Still others, like the 14 Pennsylvania Ballet dancers who perform in Black Swan and the Roots, who furnished the retro-soul soundtrack for Night Catches Us, are members of beloved institutions.
The program, which also includes the tales of a West Philly beanery (Cafe) and a Center City ad executive tempted by small-town life (Lebanon, Pa.), speaks to the vibrancy of a region long a setting for films and increasingly a home to filmmakers.
Philadelphia's wealth of locations and architecture of every period from colonial to modernist are visible in the locally connected films, which run the gamut from blue-blood to blue-collar. In The Best and the Brightest, a farce about the admissions competition to get into one of Manhattan's elite private schools, Rittenhouse Square stands in for Central Park. Philadelphia and Scranton are the settings of Blue Valentine, an intimate relationship drama with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams that was well received at Sundance.
"Almost anything you want to shoot, you can shoot in this region," says Marc Erlbaum, the Haverford-born, Merion-based filmmaker of two festival movies. Cafe, his magic-realist parable of community that unfolds in a coffeehouse, features Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jamie Kennedy. A Buddy Story, a road movie about a struggling musician who makes his way from New York to Philadelphia's Main Line, stars Gavin Bellour and Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss.
"If you want urban, rural, or suburban, it's all within a 45-minute radius," Erlbaum extols. "And the Wissahickon - you can be right in the middle of the city and it can double for Colorado or Maine."
