CineVegas turns focus on Cage

Thursday, June 16, 2005 | 8:17 a.m.

The Seventh Annual CineVegas Film Festival continues today at Brenden Theatres Las Vegas 14 at the Palms. The festival features nearly 100 shorts, documentaries and feature films.

For ticket information, go to: www.cinevegas.com or call 992-7979.

Event highlights include:

Nicolas Cage will receive the the Half-Life Award tonight at 6:30 for his contributions to his profession at a young age. Cage will participate in a moderated question-and-answer session prior to the screening of his film "Leaving Las Vegas."

Samantha Morton will be honored with the Half-Life Award on Friday.

On Saturday, George Romero and Wim Wenders will receive the CineVegas Vanguard Director Award for their achievements in film. Romero's new film, "Land of the Dead," will be screened at 7:30 p.m. Saturday.

Among today's highlights:

Festival premieres of the feature films "Losing Ground" "Fifth World" and "Standing Still," as well as encore showing of "Homeland Security," which is a two-hour collection of short films about Nevada by local filmmakers.

Also featured as part of the CineVegas 100, is a showing of cult classic "Showgirls."

Trevor Groth, CineVegas director of programming for the past three years, said his approach to this year's festival was simple: keep what worked and modify what didn't.

"What really works and builds the festival ... is having world-class premieres," he said.

"What didn't work is, I think, the first year ... we had a huge documentary program and there wasn't interest in the community so it was really poorly attended."

Instead, Groth downsized the number of documentaries at the festival.

"I still wanted to include documentaries, they're a terrific complement to film festivals, but I took a different approach to it," he said. "I trimmed it down and it works into parts of the film festival, so that poeple say, 'This is a grat film,' not, 'This is a documentary section.' That sort of frightens people."

Groth also stressed the continual reliance of celebrity tributes, such as Cage, Morton and Romero, to attract attention to CineVegas and to set it apart from other festivals.

Still, he doesn't want the media attention for the celebs to overshadow the original purpose of the festival.

"This year I'm delighted with the honorees and that it matched last year's," he said. "But this is a celebration of film and what we want to continue to support in doing these world-class tributes."