Contact: Ron Rollet
(609) 884-6700

FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF NFL FILMS TO RECEIVE TOP AWARD AT THE CAPE MAY NJ STATE FILM FESTIVAL

Steve Sabol, President of NFL Films, Inc. will accept the CMNJSFF’s Governors Award For Outstanding Achievement and Innovation In New Media on behalf of himself and his father, Ed, the founder of NFL Films, at the 5th Annual Cape May NJ State Film Festival November 17 – 20, 2005.

Sabol, who heads the Mount Laurel, NJ, NFL Films, will be honored at the Gala “Cocktails and Caviar” Opening Night Ceremony on Friday, November 18 in the elegantly restored Congress Hall ballroom in Cape May.

Ed and Steve Sabol are responsible for guiding NFL Films’ innovations in the film industry that have changed the way America watches football. Nothing could validate this standard of excellence more than NFL Films’ 91 Emmy Awards and numerous International Awards.

Joe Stinson, well-known screenwriter and Chairman of the Film Festival’s Board of Governors, says, “The Sabols have single-handedly changed the way all films, not just sports films, are made. Look at Brian's Song, Rudy, Jerry Maguire, and He Got Game—all features that NFL Films influenced and worked on.”

Past festival honorees include Susan Sarandon, William Baldwin, Joey Pantoliano, and Robert Prosky. The Gala tribute highlights a weekend packed with an impressive collection of over 50 New Jersey Films and filmmakers, including several Academy Award winners and nominees, screening at the Frank Family’s Cape May Beach 4 Theatre, Congress Hall, and the city’s Convention Center.

The Cape May NJ State Film Festival is New Jersey’s premiere weekend film festival celebrating the best New Jersey films and filmmakers and has become one of the major festival venues on the east coast growing from 500 in 2001 to over 3,800 in 2004. Along the way, attendees have the pleasure unique to film festivals of meeting face-to-face with the directors, actors, producers, screenwriters, and composers who are the makers of these films.

BACKGROUND ON STEVE SABOLS

Ed Sabol, born in Atlantic City and raised in Blairstown, NJ, began his film career by filming Steve’s high school football games. In 1962 he bid $3,000 to film the 1962 NFL Championship Game between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers at Yankee Stadium. The ensuing film, titled Pro Football’s Longest Day, premiered at Toots Shor's famous New York Restaurant and received such rave reviews that Ed Sabol and Blair Motion Pictures filmed 1963 and 1964 NFL Championships. In 1964, he convinced the NFL that it needed its own motion picture company that would promote the NFL and preserve the history of the game. The League agreed and NFL Films was born.

Steve Sabol has always been the creative force behind NFL Films. He has received 27 Emmys himself for writing, cinematography, editing, directing, and producing. No one in television has earned as many Emmy's in as many different categories.

Every year, the National Football League subsidiary films about 270 professional football games, consisting of about 1,000 miles of film. Since its inception in 1962, NFL Films has shot more than 8,250 games. It also records other sporting events such as the World Series, produces content for the NFL Network, and offers commercial and corporate video production services. All told, NFL Films produces more than 2,500 hours of programming every year.

FOCUS ON YOUNG FILMMAKERS

The Cape May Film Festival dedicates the first day of the festival, Thursday, November 17, to young teen filmmakers, offering two free workshops with renowned film and media artists. In the morning, “Shooting the News,” will feature NBC TV 40 anchor Michelle Dawn Mooney and weather announcer Dan Skeldon. Emmy award winning makeup artist Marianne Skiba will return to the festival to offer the afternoon workshop, “Stabbings, Wounds, Burns and Bullet Holes—Makeup for crime scenes and accidents.”

South Jersey teens also have the opportunity to work one-on-one with seasoned film professionals and with professional equipment in a year round program of intensive workshops where they learn filmmaking from script to screen. Over the past four years, films produced by these young people have received national recognition with the prestigious National Student Television Award of Excellence for their PSA productions.

OPENING NIGHT FILM IS AWARD WINNING ANIMATION

The opening night film, S.P.I.C.—The Storyboard of My Life, by Jersey City filmmaker Robert Castillo, is a personal and revealing animation that uses drawing in the form of storyboards as a device to frame a series of life changing events experienced by the filmmaker. The “cartoons” become hyper-real elements, almost larger than life, as they unfold as individual moments within a complex whole.

FESTIVAL OF INDEPENDENTS

The heart of the festival is the over 50 independent shorts and features that are screened during the day on Saturday. At any one time, as many as four screens are showing films, including a Young Filmmakers Film Festival, featuring films by students across the state, including films from the festival’s Summer Institute. Provocative films like “The Vanishing Black Male,” by Hisani Dubose, and “The Pillar of Salt,” by Hafiz Farid, offer audiences the opportunity to view and then discuss with the filmmakers differing points of view. Quirky animations, fantasy flings, lyric dance poems, startling fictions, and disturbing docudramas all await the festival’s audiences. Most films include a Q & A with the director or a member of the film’s crew.

SIDEBARS: CHICKS-WITH-FLICS AND THE BLACK MARIA FILM FESTIVALS

“Sidebars” are special programs chosen by New Jersey curators of other film festivals that expand the range and subject matter of this festival. This year, our sidebars include selections from the Chicks-with-Flics Film Festival, founded by Mays Landing native Yhane Washington, featuring films by minority women filmmakers, and Jersey City’s Black Maria Film Festival, the oldest film festival in NJ and one of the most respected in the country, which was founded and is curated by festival director, John Columbus. The Black Maria program will include “Ryan,” this year’s Academy Award winning animation.

WORKSHOPS

“The Forbidden Dance,” a narrative short, will serve as a starting point for a workshop sponsored by Gables of Cape May County on the issue of gay teens. A second workshop and panel, dealing with the subject of Holocaust survivors and their adult children, will screen Sharyn Blumenthal’s “The Phoenix Effect,” a documentary profiling the Holocaust survivors and their families who were relocated from Europe to Vineland, NJ following the end of WW II.

FESTIVAL FEATURE SELECTIONS

Saturday evening will highlight four features, including “Paper Clips,” an award winning documentary about students at the Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee struggling to grasp the concept of six-million Holocaust victims who decide to collect six-million paper clips to better understand the extent of this crime against humanity. “Street Fight,” the Audience Choice Award Winner at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, examines the 2002 mayoral race in Newark, NJ, and is one of those rare documentaries that you come out of theater feeling better than when you went in. “Several Ways to Die Trying,” is a first feature by a young filmmaker that both Stefan Prosky, the curator of the film festival’s Festival of Independents, and Ron Rollet, the festival’s founder and artistic director, agree is simply the best narrative feature ever submitted to the festival.

Also being shown is the outstanding film, “Joe and Maxi,” shot in Cape May in 1973, and one of the very first documentaries to receive theatrical distribution. “Joe and Maxi” is an intimate and revealing portrait of the relationship between a father and daughter. The film is about the difficulties of communicating love, especially when the unexpected happens. A breakthrough, verité film, it portrays universal emotions while exposing family interactions and raising ethics issues involved in documentary filmmaking. Joe and Maxi has been invited into the Museum of Modern Art Archives and has received a Women in Film Preservation Grant.
The director, Maxi Cohen, will introduce the film and take Q & A following the film.

SUNDAY CINEMA CAFÉ BRUNCH

The festival ends with a luxurious brunch prepared by Congress Hall’s superb kitchen and features the Academy Award nominated film, “Sister Rose’s Passion,” which is an inspiring portrait of an 84 year-old nun—a remarkable woman who challenged the doctrine that blamed the Jews for the death of Jesus, and took a leading role in Vatican II, which officially changed the Catholic Church's position on its relationship with the Jewish people.

Still active today, Sister Rose lives in New Jersey, near Seton Hall University, where she came to teach in 1968 when the Department of Jewish-Christian Studies was established.

For tickets and information on this year’s festival, please go to www.njstatefilmfestival.com or phone (609) 884-6700.

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