The Fifth Annual Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) announces the opening and closing night films for this year's festival taking place Thursday, October 1 through Sunday, October 4.

The festival will open with Convention, a documentary telling the story behind the mounting of one of the biggest events of the decade: the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Producer, director and industry journalist AJ Shnack (http://edendale.typepad.com/), and co-producer and editor Nathan Truesdell will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening. The CIFF screening will be the film's New England Premiere.

Convention offers a rare inside look at a national political convention, portraying the 2008 DNC through the eyes of Denver's organizers, reporters, police and protesters and capturing what the mainstream media left out. Convention received positive attention at the 2009 Silverdocs Film Festival where it was the centerpiece screening.

"By placing Denver's administrative process of organizing and running the 2008 Democratic confab ahead of the event's political content, AJ Schnack's Convention becomes a bipartisan, upbeat celebration of democracy's delicate membrane and can-do spirit." -Eddie Cockrell, Variety

The CIFF will close on Sunday, October 4 with the film Earth Days, directed by acclaimed documentarian Robert Stone (Oswald's Ghost, Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst). Visually stunning and awe-inspiring, Earth Days looks back to the dawn of the modern environmental movement and follows its development from the post-war rustlings in the 1950s and the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's incendiary bestseller Silent Spring, to the first wildly successful 1970 Earth Day celebration and the subsequent firestorm of political action. Earth Days is both a poetic meditation on humanity's complex relationship with nature and an engaging history of the revolutionary achievements - and missed opportunities - of groundbreaking eco-activism. A critical success, Earth Days was featured as the official closing night film of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival 2009.

ABOUT CIFF

The Camden International Film Festival will announce its full slate of films on September 1. Committed to supporting and generating interest in independent documentary films, the annual festival presents a snapshot of the cultural landscape through the year's best non-fiction storytelling. The weekend also consists of a number of panels, photographic exhibits, musical performances and parties.

The 5th Annual Camden International Film Festival will take place October 1-4, 2009, screening nearly fifty films in venues throughout Midcoast Maine. For more information on the festival, the marquee films or information on passes visit www.camdenfilmfest.org.

Small towns, big films.