Kevin Rafferty talks about his documentary, "Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29" before a screening of the film at the Denver Film Society's Starz Theatre in Denver on April 14, 2009.  With audience Q&A after the screening.

I was a freshman at Harvard on November 23, 1968, the day of a legendary football game between Harvard and Yale.  Rafferty's loving attention to the details of that game and the characters of the players makes this a most satisfying film and a highly original portrait of the Sixties.

UPDATE: Harvard buffs may also be interested in this interview I did with my Harvard friend Ben Beach when he and I first saw the movie in Cambridge the weekend of the 40th anniversary of the 29-29 tie. Ben is a former sports editor of The Harvard Crimson and has more details on the mystery surrounding who actually wrote the iconic headline that became the title of the movie.

 

Alexandre O. Philippe, a Denver film maker who is a friend of mine, has an 11-minute short in this year's Denver Film Festival. It's titled Left and it portrays, without a single word of dialogue, a deep sense of loss of a loved one.  At tonight's screening, I happened to sit down next to two stars of Alexandre's last feature-length film, Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water, and they agreed to a quick interview.  Earthlings is a documentary of an institute devoted to preserving the Klingon language created for Star Trek.  The podcast concludes with excerpts from Alexandre's introductory comments for Left.  After the movie, I recorded an interview with Marilyn Auer, who stars in Left, but my unfamiliarity with my new Edirol R-09 recorder led to the painful discovery that I hadn't actually been recording when we spoke.

If all the rest of the movies I see at the Denver Film Festival stink, I will still count the festival a success because of "The Lives of Others," a German film released this year about a Stasi agent responsible for spying on a writer and his friends in the mid-1980s in East Germany.  The agent becomes moved by the artists and this poses complications which unfold in a terrific plot, acted to perfection.  The photo is of Gerd Wiesler, the Stasi agent played by (Ulrich Mühe).