Martin Scorsese to honor Darren Aronofsky at First Time Fest

PanARMENIAN.Net - Martin Scorsese will present the first John Huston Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinema to Darren Aronofsky at the First Time Fest, which will take place in New York from March 1-4, The Hollywood Reporter said.

The freshman festival, which celebrates first-time filmmakers, was co-founded by Johanna Bennett and Mandy Ward and will be hosted by The Players, the club founded by actor Edwin Booth, author Mark Twain and artist John Singer Sargent in 1847 and located at Gramercy Park. Events will take place at the club, while screenings will be held at Loews Village VII on Third Avenue.

The festival will screen a dozen films in competition, and together, the jury and audience will select a grand-prize winner, who will be offered theatrical distribution and full international sales representation from the American film distributor Cinema Libre Studio.

The fest will also present a series of first films from filmmakers who went on to prominence, like Aronofsky’s Pi, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss.

Participants will include such critics and filmmakers as Christine Vachon, Fred Schneider, Sofia Coppola, Todd Solondz, Barbara Kopple, Scott Foundas, John Anderson, Eric Kohn, Emily Russo, Jenny Lumet, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hal Hartley, Peter Saraf, Nancy Savoca and Amy Ryan.

The festival will also include a series of panels called “How They Did It,” plus one-on-one conversations with a number of the filmmakers.