Legacy out of tragedy
Adrienne Shelly Award continues filmmaker's hope for female filmmakers
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
"If only life were as easy as pie."

Adrienne Shelly

That's the tagline for "Waitress," a new feature film starring Kerri Russell as a smalltown, pregnant waitress who combines otherwise ordinary ingredients of her life and creates a recipe for hope that is as sweet and unexpected as the pies that earn her local fame. From the film's Sundance premiere and onward after its May release, audiences have been eating it up.

On Friday and Saturday, the Nantucket Film Festival is screening the film, written by Adrienne Shelly, who was murdered last November in Manhattan. The tragedy rippled from New York to Hollywood and back again, all the way to Nantucket, where, this week, the Nantucket Film Festival becomes part of the groundswell of good work Shelly's friends, family and peers are enacting to leave a lasting and positive legacy in her name.

The NFF's Adrienne Shelly Excellence in Filmmaking Award will honor female filmmakers.

"Throughout the year, when we're looking for filmmakers to honor, we're always struck by how much filmmaking is still very much a man's world," said NFF Executive Director Jill Burkhart. "So to have an opportunity to seek out female filmmakers and award them and spotlight them is exciting us."

This year's recipients are Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, directors of "The Devil Came on Horseback," an American soldier's-eye-view of the genocide in Darfur (screening Saturday and Sunday at 5 p.m. in Bennett Hall. $12). The duo won the audience award for "The Trials of Darryl Hunt" last year.

The award is an outcropping of the Adrienne Shelly Foundation (AdrienneShellyfoundation.org), a nonprofit organization spearheaded by Shelly's husband, Andy Ostroy, to support rising female filmmakers and to assist actors in making the switch to writing and directing, as Shelly once did.

As an actor, Shelly broke through working with Hal Hartley on "The Unbelievable Truth" and "Trust." She appeared in over 20 other films before pulling the triple threat - writing, directing and acting - in three feature films, "Sudden Manhattan," "I'll Take You There" and, most recently, "Waitress," which Fox Searchlight Films purchased after the film's positive reception at Sundance.

"The foundation was born out of people asking what they could contribute to in her name, and it took me a few weeks to make sense of what she wanted," said Ostroy, chairman and CEO of Belardi/Ostroy ALC LLC, a list-services firm. "Her passion was filmmaking, and she always believed that that women could make tremendous art, even though the challenges they face are monumental." To create a foundation that empowered women was in line with the theme of Shelly's films, Ostroy added. "It was a natural extension of who she was as a person."

The board of directors and advisory board of the Shelly Foundation include academics, filmmakers, including Hal Hartley, and actors such as Rosanna Arquette, Paul Rudd and Russell. In addition to the NFF award, the foundation has established standing grants with schools and organizations including Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, the American Film Institute and New York Women in Film and Television. Ostroy said the foundation hopes to expand its realm of partners and grow its budget for more scholarships, short film grants, finishing funds and even living stipends, which Ostroy said would have made Shelly "very proud."

"This is designed to put her imprint on something really good," Ostroy said. "Something horrible happened in November, and something really good has to come out of it."

Ostroy said the foundation reached out to the Nantucket Film Festival because it is in synch with Shelly's philosophy on filmmaking.

"Adrienne was a part of the Nantucket Film Festival once or twice, she was a juror once, and really enjoyed herself there. She felt it was the kind of festival that championed the small, independent filmmaker," said Ostroy, noting that "Waitress" was made independently.

"Someone said to me yesterday, watching 'Waitress,' you get a sense of Adrienne as a person," Ostroy added. "You see the humor, the wit, the sarcasm, the dark side - she ran the gamut of the qualities of emotion. She was funny, silly, deep, very learned and educated. She had a strong voice and a strong vision."

If Shelly herself could speak to any of the female filmmakers at the festival, Ostroy suggested, she would tell them to believe in themselves and in their work and to "keep persevering."

"She knew early on that her destiny was to be a director. And she started planning for that when she was 20 years old," Ostroy said. "It took 20 years for her to hit her stride with 'Waitress.' The tragedy of this is that the film would have been her ticket to whatever she wanted. The filmmaking world now sees the strength of her writing and directing. She would have been the proverbial sensation overnight that took 20 years."

In addition to the work being done by the Shelly Foundation, Shelly's legacy is, of course, her 4- year-old daughter, Sophie, and her own work - films that have been realized and scripts that are still alive and waiting for a chance to prove that a good story can outlive any person.

"She left a lot of work uncompleted, a lot of work unproduced," Ostroy said. "It's frustrating that you read, 'Waitress is Shelly's last film.' As a director, that might be true. But we haven't heard the last

of Adrienne Shelly yet." I
When: Fri., June 15, 2 p.m. and Sat.,
June 16, 10 a.m.
Where: Starlight Theatre
Cost: $12; tickets are available at the door