BIFF Brings Back Alec Baldwin, Tickets Go on Sale February 11

The 18th Boulder International Film Festival is set for March 3-6, and it’s catching plenty of advance attention this year: The fest, which was founded by sisters Kathy and Robin Beeck, has announced that it will have a special guest programmer for the first time, and it’s none other than Alec Baldwin.

“Alec Baldwin had come to our festival many years back, and it was one of the best interviews we had at the festival; people still talk about that appearance,” Kathy Beeck says. “We’ve been friends with him over the years and maintained contact, and I had reached out to him for last year’s festival. He couldn’t make it, but said he’d love to come the next year. He’s just a perfect candidate for a special guest programmer because of his own background on Turner Classic Movies, for example. He’s very knowledgeable about films, and he’s perfect for this role.”

It’s also a headline-grabbing decision, considering that Baldwin’s 2021 was fraught with drama. In October, he fired a prop gun that turned out to be loaded while rehearsing a scene for the movie Rust, fatally shooting cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza. Film and TV unions in turn blasted Baldwin, also a producer on the film, for hiring a non-union crew that complained extensively about poor working conditions.

But Baldwin is looking forward, at least to this engagement. “I am quite excited about returning to the Boulder International Film Festival, which I last attended in 2010,” he says in a statement. “I think Boulder is a great town, and I know they have a wonderful festival.”

As special programmer, Baldwin has chosen three selections: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers and Julia, a new documentary about Julia Child. After each screening, Baldwin will be interviewed live by film critic Lisa Kennedy.

“This year will be a first because we usually don’t replay old films,” Kathy says. “I think the choices that Alec Baldwin made this year are very eclectic and unusual; it’s always fascinating to see what special programmers choose and why.”

The Beeck sisters were attending film festivals and creating films together long before they founded BIFF. “We thought about how great these festivals are and were wondering why Boulder didn’t have one,” Kathy says. “We figured somebody would start one, but no one ever did. So finally we decided to just go ahead and start it. We took all of the wonderful elements of festivals we love and put them all into this one festival in Boulder, and we’ve been doing it now for eighteen years.”

The first festival was a big success, and the event has only gotten bigger through the years, with Kathy as director and Robin as executive director. The exponential growth has resulted in more quality films coming to the fest, as well as the introduction of new features such as youth and senior programs and the BIFF’s Call to Action Program. “We think it’s one of the best festivals out there. Great storytelling is what makes us such a success,” Kathy explains.

“People always ask what the common denominator is in the films we screen, and it’s always great stories,” she continues. “We learned that while we were making films. We also learned that festivals can forgive production value if you have a great story, but they never forgive something that isn’t a great story. So we always look for films that tell a wonderful story and tell it well.”

BIFF receives about 1,000 entries each year that are screened by different tiers of teams. “We watch the films that are entered two to four times, just to make sure that those filmmakers get as much consideration as possible,” Robin says. “We were filmmakers ourselves, and that’s what we would want, so we really try to give them a good look.”

The festival usually winds up showing fifty to seventy films, and a wide variety, at that. “We have shorts, features, documentaries and animated films,” Kathy says. “We scout them at other festivals, as well, and see what’s doing well and what’s winning. We just try to bring all the best films that are out there at any given time and bring them all to Boulder.”

This year’s films will include several from local filmmakers, including Imperfect, a documentary about Denver’s Phamaly Theatre, and Mighty Oak, about a naturalist doctor in Boulder.

The sisters moved to Boulder from Iowa when they were tweens, and their first jobs were at a local movie theater. “We both worked movie theaters, which is where our love of film started,” Robin recalls. “It was pretty wonderful, the amazing films we could see for free.”

“That got us really hooked on film,” Kathy agrees.

While neither has formal training, they got an early start making films, and their whole family would get involved. “We used to say, ‘A family who makes films together fights a lot,'” Kathy jokes. “We had a lot of fun. I was a producer and Robin was always a director; she had the vision. I was the one who had to find the little bit of money we could to make the film.”

While she and Kathy used to make “funny short films,” Robin says that their “biggest hit” was Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed, which covered the ’90s saga of “Grandpa” Bredo Morstol, a deceased Norwegian man whose body was cryogenically preserved and stored in a shed in Nederland by his daughter and her son, Trygve Braud. The two were planning to open a cryogenics facility in the mountain town, but after Braud was deported and his mother evicted, she expressed concern to a local reporter that not only would her father’s body thaw, but so would two other bodies that were frozen on her property. After a whirlwind of publicity and some legal workarounds, Grandpa Bredo’s body was allowed to stay preserved in a new Tuff Shed. Nederland still holds an annual celebration for him, Frozen Dead Guy Days, every March.

“The film came out in ’98, and then we expanded it to be an hour long after they started Frozen Dead Guy Days,” Robin says. Michael Moore, whom the sisters had met at the Aspen Film Festival, helped produce the documentary.

The siblings don’t make films anymore, however. “We thought that we’d start this festival and we’d make films in our spare time, but that was just a joke,” Kathy says. “Robin actually won a lot of awards for her films. We were just always really low-budget, so it was about a great story with low production value. But we got so involved with the festival, we ended up leaving filmmaking behind years back.”

BIFF was the last big event in Boulder in 2020, happening just days before the pandemic shut down the state that March; in 2021 the sisters moved the festival’s dates to June, making it the first large-scale event coming out of lockdown.

But now it’s back in March, and they’re hoping for the 20,000 to 25,000 attendees clocked pre-pandemic. “I think we’re going to have some good numbers this year,” Kathy says. “We believe in the power of film to change the world.”

Tickets for the Boulder International Film Festival, which runs Thursday, March 3, through Sunday, March 6, go on sale Friday, February 11.