WV FILMMAKER TO SCREEN SHORTS AT FALL WVIFF
"Audition" is a tragic comedy about William Ashe, a man who believes in signs. William, an aspiring actor, travels to the big city to audition for a movie and gets sidetracked by murder, mayhem, and mistaken identity. "Audition," says Holdren, "is a dark love-letter to people who haven't quite found their way in life just yet."
The movie – which won awards for Best Student Short Film and Best Regional Student Film at the 2007 Bluegrass Independent Film Festival in La Grange. KY, and an Award of Excellence from the 2007 West Virginia Filmmakers Film Festival – will mark its 15th and final film festival screening in Charleston at the Capitol Theater, where a part of the movie was shot in 2005 involving local actors and crew. For Holdren, it’s eerily appropriate, since the movie was mostly written as he and co-writer Joseph W. Ng downed coffees at Taylor Books and strolled around downtown Charleston during the summer of 2004.
“Play,” on the other hand, is a comedy of manners where the audience is the show during a night at the theatre. The short recently tied for Best Narrative Short at the 2008 WV Filmmakers Film Festival, and previously screened at the Rockport Film Festival in Texas.
Meanwhile, “The Paradigm Shift” has previously won the Audience Award at the Main Line Film Festival in Wayne, PA, and Best Student Narrative at the Peace On Earth Film Festival in Chicago, IL. Written and produced by Holdren – and directed by Jon Barr – the film is about an activist history professor (H. Michael Walls - 12 Monkeys) who assigns his class to design a plan to assassinate the President. The repercussions are immediate for everyone involved, particularly upon the professor’s teaching assistant (Nicholas Wilder - Flogging Margaret), whose reluctance to choose a side plants the young man right in the middle.
While this may sound like very serious subject matter, audiences will be surprised by the amount of humor in the film, which takes its context as a response to recent controversies where college professors have gotten in trouble for political statements made in class.
“Even though the university environment is supposed to be open for ideas,” says Holdren, “you hear several stories nowadays of so-called ‘nutty professors’ being chastised on cable news shows for stepping over the line in their dissent. The film touches upon this atmosphere with humor, while still focusing on the personal dilemmas of these two characters.”
The upcoming screening marks a happy return to the WVIFF for Holdren, who received awards during their college competitions in 2001 and 2002 for short works created while Holdren was a student at West Virginia State University (then College). He credits those experiences as helping him get accepted as a graduate student at Temple University, where he received his M.F.A. in Film & Media Arts in May 2008.
Holdren is also a West Virginia native, a 1997 graduate of Winfield High School, a double-graduate (2001 & 2002) of West Virginia State University. More information, along with trailers, is available at www.samholdren.com or at www.youtube.com.
Following these screenings at 8 p.m. will be the Charleston debut of the feature film “Transsiberian,” which is the dynamic new crime/drama from director Brad Anderson (The Machinist) about a Trans-Siberian train journey from China to Moscow that becomes a thrilling chase of deception and murder when an American couple encounters a mysterious pair of fellow travelers.
Production stills and posters are available electronically upon request.
For more information, check out www.samholdren.com or www.imdb.com/name/nm2435996
Trailers for all films are available at http://www.youtube.com/user/samholdren
