Movies

In Part One of our little fireside chat with filmmaker Craig Laurence Rice, we learned that, before he got around to programming this year’s “Minnesota Made” films at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, he had dropped out of Lutheran high school, become a hard-living bass player, and happened upon a scholarship to one of the best film schools in the world. We left him in L.A. with his broken-down car, desperately wanting to hightail it back to Minnesota.

The new musical dramedy The Sapphires has been a huge hit in its native Australia for close to a year now. It surprised audiences at the 2012 Cannes (where it was picked up by the Weinstein Company, and after its first screening had a standing ovation) and Toronto International Film Festivals, and even made a brief appearance in Minnesota, last October at the Twin Cities Film Festival. The Sapphires opens Friday, April 5, at the Lagoon Cinema, and its director, Wayne Blair, was in the Twin Cities last month to discuss this true story of four Aboriginal women who traveled from Australia to Vietnam and in other countries to perform for American soldiers.

If you're working for or with a small or mid-sized arts organization and you've been looking for funding to make your programming more accessible to underserved audiences, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) wants to hear from you.