Virginia Film Festival

Join us for a virtual conversation on the acclaimed documentary The Booksellers, featuring the director of the acclaimed documentary D.W. Young, Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library Curator Molly Schwartzburg, and owner/manager of New Dominion Bookshop Julia Kudravetz; and moderated by Sarah Lawson of the Virginia Center for the Book.  This event is presented in collaboration with Violet Crown Cinema and the Virginia Center for the Book.

This event is part of the Virginia Film Festival’s new Beyond the Screen: A Virtual Conversation Series.  All discussions in the series will be free, open to the public, livestreamed on Zoom, and archived on the VAFF’s YouTube channel. Pre-registration is required to attend the livestreamed Zoom conversations. Related films are available to rent or purchase through various streaming platforms prior to the scheduled discussion. For more information on how to pre-register for each virtual conversation and where to stream each film, visit virginiafilmfestival.org/year-round-events.

More about the participants:

D.W. YOUNG – Director: D.W. Young’s films have screened at festivals around the world including SXSW, Vancouver International Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, Provincetown Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, and many more. His features A Hole in a Fence and The Happy House were released by First Run Features. Most recently his short A Favor for Jerry, filmed on election night 2016, premiered at IFF Boston.

SARAH LAWSON – Assistant Director, Virginia Center for the Book: Sarah Lawson is the assistant director of the Virginia Center for the Book. A longtime resident of Charlottesville and attendee of the Virginia Festival of the Book, she worked and volunteered for a variety of local nonprofits before joining Virginia Humanities in 2015. Continuing to build on her background in communications, Lawson is also a freelance designer and writer, with a focus on regional arts and culture. When she’s not working, reading, or traveling, you can usually find her with her dog.

JULIA KUDRAVETZ – Owner/Manager New Dominion Bookshop: Julia Kudravetz is the owner and general manager of the New Dominion Bookshop on the historic Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1924, the New Dominion Bookshop is Charlottesville’s only all-new independent bookstore, www.ndbookshop.com

MOLLY SCHWARTZBURG – Curator, Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library: Molly builds collections, curates exhibitions, works with researchers, and teaches classes at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. She purchases and accepts gifts of books, manuscripts, and artifacts that will enrich existing strengths and build new collection areas to serve the University of Virginia community and our global audience of visiting and remote researchers. Her largest collecting area is books and manuscripts of the 20th and 21st centuries, though she acquires materials of all kinds across all periods. She is a generalist by nature, interested all subject areas, and has particular expertise in literature and artists’ books. She curates exhibitions, often with student collaborators, with the goal of inspiring research, revealing hidden treasures, and helping audiences understand the depths of our collections. She works with faculty and instructors from all departments and schools to create class sessions for their students, and meets one-on-one with students who are seeking help with the collections, ideas for research projects, and information about the special collections profession. She received her A.B. in English Literature from Harvard (1991), her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford (2004) and was previously Cline Curator of Literature at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Molly’s most recent publication is an article, “Frank Shay’s Greenwich Village: Reconstructing the Bookshop at 4 Christopher Street, 1920-1925” in The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop: Books and the Commerce of Culture in the Twentieth Century (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015). Molly’s most recent exhibition is “Shakespeare by the Book: Four Centuries of Printing, Editing and Publishing” (2016). Molly is currently at work on three upcoming exhibitions: Faulkner (2017), A History of UVA in 100 Objects (2017), and Drafting World Peace (2020), an exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

More about the film: 

D.W. Young’s elegant and absorbing documentary is a lively tour of New York’s book world, populated by an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers, past and present: from the Park Avenue Armory’s annual Antiquarian Book Fair, where original editions can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars; to the Strand and Argosy bookstores, still standing against all odds; to the beautifully crammed apartments of collectors and buyers. The film, executive produced by Parker Posey, features a range of commentators, including Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, Gay Talese, and a community of dedicated book dealers and collectors who strongly believe in the wonder of the object and what it holds within.

Available for rent through Violet Crown Virtual Cinema: https://charlottesville.violetcrown.com/movie/HO00002475/