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Last night at the AMC NorthPark, where he accepted the AFI Dallas Star Award following a screening of Chinatown, the film’s writer, Robert Towne, spoke of how films were once the place where audiences and filmmakers met to share their stories. In the 1930s and ’40s, he said, those who made the movies and those who consumed them shared “a common bond, common values — you know, give the underdog a break.” That disappeared in the ’50s and ’60s, he insisted, only to resurface in the 1970s — when cinema had become the opposition, a clenched fist raised against politicians, ideologies, scandals and Vietnam.
At its best, said Towne, “audiences and filmmakers speak to each other,” especially at film festivals such as the AFI Dallas International Film Festival: “Audiences and filmmakers come together to learn a common language.”
In that spirit, then, these suggested offerings from today’s schedule: Plano native Keith Maitland’s The Eyes of Me, which is, in some ways, the quintessential high-school film full of the requisite angst and hope and despair and joy you’ll find in every single hallway and every single locker. But The Eyes of Me has its own singular twist: It’s a documentary set inside the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, where Maitland gathered hundreds of hours of footage to tell the stories of four wholly distinct subjects who share but a single trait: They are blind. A remarkable accomplishment, The Eyes of Me screens at 12:30 this afternoon at the Magnolia and again tomorrow at 2 at the Magnolia. Here’s the trailer:
