MIFF to Honor Three Filmmakers

At this year’s Maine International Film Festival, the Maine Film Center will present three achievement awards. The honorees are producer Christine Vachon, writer and director Alan Rudolph, and producer and longtime festival supporter Mike Kaplan.

MIFF will offer a retrospective of each honoree’s work. Except for Remember My Name and Luck, Trust & Ketchup, the screenings described below take place during the festival’s first seven days and in the Waterville Opera House. Starred screenings (*) include an award presentation and a free reception afterwards at a restaurant within easy walking distance of the theater.

Christine Vachon, Producer

Christine Vachon’s work behind the camera has shaped American independent cinema for over 30 years. Her works include hits, cult classics, and awards darlings such as The Brutalist (2024), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Carol (2015), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), Still Alice (2014), First Reformed (2017), Materialists (2025), and May December (2023).

MIFF audiences can watch five of Vachon’s films with Vachon in attendance:

• In Far from Heaven (2002), Julianne Moore stars as a 1950s Connecticut housewife whose idyllic life is suddenly upended as she is forced to confront social inequities in her community. (Sat., 4:00)
• Past Lives (2023), which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, stars Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as two, long-separated, childhood friends who reconnect briefly after 20 years. (Sun., 7:00*)
• Late Fame (2025), stars Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee in a deeply human story of a New York poet whose long-lost, single volume of work is rediscovered by a group of much younger poetry enthusiasts. (Late Fame is being shown at film festivals but has not yet been officially released. MIFF attendees will be among the first to see it.) (Mon., 1:00)
• I’m Not There (2007) is an unorthodox biopic about Bob Dylan with six different actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Richard Gere, and Marcus Carl Franklin) portraying six different aspects of Dylan’s personality. (Mon., 7:00)
• Written by, directed by, and starring John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) is a sometimes uproarious, sometimes poignant, musical comedy about a gender-queer East Berlin punk rocker. (Tues., 4:00)

Alan Rudolph, Writer and Director

According to MIFF’s founding program director Ken Eisen, Alan Rudolph is “one of the most distinctive and innovative of genuine American mavericks, working in and out of Hollywood and the American independent film movement.…‘An Alan Rudolph Film’ credit means just that: a film that embodies his very distinctive personal sensibility and touch.”

MIFF will screen four Rudolph films:

• Trouble in Mind (1985), a stylish neo-noir where the lives and dreams of mobsters, cops, and civilians intertwine. (Mon., 4:00)
• Choose Me (1984), a cult classic about the tangled and complicated loves and anxieties of a love doctor radio host, a bar owner, and a drifter. (Tues., 7:00*)
• The Moderns (1988), a Roaring ’20s dramedy starring Wallace Shawn, Keith Carradine, and Geraldine Chaplin. (Thurs., 4:00)
• Remember My Name (1978), a thriller about a woman just released from prison (Geraldine Chaplin) who stalks her ex-husband (Anthony Perkins) and his new wife (Berry Berenson). (Fri., 7/17, 3:40, Cinema 2)

Rudolph will also attend a screening of Robert Altman’s Nashville (Wed., 7:00), on which he served as assistant director.

Mike Kaplan, Producer and Longtime MIFF Supporter

“Mike Kaplan has made his own unique path through American moviemaking for the past five decades in ways visible and deliberately invisible,” says Ken Eisen. “Kaplan is perhaps best known for his close work with two titans of unique and great 20^th-century American filmmaking — Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman — serving as a publicist for each of them.” He has also worked for previous MIFF honorees Malcolm McDowell and Clive Owen and appears in Choose Me, described above.

MIFF29 will present two Kaplan films:

• Luck, Trust & Ketchup: Robert Altman in Carver Country (1993), a must-see documentary for Altman fans that goes behind the scenes of Short Cuts, Altman’s 1993 dramedy based on the short stories of Raymon Carver about the lives of ordinary Los Angelenos. (Wed., 3:40, Cinema 2)
• The Whales of August (1987), the beloved, Maine-set drama starring Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price, Mary Steenburgen, Harry Carey Jr., and Ann Sothern in an Oscar-nominated performance. (Thurs., 7:00*)

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