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WAILEA – With attendance around 6,000 for its first two nights, the Maui Film Festival’s 12th season is off to an auspicious start.

Screenings continue tonight and Sunday in its signature venue, the Celestial Cinema in Wailea, as well as the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s Castle Theater, the site of many of its more provocative offerings.

Actor Garrett Hedlund, seen most recently as the co-star of “Tron: Legacy” with Jeff Bridges and Olivia Wilde, and “Country Strong” with Gwyneth Paltrow, is the latest up-and-coming artist to be honored by the festival. The 26-year-old actor accepted the Rising Star Award on Friday with a tribute, projected larger than life on the Celestial Cinema screen with Haleakala and the night sky as a backdrop.

Soon to be seen in a screen adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s Beat-era classic “On the Road,” the young actor seemed to be channeling that era’s spirit in the thoughtful, poetic answers he gave to a reporter’s questions.
“To me, it’s the era I romanticize the most,” he said. “It’s the one I’m saddest that I never got to be a part of. Any time you try to live it now, you just sort of look silly.”

Hedlund recalled his own teen years growing up in Arizona with the same sort of soulful longing.

“To be a part of this film is the most surreal thing in my life. I read the book when I was 17 and I was so inspired by it,” he said. Thinking of it as as screen role, “I said I’ll never have a chance at it – and who was I to deserve a chance at that, being a high school kid? Nine years later, it’s the most unbelievable thing ever.”

Hedlund quoted “method acting” pioneer Constantin Stanislavski’s belief that actors are shamans, or healers. He also likened his formative years to Tom Wingfield, the character in “The Glass Menagerie,” who goes to movies to get away from his own life, to forget or to be inspired. “That’s what I tended to do,” he said. “I found the biggest possibility you had was to make a difference, maybe just for a few hours, to take someone out of their blues, you know, to make someone smile for the first time in a long time.”

That outlook fits right into the Maui Film Festival philosophy, he said.

“What I’ve seen the most about the festival is it represents such positivity. There’s nothing not uplifting about this. All the films that are here are so sweet, so sad, so passionate, I can’t wait to see all of them.”

The Rising Star Award “honors a film artist who dares to dream big dreams and delivers brilliantly charismatic and revelatory performances every time that opportunity knocks,” said festival Founding Director Barry Rivers in presenting the engraved plaque.

Hedlund has also had roles in “Troy,” “Death Sentence,” “Georgia Rule,” “Eragon” and “Friday Night Lights.”

With thanks to HedlundFan - and the original Source