And let's say good morning to Abbey Esther Lime from the Milwaukee Film Festival. She's the program coordinator for this year's film festival. Good morning, Abby.
Good morning. My life revolves around movies. It just does. I can't help it. I always did since I'm a little kid. Did you grow up loving movies?
I did. I used to have a movie night with my family almost every single week and my siblings and I would watch as many movies as we could on the weekend.
I have a lot of really great memories of picking out movies at blockbuster and running home with them to be able to spend time either with my siblings or with my whole family to watch them.
Not stealing them. You mean paying to rent them and then leaving, right? Of course. Okay, just the way you sound. It sounded like you put them on the your coat and ran out with them. Okay.
I have a superpower. A lot of people don't know this, but my superpower is I can remember every single movie I've seen since the early back to late 50s.
Every movie I've seen and the theater or driving. I've seen it at every single movie. I could tell you if you name the movie, I'll tell you if I've seen it and tell you where I've seen it.
I just a superpower I have. That's pretty good, isn't it? Yeah, that's really cool. It's better than anything else. Marvel characters have. All right, the Milwaukee Film Festival for people that don't know give a little background on it if you can.
Yeah, so the Milwaukee Film Festival happens every spring. It happens this year at the Oriental Theater and the downer theaters. We play movies from all of us. We play short films.
Documentary fiction, everything in. And it is for 15 days from April 24th through May.
Now, for people that don't know and they haven't been downtown on the east side of Milwaukee, the Oriental Theater is one of the original movie palaces in this country.
It is just a knockout. If you want to see the way movies were seen in the 20s, 30s and 40s, go to the Oriental Theater. They've just maintained.
Full aura of old movie palaces. I love. Theater and it's still thriving, which is good because a lot of the old movie palaces are not.
So, so what how does why did we pick the Oriental and the downer any particular reason or just because they're there.
Because we operate them year round. So we operate the Oriental and the downer as year round cinemas through the entire year.
So it makes it really easy for.
I'm doing festival. Okay, so you are the program coordinator. So you have the power.
You are the power broker. You get to pick the films that will be shown.
The entire film festival. How do you do that? How do you pick if there's millions of movies out there? How do you know what to pick?
A lot of different things go into it. It is a lot of fun to be able to watch so many different movies to decide what goes into the festival.
I think this year I watched somewhere in the realm of like 200 for consideration. You include short film.
So it is a really cool experience and something that I look for. I do a lot of the programming for sound vision, which is the music documentaries.
So it does help to narrow it down if you're not looking at every single movie that's on the festival circuit.
But I'm looking at the music documentaries and I like to find stories about people whose stories you may not have heard before,
but names you recognize or to cover different genres of music when I'm doing sound vision.
I also help program for cream city cinema, which is the local film.
So we want to try to support as many local filmmakers as we can and through these films and these screenings,
trying to find different stories being told about things going on locally as well as supporting the work of fiction filmmakers locally.
So it is a lot of it kind of depends on the year, but like this year, we're looking, we were looking at a lot of different documentaries and just looking at, you know,
the importance and the timeliness of all these different stories being told.
Local filmmakers actually on the air with us every day. He works for civic media our company. His name is Pete Schwabba.
He made a movie a couple of years ago about I think it's the king of green Bay.
I'm trying to remember the name of the film now and he'll be honest just a few seconds here with his update is entertainment update,
but he's a local filmmaker lives up in green Bay.
And there are a lot of them out there. As a matter of fact, I get to tell people just because you never heard of a film before,
doesn't mean it's not going to become your favorite case in point.
The Academy Awards a couple of years ago chose no madland as its best picture of the year.
And I said to my wife, do you ever hear of this movie? No, let's take a look at it.
It's one of our favorites now. We watched it at least three or four times.
And one with Frances McDormand, I don't know if she won the best actress.
You may have no madland, but it's not one of our favorites and we never heard of it before it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Same with this year's Anora never heard of it before, but we're going to see it because you never know.
Somebody picked it as best picture of the year. So a lot of these films that people never heard,
it might become their favorites, right? Yeah, absolutely.
I'm speaking of Anora. It was a movie that I was invited to watch for work.
And I also hadn't heard of it. And I fell in love with it the first time I watched it.
And as I'm programming for the festival, I end up watching a lot of things that I wouldn't necessarily watch on my own.
But there are definitely things that have become some of my favorite films and that I get really excited to bring to the audiences in Milwaukee,
because I know that their films they wouldn't have access to if we weren't playing them at the film festival.
We always encourage people to go to films that they maybe wouldn't think about going to right away or maybe that don't sound like,
I have to go see that right this second. You know, we have some of those bigger blockbusters,
but it is there's a lot of really great hidden gems of the program.
Did you ever see No Mad Land? I did. I loved it.
And for people that don't know, you got to watch this movie. It's about people.
And this is true. People that live in their campers and cars and just travel America.
They have no homes. This is just way the way they live. They just travel and they they want it in groups.
They pull their trailers together or they're they're, you know, vans.
And that's just the way they live. And it's a it's a story about one lady who loses her job.
And this is her lifestyle. Now it's an amazing movie. Of course, you have to have a good director.
Crypto you have a good actor to make it worthwhile. Now, here's the problem.
Great movie on one that you can't over. It's just so bad.
You've said all right. Yeah.
You know, Cisco and Ebert, the great reviewers for the Chicago newspapers are interviewed once.
They won the interview said, I'd love to have your job watching movies the whole day.
He said, yes, but how about sitting through six hours of bad movies every week?
Well, you can't leave the theater. You just got to sit there and watch the screen.
And it's really bad. So sometimes they're not so good.
But I assume you pick out what you feel will be a crowd favorite, right?
Yeah, we definitely tried to read out any of those ones that we think will have the,
that we hope the audience will be thinking the whole time. I hope the movie doesn't end.
Yeah, hold on a second. We're talking to Abby Astroline.
Abby is the program coordinator for the Milwaukee Film Festival.
It runs though April 24th through May 8th is it? I think May 8th.
And you can get tickets. We're going to tell you how to get the tickets in just a minute.
Don't worry. We're going to get to all that. I get to their website,
which is M K E film dot org M K E film dot org and really information is on there.
And I'm happy to say that civic media and WRGN, one of the media sponsors for the Milwaukee Film Festival this year.
WRGN
718 at WRGN local news, timeless hits.
Abby Astroline is here. She's the program coordinator for the Milwaukee Film Festival,
coming to the Oriental and Downer theaters on the east side of Milwaukee.
And that will be April 24th through May 8th. How do you get tickets?
I'm going to go to the movies. How do I get them?
So you can go to M K E film dot org flash MFF.
And that'll take you to kind of the Milwaukee Film Festival homepage tickets go on to
the public today online. It'll be available in the box office.
Later this week, the in person Oriental.
The entire lineup is available on our.
Now, the downer's also an historic theater. Don't get.
But just that.
Let's look when you get inside the Oriental theater.
Movies there. My son is an actor. He did, you know, not full time.
And one of his movies premiered at the Oriental Theater.
So we went there for the big premiere.
And they had three movies on the marquee.
Jakes out to which was his film. They had the.
Three movie off the movie was she was in was a.
Oh, Mama Mia. All three were on the marquee.
So he was his film was in the main auditorium, the big one.
And after it was over, they were taking down the letters on the marquee.
And he looks up. He says.
Up one day down the next that show business.
That is so true.
But yeah, it was great to see his movie on the big screen at the Oriental.
I loved it.
Okay, so can you give us some of the hot titles to look out for at the film festival this year?
Yeah, definitely.
One of the ones I would definitely recommend checking out would be our opening night film Sally.
It's about the astronaut Sally ride.
You learn a lot about her journey to.
Becoming an astronaut as well as a lot of her life that was never seen or known until after she died.
The filmmaker is a local Milwaukee filmmaker Christina Kassantini.
She will be in attendance as well as Sally rides life partner.
So that'll be a really great screening.
So that's opening night on April 24th.
We also have a couple really great vocal films.
One film is called cycle.
It's about the police killing of Tyrese Westen.
We're seeing so it's a really powerful story that goes through everything that has happened since that day as well as how it kind of has
rippled out nationally and how these different things have impacted different corners of the world from right here in the Milwaukee area.
Also films like one of the sound vision films that I mentioned.
Sound vision being our music documentary that I mentioned earlier.
One of my favorite films that is in that program this year is called Janice Ian Breaking Silence.
It's about Janice Ian and one thing that I love about that movie is that if you saw movies like a complete unknown,
a lot of the people that are featured in that movie are also kind of main players in Janice Ian's story.
Janice Ian existed in kind of the background of the Bob Dylan universe.
She was a lot younger than a lot of the other people at the time.
And so you see there are interviews of people like Joan Diaz.
And you hear a lot about how kind of the music industry has changed and shaped and how the culture around it has changed.
And it was a really, really fascinating documentary.
And one of my favorites that I watched this year while programming.
It was a song from Janice Ian at 17.
Remember playing it on the radio when it came out at 17.
She had a lot of good songs, but that was your big top 10 hit at 17.
What else do you got any others you want to talk about?
There's a bunch of really great, another local film that I'm really excited about is called All That Glitters.
It is a fiction film that I view W.A.
And so it is not only by a re-suitable by Milwaukee area filmmaker, but also with an entire Milwaukee crew.
And a bunch of the filmmakers are going to be in attendance at all three of those Q&As.
Something that's really fun about the world.
That there's always somebody there from the film team who will be there to do the Q&As as well as with our short films.
We have the local short programs will have each short will be followed by a Q&A from one of the filmmakers as well.
One day, this is on a, I think, Memorial Day weekend back in the 80s.
I was working at a radio station at 7th Wisconsin Avenue.
And it was a holiday.
And I noticed the library across the street in Milwaukee Public Library had the windows blacked out.
I said, well, that's interesting. Then I saw like lightning flashes in there.
And I said, what the heck is going on?
I got off the air. I walked over there and they were filming a movie inside the library.
And they used the lobby as a bank.
And they were filming the movie Dillinger inside the public library.
You never know where you're going to run into a movie being filmed.
And they got one of the story for you.
So I'm sitting at Central Park West in Manhattan, the by Columbus Circle.
And I see a banner across Columbus Circle saying Palantine for president.
It was 1975. And I figured out what the guy's running for president.
I see cameras all over the place. They're filming a political commercial for him.
About seven months later, six months later, I'm watching TV and they're reviewing a movie.
And I see Palantine for president.
I said, wait a second.
I know I've seen that somewhere before. I can't put my finger on it.
Where did I see that?
When I was sitting there at Central Park West, they were filming the movie Taxi Driver
with Robert De Niro.
And of course, he wasn't a big star at the time with Martin Scorsese there and everything.
I was standing right next to the guy. I didn't even recognize him.
But yeah, so you never know where you're going to see a movie being filmed.
So that's kind of fun.
Have you ever seen a movie filmed before?
Well, I haven't run into one like in the wild.
So it is.
But I did. I did go to film school.
So I've been on a couple of smaller films that felt having the opportunity
to be different, different of being made.
We was driving around Manhattan and he's traffic is there, especially when they closed
down streets on.
Recycle.
Oh, and all this big fake.
About six or eight feet in the air.
Like.
And he said, huh, they must be filming something.
So when he got.
He said, what are they doing? He said they're filming a movie. It's called Ghostbusters.
They causing traffic jams all over the place.
You never know where you're right in the wild.
You never know where you're going to run into it.
I quick review here.
Milwaukee Film Festival.
I'm with the dates.
I want the location and how to get tickets.
Yeah, so the Milwaukee Film Festival.
24th and it runs through May 8th.
There'll be movies every single day.
It'll be held at the Oriental and the downer's theater on Milwaukee's east side.
And you can get tickets at mkefilm.org slash MFF.
Yeah, we're going to give that.
All throughout your film festival, be giving that information out.
Because I wanted to be a great success.
And people got it.
I love movies.
I love film, especially films you never heard of before.
It's just fantastic to.
New film and you never know when it's going to become your favorite.
Either regular fish movies, directions for home.
Or in any shots.
Enemy film festival.
Fourth through may a th at the Oriental and downer theaters and
when can it give some tickets to?
12.
Can't wait to see them.
You thank you All right, Abby.
Abby Yesterday, she is the program coordinator for the Milwaukee Film Festival.
Thanks for waking up early with me this morning, and appreciate it.
No problem.
Bye.
Abbey upcy.