“After the success of NFF 15, it was inevitable that we would need to expand the festival’s length and scope to accommodate the growing interest,” said Executive Director Colin Stanfield. “Along with the later dates allowing more families to attend after the school year wraps, the festival stands to help bring more people to the island and in turn positively affect local business economically.” Passes are currently on sale on the festival website, with individual tickets on sale May 27.

The opening night films will be Disney/Pixar’s “Cars 2″, and “Buck”, a documentary about horse trainer Buck Brannman. “Cars 2″, directed by John Lasseter, follows Lightning McQueen and his best friend Mater as they race around the globe and unwittingly find themselves caught up in international espionage. “Cars 2″ writer Ben Queen will receive the New Voices in Screenwriting award.

Closing the festival will be “Higher Ground” by first time director Vera Farmiga, who also stars in the film.

Awards this year include Showtime’s annual Tony Cox Award for Screenwriting, The Audience Award for Best Feature & Best Short, Showtime’s Tony Cox Awards for Best Screenwriting in a Feature Film and Short Film, Teen View on NFF Award, Best Storytelling in a Documentary Film, and the Adrienne Shelly Excellence in Filmmaking Award, which gives a cash prize annually to a promising female writer/director at the Festival.

The line up:

* Being Elmo

* A Puppeteer’s Journey

* Benavides Born

* Beyond the Road; Bobby Fischer Against the World

* Buck

* Cars 2

* Circumstance

* Connected

* Donor Unknown

* Five Days Gone

* Granito

* Happy, Happy

* Higher Ground

* Hot Coffee

* The Last Rites of Joe May

* Life in a Day

* The Lie

* Mia and the Migoo

* Mozart’s Sister

* The Names of Love

* Nantucket by Nature

* On the Ice

* One Lucky Elephant

* The Other F Word

* Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times

* Senna; Submarine

* Terri; To be Heard

* Tyrannosaur

* Unraveled

* We Still Live Here: As Nutayunean

* When the Drum is Beating

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Nantucket Film Festival 2011

The project began as a visit to the Nantucket Public Schools to talk about installation art:

“I was talking to the students about installation art and then we talked about the differences of a wish, a prayer, a thought and an intention, and if there’s a different weight to each one,” he said. “Then they were given a flag to write, draw or paint whatever their mood or thought was or their wish. That went on for about a school year and a half.”

Carapezza then took the idea to other locations like The Chicken Box nightclub, St. Paul’s Church and senior-citizen centers – anywhere he could go as long as he had enough time and money to buy the bed sheets and the paint.

Send us your pics of Wishes From Nantucket flags in your neighbourhood, and we’ll add them to our Nantucket Art photo gallery.

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Wishes From Nantucket

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Featured Nantucket Photography Gallery – Laura Poole

The shores of Vancouver Island’s wild west coast are overflowing with Whale based Art & celebrations during this week’s Pacific Rim Whale Festival, as they celebrate the arrival of upwards of 20,000 grey whales on their northbound migration from the Baja Peninsula to Alaska’s Bering Strait and beyond.

Visit the link to find out more about the Pacific Rim Whale Festival and support this great cause

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Whale Art Festival

The history of Nantucket is inexorably linked to that of the whale – and Moby-Dick. A fathomless source for literary exploration, Melville’s masterpiece has also inspired a stunning array of book illustrations, prints, comics, paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and even architectural designs.

Unpainted to the Last by Elizabeth Schultz illuminates this impressive body of work and shows how it opens up our understanding of both Moby-Dick and twentieth-century American art.

Deftly interweaving words with images, Elizabeth Schultz radically reframes our most famous literary symbol and provides a profoundly new way of “reading” one of the key texts in American literature. Ranging from the realists to the abstract expressionists, from the famous to the obscure, Schultz reveals how these artists have tried both to capture the essence of Moby-Dick‘s many meanings and to use it as a springboard for their own provocative imaginations.

Moby-Dick has attracted some remarkable book illustrators in Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, Garrick Palmer, Barry Moser, and Bill Sienkiewicz, among others represented here. It has also inspired extraordinary creations by such prominent artists as Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Sam Francis, Benton Spruance, Leonard Baskin, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Ellis, Ralph Goings, Seymour Lipton, Walter Martin, Tony Rosenthal, Richard Serra, and Theodore Roszak.

Reviews:

About the Author

Elizabeth A. Schulz is a Chancellors’ Club Teaching Professor of English at the University of Kansas. A former Fulbright Lecturer, she has taught and written widely in the fields of American studies and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature with a special emphasis on feminism and multiculturalism.

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Unpainted to the Last – Moby Dick and Twentieth Century American Art

Work copyright Zoe Brookes

We loved stumbling upon this blog and finding the exquisite doodles of Zoe Brookes. Of her Nantucket inspired sketches she writes “Lanterns, flags, sea shells, some harpoons mixed in there, plus some general nautical imagery for good measure. Plans? Definitely a strung up lantern pattern for maybe fabric application (I’m thinking a skirt?) and maybe play the old school metal ones against a more vibrant, playful paper lantern design. Also I want to play with the flags more! Results to come!”

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Nantucket Inspired Art

You can see them on his blog Mahon About Town.

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AAN Sidewalk Art Show 2010

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In the Heart of the Sea – Nathaniel Philbrick