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Asheville Film Festival 2005 honors Ken Russell with Lifetime Achievement Award

photo © 2005 Renee Wright

British filmmaker Ken Russell – the perpetual enfant terrible of British cinema -- received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2005 Asheville Film Festival presented at The Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa on Saturday, October 29.

The festival - running Thursday-Sunday, Oct. 27-30 with a full slate of features, documentaries, animation, shorts and student films - screened a number of Russell's films including:

• Tommy
• Women In Love
• Altered States
• Crimes of Passion
• The Lair of the White Worm
• Mahler
• The Music Lovers

Also screened: a number of world and North Carolina premieres, including the first N.C. showing of George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck" bringing the festival to a close on Sunday night.

Asheville Film Fest Gets Russelled

We loved our trip to Asheville and the Grove Park Inn for the Asheville Film Festival.

Asheville itself is a very urban place for North Carolina, with its many street muscians, its myraid of quaint and intriguing shoppes, it's unusually varied and hip young denizens mixed quite comfortably with solid and four-square, if relaxed, business types and retirees.

It made for an entertaining Saturday stroll along its hilly streets.

We heard through the inevitable film fest grapevine that Ken Russell and entourage showed up at a late night party one evening and changed the entire dynamic.

Girls vamped.

Guys drank.

It sounded much like the hot parties that made Toronto's fall film festival so well known among the various cliques of filmdom, indie, Hollyweird, and, ah, low budget.

We should talk. Our Super 8 cam battery died inconspicuously at just the wrong moment.

We'll get that filmfest doc done yet, though.

But I digress. We missed the sure-to-be-talked-about party to watch "Zombie Honeymoon."

So, while we're watching this horror-comedy, they're playing real Hollywood party up town (not anywhere near the Grove Park Inn, by the way. Although that place has charms aplenty without any wild parties, at least since Scott Fitzgerald stayed there back in the early part of the last century.

Well, anyway, WE didn't see any wild parties at Grove Park. That burnin' fall fire hearth downstairs in the lobby fronted by rocking chairs, though, is so cozy warm and comfy, you could sit there with a book open in your lap contented for eons).

But I digress. We were talking about seeing "Zombie Honeymoon."