West Texas Plays Host to One Of Its Own

Tonight at the Plaza Classic Film Festival in El Paso, Texas, alongside The Graduate and the original Django, area resident Cory van Dyke will present his indie drama Far Marfa.

Look at that title long enough and it can start to play tricks on you. It's not quite a palindrome (e.g. spelled the same backwards and forwards), but it's pretty close. Van Dyke tells the El Paso Times that prior to this home turf debut, the film has screened in Manhattan, Ireland, North Carolina and nearby Austin.



The Plaza Classic Film Festival program synopsis for Far Marfa is great:

The unlikely artists' haven of Marfa, Texas plays backdrop to a stalled musician’s rarefied and unpredictable quest to reclaim his art (both figuratively and literally) in Cory van Dyke’s Far Marfa, produced entirely in Marfa with mostly local cast and crew. Johnny Sneed plays Carter Frazier, a recent transplant to the tiny west Texas town who, like in no country song ever written, manages to lose his girlfriend, his pride, and a priceless piece of modern art all within the span of a day. In his half-baked attempts to sleuth out the thief of the rare painting that Carter unwittingly inherits, he may just find the pathway to true happiness and reason to start attempting some new masterpieces of his own.

Van Dyke has an interesting background. He spent many years in LA trying to get a feature off the ground, working at various points for both Columbia Pictures and Roger Corman. Finally, he decided to come back home to Marfa in 2007 and a year later, with a girlfriend, launched the Marfa Film Festival.

He and Sneed will both be at tonight's screening. Not too long ago, Marfa made major headlines when it was used as a location for both the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Marfa is about 190 miles southeast of El Paso.

[Far Marfa]