Town Tales: "Crawford" and "Trinidad" Screenings
Director David Modigliani at the first hometown screening of his film "Crawford" in Crawford, TX.
This past week was a good one for "local boy makes good" stories with a pair of screenings that both feature the stories of small towns.
On Wednesday P.J. Raval held a sneak preview fundraiser screening of his new doc Trinidad (set in Trinidad, Colorado) which will debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival later this month. A sternly worded e-mail from Matt Dentler (and read by Raval at the screening) reminded us that mum's the word on this film until the actual world premiere in L.A., but it's not giving anything away to say that the local crowd at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar received the film warmly.
Trinidad follows a group of transgendered women who have all had gender reassignment surgery in Trinidad, which is now the "world capital of sex changes" and, according to Raval, should have New York screenings and additional screenings in Austin following the L.A. fest.
Sunday saw the first hometown screening of Crawford, David Modigliani's chronicle of eight years in the life of the quintessential American small town. Crawford, Texas, you may recall, became the official home of George W. Bush shortly before his campaign for president in 2000. The town hasn't been the same since. First there were a few years of booming tourism followed by mobs of Iraq war protestors (both of which brought money to town) and finally stagnation as Bush's approval ratings sank. Modigliani said early in the evening that he always knew he would eventually have to show it to the townspeople, so he tried to make it as balanced as possible. Reaction from the Crawford crowd was overwhelmingly positive -- even from the townsperson who grudgingly admitted during the Q&A that the film was reasonably evenhanded in its treatment of politics, though he still felt it "leaned a little to the left."