Cinematic work of 3 Hopkins faculty members on screen at Maryland Film Festival

Three films from Johns Hopkins faculty members are part of the lineup at the Maryland Film Festival this week, including an award-winning Argentinian feature.

Filmmaker Matt Porterfield, a JHU Film and Media Studies lecturer, is one of the creative minds behind the experimental feature Kékszakállú. The fictional narrative, which screens twice at the festival, explores the day-to-day lives of several upper-class Argentinian girls on the cusp of adulthood.

Porterfield co-wrote and co-produced Kékszakállú in 2015, working with debut director Gastón Solnicki. The film has already made the rounds at several festivals in the U.S. and abroad, winning the International Critics Award (the FIPRESCI prize) at the Venice Film Festival last year.

The Maryland festival brings Porterfield's film to his hometown, Baltimore, which the filmmaker has used as a primary setting for much his past work, including features like Putty Hill and I Used to Be Darker.

The 19th annual film festival, which runs through the weekend at venues in and around the city's Station North Arts and Entertainment District, also features short films directed by JHU film lecturers Karen Yasinsky and Jimmy Joe Roche.

Yasinsky's short, The Perpetual Motion of My Love for You, presents a collage of narrative images and sounds, slipping between themes of "domesticity, boredom, female and maternal forces, and war," according to the festival's program.

Roche's To You Dear Friend was the product of "an intense bout of insomnia," the filmmaker writes in the program. His short film, made with homemade lenses and silent backdrop, aims to capture the trance-like state between waking and dreaming.

All three of the Hopkins filmmakers will have screenings Friday at the festival's premiere venue: the newly renovated Parkway Theatre. The historic 102-year-old theater house just reopened after a long period of dormancy.

Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels was instrumental in getting the university on board as one of the partners to the Maryland Film Festival in the $18.5 million rehabilitation of the Parkway. Daniels is also a member of the film festival's board.

The festival's events this week will be the first time the public gets a look inside the 5 W. North Ave. theater, which is now officially known as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway.

Kékszakállú plays at the Parkway on Friday at 4:55 p.m., and the short film selection featuring Roche and Yasinsky's work will screen there at 7 p.m. that evening. Details for other screening locations and times are available on the film festival's schedule.