BY VINCE DEVLIN

The Flathead Lake International Cinemafest is Friday through Sunday, Feb. 1-3, in Polson.
The event kicks off Friday, Feb. 1, with an opening night champagne soiree from 5-6:30 p.m. in the main ballroom of the Kwa Taq Nuk Resort, where tickets are $25 and people are invited to come dressed as their favorite movie star. The soiree includes hors d’oeuvres, champagne, wine and beer. At 7 p.m. at Showboat Cinemas, guest filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearns screens his documentary “One Big Hapa Family” and three short animated films, and other festival entries will be screened from 9:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Tickets for those are $5 apiece.
On Saturday, Feb. 2, six two-hour blocks of films will be shown at Showboat Cinemas. You can watch them all for $25 or view any particular session for $5. Sessions start at 10 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 3 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.
On Sunday, Feb. 3, two two-hour blocks of films will be screened at 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Tickets to each are $5. The festival will conclude with a dessert and awards reception from 3-4 p.m. The reception is free to anyone holding a ticket stub from any of the screenings, or $5 to anyone who isn’t.
Tickets are on sale at Showboat Cinemas, Terrace Flowers and Gifts or at www.flicpolson.com. Screening information can also be found at www.flicpolson.com.

Cannes has the most famous of them all, and around the world you can find film festivals of all shapes and sizes. Some specialize in horror films, some in short films, some in animation, others in science fiction. There are festivals that celebrate emerging filmmakers, independent filmmakers, women filmmakers.
Boston has one for Latino films; Los Angeles one for Irish films. Missoula’s film festivals include one for wildlife films and another for documentaries.
When a committee in Polson charged with developing ways to bring people into town during the off-season – essentially any time other than summer – started tossing around ideas a year ago, a film festival was one that surfaced.
And now the first Flathead Lake International Cinemafest is upon us.
Running Friday through Sunday, Feb. 1-3, the festival will focus on … well, just about anything on film, within reason, of course.
“We didn’t want too narrow of a focus,” co-coordinator Daniel Smith says. “Our community is small, and the beauty of it is we don’t have exposure to a lot of different films and genres.”
So now they have a film festival that will feature everything from a feature shot in eastern Montana called “Cooper,” about family that suffers consequences when one of its own decides to take up cattle rustling, to a six-minute short animated on more than 2,300 sticky notes.
The latter was made by Vancouver, British Columbia filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearns, who will be a special guest at Polson’s cinemafest, also known as FLIC.
Smith and his wife met Stearns when they lived in Hawaii several years ago. They volunteered to host a filmmaker at the Maui Film Festival, and that filmmaker turned out to be … well, not Stearns.
But hosting got them free tickets to some festival events, and it was at one of those – where actor Jake Gyllenhaal was discussing an upcoming movie he was starring in that he thought might prove controversial called “Broke Back Mountain” – that they found themselves seated next to Stearns.
“We got to talking and really hit it off,” Smith says, and the friendship has continued. The festival’s first night, following an opening champagne soiree, will feature not only the aforementioned “Yellow Sticky Notes” but a documentary by Stearns – who calls himself “half Japanese, half Euro-mutt” – examining why his Japanese mother and all four of her sisters married interracially in Canada.
It’s called “One Big Hapa Family,” and Smith believes it could find an interested audience here, where Indians and non-Indians have been marrying each other for decades.
Who knows what moviegoers will discover at FLIC? As he talked about the festival earlier this month, Smith was opening up a submission from the United Kingdom called “Rose, Mary and Time” about an unhappily married man who, through an old clock he inherits, may have stumbled on the ability to go back in time and save the love of his life, who died several years earlier.
From Oklahoma comes “Peace, Love and Zombies,” an “inside look at the daily lives of the undead.” Out of Washington, “Whiskers” is the story of a couple who purchase a beta android butler but see things take a terrible turn.
There’s the Montana-made “Code of the West,” a documentary that follows the upheavals medical marijuana has gone through in the state.
If you’re starting to think this film festival has a little bit of everything, you’re right.
It’s even got television programming.
“Chasing Fame” is a “docu-reality series” about four wannabe actors trying to make their way in Hollywood. It comes to the Polson festival courtesy of writer, producer and director David W. King.
King, who has spent 30 years in both the television and movie industries in a wide variety of jobs – starting as a production assistant in the 1980s on an obscure Peter Fonda film called “Dance of the Dwarfs” – moved to Polson in 2012 and set up his own production company.
He is one of three local FLIC judges. The others are Karen Lewing of the Port Polson Players and retired Polson teacher Mac Swan, who worked as a projectionist in a Missoula theater while in high school and says, “There’s nothing like watching a movie 20 or 30 times to help you see the strengths and weaknesses in a film.”
FLIC was developed by an Envision Polson subcommittee, which hopes to make it an annual event. The first one has been challenging – “We’re all volunteers,” Smith notes – but if it’s successful and there are more, he’s confident they’ll be able to put to use what they’ve learned.
“We were slow to start getting the word out,” he says, “and we need to give filmmakers more time to enter, and ourselves more time to review films.”
In the meantime, this is a film festival where you can see a movie about cattle rustling, a documentary about a Juneau, Alaska businessman struggling to pay his bills and prepare traditional food (“Smokin’ Fish”) and a five-minute animated short about a Post-It note that escapes a cluttered desk to go in search of its father (“Ode to a Post-It Note”).
And – just guessing – you probably can’t get any of that at Cannes.

BY KIM BRIGGEMAN | PHOTO BY MICHAEL GALLACHER

The Race to the Sky returns to the winter hills and fields of western Montana for the 28th time in February.
Mushers and teams in the 350-mile dog sled race will start at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 9, with a run from Camp Rimini west of Helena to Elk Park, north of Butte. Finishers are expected to come in after 4 p.m. near Exit 138 of Interstate 15.
They’ll restart on Sunday afternoon at Hi-Country Snack Foods near Lincoln beginning at 2 p.m., followed by the start of the adult and junior 100-mile races at 3 p.m.
The first finishers of the 100-mile races are expected into Seeley Lake around daylight on Monday after a six-hour layover at White Tail Ranch near Ovando. Last year Jenny Greger of Bozeman won the Junior 100 at 6:20 a.m. Monday and she was followed by two others in the next five minutes. The Adult 100 winner, Garrett Warren of Council, Idaho, finished at 7:38 a.m.
Award ceremonies for the 100-mile races races are set for Monday afternoon at the Seeley Lake Community Center after all mushers finish.
Meanwhile, teams in the longer race will be passing through the Seeley Lake checkpoint en route for Owl Creek near Holland Lake, the primitive checkpoint for the 350-mile race. They retrace the route back to Lincoln where, depending on weather and trail conditions, the leaders will most likely cross under the archway near Lincoln some time Tuesday, Feb. 12.
Last year’s winner, Warren Palfrey of Quesnel, British Columbia, crossed at 2:27 p.m. on Tuesday for his second Race to the Sky victory. Laura Daugereau of Port Gamble, Wash., finished second at 4:50 p.m.
Pre-race public events begin Friday, Feb. 8, with a vet check at Women’s Park in Helena from noon to 3 p.m. For the first time organizers have scheduled a meet-and-greet and spaghetti feed at the Lewis and Clark County fairgrounds in Helena from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Also new this year: The 350-mile race award ceremony has shifted from Lincoln to Helena. It’s set for Wednesday, Feb. 13, at Exploration works, next to the Helena Carousel, in conjunction with a meal served by Chili O’Briens for $7 a person. Kids eat free.

BY DILLON KATO

It’s awards season, so there isn’t a better time than now to look back at accolades picked up by the Garden City over the past year.
In September, The National Jurist, a law student magazine, rated the University of Montana’s School of Law as the seventh best value law school in the country. The ranking took into account the average rate of bar passage (92.8 percent for UM) and the job placement rate (78 percent), along with tuition and cost of living, and the average amount of student debt.
Speaking of UM, the American Institute for Economic Research calls Missoula the 20th best college town in America on its annual list.
For the sixth time, Missoula made the list of the 100 Best Communities for Young People, put out by the Americas Promise Alliance. It said Missoula was “honored for its commitment to mentoring and success in creating a positive environment for all youth to grow.”
The League of American Bicyclists gave Missoula its gold award for bicycle-friendly communities, and Livability places it seventh on its list of best winter vacation destinations.
The Peace Corps said Missoula ranks second in the number of volunteers, per capita, of metropolitan areas in the United States.
Esquire magazine named Charlie B’s one of the “15 Bars Every Man Should Drink In Before He Dies,” calling it “The best bar in one of America’s best bar towns.”
While it’s not just Missoula, the Garden City did play a big role in Montana taking over the second spot last year for the number of microbreweries per capita. Watch your back, Vermont.
Missoula also made Outside magazine’s list of “The Best River Towns in America.” The magazine cited Missoula’s world-class fly-fishing, as well as the abundance of hiking and biking trails, proximity to wilderness areas and the college-town mood. “Residents highlight everything from tubing on the Clark Fork with a crew of friends and a cooler of Kettlehouse Cold Smoke to mountain-biking old pack trails in the Rattlesnake to hucking cliffs at Snowbowl to eating yellow-cake ice cream at Big Dipper,” Outside wrote.
Food Network Magazine, traveling the nation to find the best sandwich in every state, picked “The Nuke” from Staggering Ox as Montana’s tastiest.
Even if you do leave town for a bit, the surrounding area is award-winning as well. TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel website, called St. Regis’ Cowboy Up Montana Roadhouse Dinner & Bed one of the top bargain hotels in the country in its annual Travelers’ Choice Awards.
While it might not be good news to everyone, a study by Sperling’s Best Places found Missoula to be the ninth cloudiest city in America. The study was based on cloud cover percentages over the course of a one-year period.
The Milken Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, ranked Missoula as the eighth best small metro area for “successful aging,” specifically pointing out its medical facilities, job opportunities, and arts and culture events.
Congratulations Missoula!

Dillon Kato is a journalism student at the University of Montana and an intern at the Missoulian.