filmmakers. Ms. Alexander’s short is one of three such films that will be featured next Wednesday at 5 PM at Redfield Auditorium.
     “Portrait of a Master,” Ms. Alexander said, is actually a work in progress that will feature those from Woods Hole and beyond. “This is a section of that,” she said, focusing on artist Doug Rugh of Cataumet, who has a studio at the Cataumet Arts Center.
     Ms. Alexander has known him for several years after taking one of his painting classes. “He is an incredible painter and is really talented,” she said. “He can just really depict a scene. He has done a lot of different paintings of areas I grew up in around Woods Hole.”
     His work was the perfect fodder for her documentary, she said, in which she wanted to create a series of portraits of people involved in intriguing and remarkable work throughout the world.
     She spent a day shooting video in his studio as well as in his home, to give audiences a glimpse of his life as an artist.
     Through her work on this project, Ms. Alexander has begun work on a separate documentary on John S. Todd of Hatchville. “I started working on a small portrait on Dr. Todd, but this has turned into a larger movie because he is doing incredible work,” she said.
     Dr. Todd, who heads the nonprofit Ocean Arks International and the private Todd Ecological Design, recently won a Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for his reforestation design work in Appalachia. Ms. Alexander’s film will document not only this work, but his creation of the eco-machine, a water purification system that works in tandem with nature.
     As with any independent film, Ms. Alexander said, she is not only concentrating on the content, but on raising enough funds to produce the documentary.
     While filmaking may be a solitary world on the Cape, Ms. Alexander said, it does not dampen her passion “for making documentaries and bringing to life the things I see and the stories that are out there...I have a great time filming and getting people comfortable with the camera, so they don’t realize it is there.”
     That same enthusiasm can be heard in Richard Brundage’s voice. A 1977 graduate of Falmouth High School, now living in New York City as an actor, Mr. Brundage only recently got into acting, after having been a math teacher, a librarian at the New York City Public Library, and an editor of classical music scores.
     “I had always had a fantasy that it would be fun to be on stage or be in a movie, and, one day when I was 39, I signed up on a whim for an acting class,” he said. “Within a few weeks, I was pretty much ruined for doing any kind of useful work. I was completely converted. I guess the main thing for me is this never feels like work. It feels like play. It is the most fun thing I have ever done.”
     He admittedly is not famous, but still said, “I feel really lucky. I’ve been in some 35 independent films, where I’ve had speaking roles, not counting the extra roles in the big Hollywood-type movies.”
     Next Wednesday, “Fourhand,” a romantic comedy in which he plays one of the lead characters, Richard, an amateur pianist who vies for the love of a woman with Frank, his piano teacher, will premier as another of the Cape Cod selections.
     As an example of how difficult it is to make a movie, Mr. Brundage said, “Fourhand” was shot over a one-month period in 2004, but because of problems with sound it was not finished until this year. “I pretty much gave up,” he said. “I’ve been in so many films that never got finished, which is a pretty frequent occurrence in the film world, even at the Hollywood level.”
     Earlier this spring, he said, the producers contacted him that the movie was finished. “It really amazed me they had finished it,” he said.
     This will be the second Woods Hole Film Festival he will attend as the star of a movie. Two years ago, he attended the premiere of “You Are Alone,” a dark thriller in which he played a leading role.
     In addition to Mr. Brundage, “Fourhand” also has another Falmouth connection; its screenwriter, Hortense F. Gerardo, worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory as a research scientist in the early 1990s.
     While she makes her living as an anthropologist—she has taught at Lasell College in Boston the past two years—she recently has been bitten by the screen- and playwriting bug. “Fourhand” is the first screenplay she has written that has gotten produced.
     The inspiration for the movie centers around fourhand piano playing, in which two or more people play at once. “I thought it was a good metaphor for life and love in general,” she said.
     She has since sold another screenplay, “Dancing in Exile,” which she calls a companion piece to “Fourhand,” but represents the darker side of that love triangle.
     As to what she likes about writing, she said, is “sitting down and creating a new world. With ‘Fourhand’ I never knew where I was going to go. I tapped into the characters and they drove the car.”
     The end result, she said, is an “enjoyable movie. One of the things I like about it is there are no car chase scenes, overt violence, or graphic nudity, yet I feel it is a compelling story because it is about friendship, love, and music.”
     It is the festival’s goal, Ms. Laster said, to foster this type of creativity from more Cape residents. Starting next year, she said, the festival hopes to organize the Cape and Islands Filmmaker’s Collaborative, which would bring together those interested in the video and film industry as a way to share information and encourage collaboration.