E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fruits of the fringe Lower-tier Northampton aims high BY GERALD PEARY

Pity the first-time American indie filmmaker whose movie doesn’t premiere at Sundance, Toronto, or, in the New York environs, Tribeca and the Hamptons. These are the key North American festivals because that’s where distributors, mostly Big Apple–based, converge looking for acquisitions. And if your film is shown at other alternative fests about our country? Cut back on your hopes of discovery, fame, and recouping those production costs. Forget about a theatrical run. The largest and most enthusiastic crowds you’ll probably ever get are at festival screenings. Enjoy America, blue and red!

Not every filmmaker feels this way. I can understand those who are frustrated by the difficulty of getting distribution and the ghettoization of under-the-radar fests. But other film artists take the high road, reveling in every chance to show their work at whatever venue. There were several especially upbeat types at the Northampton Film Festival a couple of weekends back. And the first-time feature filmmakers behind 7 to 10 Days and Four Dead Batteries weren’t worrying about whether a Miramax representative was in the house. Instead, they got off on the overwhelming response of the crowds to their inventive, arresting movies.

An intense, involving eco-thriller, 7 to 10 Days had its world premiere at Northampton, in what was a coup for the festival. It’s an on-location saga of a kayaking and camping trip gone awry, as chemicals in the environment untrack a healing journey into Vermont’s Green Mountains. Already weakened by Epstein-Barr Virus, Neal (Michael Dean) finds that impurities in the air and the water are threatening his immune system. Who can save him? The last act offers a compelling medical debate between AMA-type "real" doctors and a naturopathic Cherokee physician, Dr. Jody Noé, who in effect plays herself.

The Vermont filmmakers, Carrie Sterr and Geoffrey Eads, moved recently to Northampton. Their movie was prompted by real-life troubles experienced by Eads’s wife, who has been stricken by Epstein-Barr. Family trips would end with her being poisoned by spraying of campsites, by chemical dumpings in the river water. "What we show in the movie is a worst-case scenario," Sterr explained.

7 to 10 Days kicked off its festival run at Northampton. Four Dead Batteries, which was made by a group of New York–area twentysomethings, has been showing lots of places. I met the genial filmmakers last summer, when the movie had its New England premiere at Woods Hole. A few months later, the whole crew are still admirably enthusiastic about publicizing and screening their movie and engaging in Q&A’s with audiences. "They are the best festival guests!", Woods Hole director Judy Lasker told me when she met them again at Northampton.

Four Dead Batteries is a cute, cleverly written comedy satirizing the hapless love lives of a New York City improv troupe who are, as their group name indicates, a quartet of emotional-spiritual-sexual losers. The jokes are randy, the performances are touching, and as a male-bonding be-in, the movie is far sharper than anything by Kevin Smith.

The writer/director of Four Dead Batteries is a precocious 24-year-old Dominican-American, Hiram Martinez, who dropped out of St. Peter’s College in New Jersey to make his movie. "I made it through high school, sir!" he corrected an audience member, though he admitted to having left university, "I made a mistake." His crew shot part of the movie on $7800, then shut down. How did they start back up? "We put a trailer together. We found a lawyer who said, ‘I’ll put you in touch with a guy.’ The guy was a tall fellow with a pony tail who looked like Dracula. He cut us an enormous check and said, ‘I don’t want to hear from you until you get distribution.’ A perfect producer."

Elsewhere at Northampton:

Racing Against the Clock, a rousing salute to supposedly overage women athletes, 50 to 82, as they set world sports records. It’s directed affectionately by local filmmaker Bill Haney and edited seamlessly by Peter Rhodes.

Andaluz, a gorgeous animated short directed by local animation veteran Karen Aqua and Joanna Priestley. This moving work is a mostly abstract homage, in lush images and music, to the southern Spain of the Moors and the Gypsies and flamenco.

Die Reise ins Glück/A Journey into Bliss, Wenzel Storch’s obsessive, scatological German nightmare fantasy, beyond Delicatessen, Terry Gilliam, and even the brothers Grimm. Northampton, so safe and PC, needs more off-the-charts movies like this one.