Editor

The 12th annual Boston Underground Film Festival, which took place at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts, came to a close Sunday night, March 28, at the Middlesex Lounge with the announcement of this year's winners. The previous night the festival bestowed its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award on John Waters' muse Mink Stole at a special tribute at The Friendly Toast.

Red, White & Blue, a film by English filmmaker Simon Rumley (The Living and the Dead) won "Best of Fest -Narrative Feature," Jennifer M. Kroot's It Came From Kuchar won "Best of Fest - Documentary Feature," and Chad Ferrin's Someone's Knocking at the Door won the "Director's Choice Award." "Best of Fest - Short" Happily Ever After and "Most Effectively Offensive" The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (the controversial and absurdist film from Serbia) rounded out the victors. Award winners receive Bacchus, the festival's signature vibrating bunny statuette.

Red, White & Blue, which recently had its North American premiere at SXSW, is a slacker revenge movie set in contemporary Austin, starring award winning actor Noah Taylor (Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). It Came From Kuchar is a definitive summation of the work of legendary, underground filmmaking brothers, George and Mike Kuchar, who inspired two generations of filmmakers (including John Waters, Buck Henry, Atom Egoyan, Todd Haynes, Wayne Wang and Guy Maddin), actors, musicians, and artists with their zany, "no budget" films and with their uniquely enchanting spirits. Someone's Knocking at the Door stars Noah Segan (The Brothers Bloom, Brick, Adam & Steve) in a genre-defying grindhouse throwback about a group of drug-addled, sexually deviant medical students who are systematically terrorized by a husband-and-wife team of serial killers.

The festival's four directors select the Director's Choice award. The "Best of" awards are selected by a panel of judges, including: Carter Long, the Katharine Stone White Curator of Film and Video at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; James Nadeau, Executive Director of the Boston LGBT Film Festival, Editor of Our Daily RED, the blog of arts journal Big RED & Shiny, and an independent curator, video artist, and writer based in Boston; Kathryn Ramey, a filmmaker and anthropologist who teaches film production and theory at Emerson College; and Stéphanie Trépanier, programmer for Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival and founder of Evokative Films, a Montreal-based boutique film distributor.

"It was a major leap forward for us to be able to host not only one, but two legends of underground cinema in the same year besides all the amazing films we had in the program this time around," said Festival Director Anna Feder in reference to this year's guests of honor, Mink Stole and George Kuchar.

The 2010 fest opened on March 25 with Japanese provocateur Sion Sono's four-hour opus Love Exposure and came to a close Sunday evening with Belgian Giallo tribute Amer.  Repeat screenings will continue at the Kendall Square Cinema through Thursday, April 1.

Founded in 1999 by veteran film curator David Kleiler, the Boston Underground Film Festival features films that celebrate an alternative vision and sound, offering a platform for filmmakers that encourages new work and ideas and pushes the envelope in style and content.