Oct. 3, 2007

CONTACT: Kimberly Busbee, 515/707-1533

ARIESWORKS ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS

2007 WILD ROSE INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

5th Annual International Film Festival

at the Fleur Cinema and Café, 4545 Fleur Drive.

Screening independent filmsin competition including: features, shorts, animation, documentaries and student films from around the world

and featuring

LEW HUNTER

as Keynote Speaker and workshop presenter

Produced by AriesWorks Entertainment

Des Moines-based company, AriesWorks Entertainment, will present the 5 ^th Annual WILD ROSE INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL (founded by Kimberly Busbee and James Serpento) beginningThursday evening, October 25 and continuing through Sunday, October 28 at the Fleur Cinema and Café, 4545 Fleur Drive. 

Sponsored by the Iowa Film Office, The Iowa Motion Picture Association, The Iowa Scriptwriters Alliance, and the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau , the Wild Rose films were selected from nearly 200 entries .The Wild Rose will offer screenings of top independent and student films from across the state of Iowa, the United States, and from around the world.

Screenings will take place in the evening on Thursday, October 25 and Friday the 26 ^th , with Saturday, October 27 slated as an all-day event! 

Saturday, October 27 will begin with aworkshop for filmmakers presented byHollywood icon and Emmy Award-nominated screenwriting guru and author, Lew Hunter,whose text Screenwriting 434is one of the most revered in the industry.

Mr. Hunter will serve as the Wild Rose’s Keynote Speaker and offer the mini-workshop, “Everything You Want to Know About Filmmaking But Were Afraid to Ask”. Also, there will be aworkshop on documentary filmmaking presented by filmmakers Lonnie Senstock and Chance Williams, who made Once in a Lew Moon, a biopic about Mr. Hunter, currently in post production. The Wild Rose’s Saturday will continue with more screenings of international and Iowa films and will end with the prestigiousAward Ceremony in the evening, featuring Capstone Speaker, Steve Schott, a producer of the newly releasedIowa baseball movie, The Final Season.

Just a few of the films foreign films Oct. 25-27 include Saving Mom and Dad from France, Droomtijd (Dreamtime) from Belgium andVictor y la Maquina from Spain

Shorts include Confessions of a Late Bloomer by Jen McGowan; (rated 3 stars byFilm Threat) about a pre-pubescent 15 year old who tries to become a man, Patrick Smith’s animated shortPuppet,and Juli Kang’s Damn the Past,a UCLA graduate thesis musical about what happens when a singing mute meets the girl of his dreams.

Feature length films include among others, To Touch the Soul , by Ryan Goble and Teresa Hagen, an Accolade Award winning documentary about college students teaching art to HIV positive children in Cambodia,Greetings From The Shore, by Greg Chwerchak and starring Paul Sorvino, about love, loss and pirates, andKeepers of Eden,a documentary by Yoram Porath and Chris Gambale, narrated by Joanne Woodward and shot in the rainforests of Ecuador about the Huarani people and their fight against oil companies for survival .

Iowa filmmakers will once again be ably represented, with screenings including among others the feature film Indelible by Rick Amundson, the documentary A Little Salsa on the Prairie by Kent Newman, the short films,Snipe Hunt, by Terry Daily, The Final Chapter by Mas Gardner, End of the Sawdust Trail by Andy Brodie, On Dasher, On Dancer by Patrick McConville and the student short, This is Bela by Sean Studer.

On Sunday, October 28, the WRIFF will present an “out of competition” special presentation of the film Monster Camp, a quirky and fascinating behind the scenes documentaryby Cullen Hoback and Aaron Kirk Douglas about Live Action Role Playing participants (LARPers); a true story about a world where seemingly ordinary people transform themselves into dwarves, sorcerers, lizard people, dragons and more in order to escape their daily lives.

Those wishing to attend Lew Hunter’s filmmaking workshop contact festival director Kimberly Busbee at 515-707-1533 or at bobbusbee@aol.com.