Dale Pollock
For someone who’s “officially” retired, Dale Pollock sure has a lot going on.
Pollock, who wrote for Variety and the Los Angeles Times in the 1970s and ‘80s before segueing into a successful career as a film producer (“A Midnight Clear,” “Set It Off,” “Meet the Deedles”), served as dean of the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts from 1999-2006 and again during the 2021 spring semester and was a professor of cinematic studies from 2007-’19. He continues to review movies for WXII 12, and saw the publication of his true-crime novel “Chopped” in 2013. In addition, he continues to host an annual film series in Boone as well as two series at UNCSA, one in the spring and one in the fall — all of them open to the public.
The next UNCSA course, “Four Bold and Unconventional Films by Female Directors,” will run Mondays, March 2-23, from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Gold Theatre at the ACE Exhibition Complex, located on the UNCSA main campus, 1533 S. Main St., Winston-Salem. Admission to the four-film series is $70. For more information or to register for the class, call 336-770-3259 or visit https://uncsa.asapconnected.com/?org=5375#CourseGroupID=62926.
“I’ve been wanting to showcase women directors for a while,” he explained. “From the late 1930s until the late 1960s, the single, solitary woman director working was Ida Lupino. More recently, however, we’ve seen a flood of women directors, especially in international films.”
Pollock carefully selected a quartet of critically acclaimed films that were overlooked during their initial release — ones that focused exclusively on female protagonists and represented a female creative viewpoint. “I wanted films that audiences were not necessarily familiar with,” he said. “I wanted them to leave behind any pre-conceptions and present challenging material.”
The series kicks off March 2 with “Sorry, Baby,” the 2025 feature debut of writer/director Eva Victor, who also stars as a literature professor who, years before, had been sexually assaulted by her professor in graduate school. The film, which also stars Naomi Ackie, John Carroll Lynch, and Lucas Hedges (who studied theater at UNCSA), earned Best Directorial Debut honors from the National Board of Review and earned a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Critic’s Choice Awards.
On March 9, writer/producer/director Jasmila Zbanic’s fact-based 2020 drama “Quo Vadis, Aida” will be the featured selection. Based on Hasan Nuhanovic’s international best-seller “Under the UN Flag,” it dramatizes the systematic massacre of over 8,300 men and boys as ordered by the Bosnian Serb Army in July 1995 and stars Jasna Duricic as a translator for the United Nations whose professional obligations are compromised by the fact that her husband and two sons are directly threatened. The film, which is in English, Bosnian, Dutch, and Serbian with English subtitles, won four European Film Awards, including Best Film, and earned an Oscar nomination for Best International Film. A sequel, “Quo Vadis, Aida — The Missing Part,” reuniting Zbanic and Duricic, is currently in post-production.
On March 16, the feature presentation is “Wanda” (1970), the only feature written, produced, and directed by Barbara Loden, who also stars in the title role of an embittered housewife in rural Pennsylvania who embarks on a fateful journey of self-discovery after divorcing her husband and relinquishing custody of her children. The film won the Venice International Film Festival Pasinetti Award for Best Foreign Film and was later selected by the Library of Congress National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Loden, who died in 1980, was married to Oscar-winning filmmaker Elia Kazan from 1967 until her untimely death from cancer in 1980, and Kazan’s relationship with Loden had unforeseen consequences on the film’s release and distribution — which Pollock will articulate in the post-screening discussion.
The series concludes March 23 with actress Marielle Heller’s 2015 feature writing/directing debut “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s best-selling, semi-autobiographical 2002 graphic novel “The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures,” detailing the coming-of-age of an aspiring cartoonist (played by Bel Powley in her breakthrough role) in 1970s San Francisco. The film, which co-stars Kristen Wiig, Alexander Skarsgard, and Christopher Meloni, earned a slew of accolades, including Best New Filmmaker from the Boston Society of Film Critics, Best International Feature Film from the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the Best Actress Award for Powley at the Gotham Awards, to name a few.
Each film contains adult themes, and each courted controversy and even notoriety for their no-holds-barred approach to the subject matter. This was intentional, according to Pollock. “Honestly, I wanted to see how far I could push my audiences,” he said with a smile. For example, “‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl is very explicit and pretty shocking in terms of nudity and sexuality, but Alexander Skarsgard is terrific. It makes no compromises.”
Pollock and wife Susie enjoy spending time with their three children and three grandchildren, but he’s also working on another novel and although not as actively involved in the day-to-day operations of the RiverRun International Film Festival, whose move to Winston-Salem he engineered in 2003, he’ll surely be a presence at this year’s event, which runs April 17-25 (https://riverrunfilm.com/).