The Paramount Theater in downtown Charlottesville was packed to near capacity on Sunday evening for the Farina Film Festival, a fundraising event honoring local documentary filmmaker Chris Farina, who was diagnosed with the devastating neurodegenerative disease ALS last year and now requires a ventilator to breathe.

“I love getting to know people and hearing their stories of who they are,’ Farina said during a recent interview at his home, his eyes and smile bright despite his illness. “In some ways I think it’s been the real part of me being a filmmaker is to listen to others and then shine a light on them.”

The packed house and fundraising haul (the gofundme for Farina had reached $76,000 by Monday morning) was no surprise to filmmaker Bill Reifenberger, a close friend who has edited many of Farina’s eight documentaries.
“Way back when I first started doing this, someone told me this little mantra of filmmaking, which is films are only as strong as the relationships that are behind them,” Reifenberger told Charlottesville Right Now in an interview aired before the event. “He’s really one of the best I know at creating those bonds between the people that he’s working with on the films. He cares very deeply about that, and I think that that really comes across when you watch his films.”
Farina’s filmmaking began with a documentary he shot while a student at UVA in his hometown of Baltimore.
“We tracked down a camera that we could rent and found some old equipment here and there, pieced together a rig so that we could shoot in Baltimore,” said former Vinegar Hill Theater Manager Reid Oeschlin, a UVA classmate who worked on the film Route 40 with Farina, capturing scenes of the city from a diner to a roller rink. “Chris really has this sort of nose for the odd, the offbeat, and the just overlooked… it became his mission to just show people and people in settings who just got passed by.”
That quality is showcased in Farina’s other films, which covered subjects from a UVA professor who brought his students together with residents of a juvenile detention center to study Russian literature (Seat at the Table) to a Baltimore nonprofit teaching meditation to inner city public school students ( Holistic Life Foundation: Breathing Love into a Community).
His other works have covered a WWII veterans memory of Normandy, artists displaying at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, and a history of West Main Street in Charlottesville.
The film that has traveled the farthest is World Peace and Other Fourth Grade Achievements, a documentary released in 2010 showcasing a game created by former Venable Elementary School teacher John Hunter that taught children how to negotiate and collaborate around global conflicts.
“We gave a Ted Talk in 2011, survived that, and it led to an invitation to South by Southwest for Chris and the film,” Hunter recalled on Charlottesville Right Now. “And ffrom there to the Bergen International Film Festival in Bergen, Norway, where it was just obvious to us that this was a huge deal. We’re just a couple of small town guys, and we were mobbed by teachers and students at the film festival there.”
Farina and Hunter were awarded the audience favorite prize in Bergen, and later found themselves speaking to tech executives at Google and at the Department of Defense.
“We were just overwhelmed. We had no idea,” said Hunter, who now runs the World Peace Game Foundation, which has brought the game to students in 41 countries. “We had to sort of figure out what to do at every stage of this evolving, exploding phenomena because we remain just a couple of small town guys.
Farina’s current project is A Bridge to Life: The Bridge Ministry, a film focused on the Buckingham County-based nonprofit that offers an 18-month residential program for men struggling with substance abuse and mental illness as an alternative to incarceration.
WINA Morning News host Jay James is closely involved with the Bridge, founded by its director William Washington, and he spoke about Farina on Charlottesville Right Now ahead of the Sunday fundraiser.

“I think what people will see Sunday, aside from his amazing talent, God-given ability to tell stories which will move you, which is such a unique skill, you will see a reflection of the diversity of our community, of different lives that he has touched all coming back together to say, we got you. You are our brother. We love you. We’re going to be there for you. We are going to be there for you and your family.”

Listen to the full interview with Chris Farina here.
Listen to the full interview with Bill Reifenberger here.
Listen to the full interview with Reid Oechslin here.
Listen to the full interview with John Hunter here.
Listen to the full interview with Jay James here.