The digital Sitka featured in chick flick director Anne Fletcher’s The Proposal won’t be the only chance for moviegoers to see Alaska on the big screen this year. Two set-in-Alaska films emerged on the festival circuit in June, both featuring Alaskans in lead roles. Neither one—thankfully—bills itself as a wacky, fish-out-of-water tale, a la Northern Exposure or Men In Trees or the aforementioned romantic comedy.

Actor/producer Joseph McKelheer, a 1992 West High Graduate, is promoting Godspeed, a feature about a faith healer dogged by alcoholism whose family is murdered by an unknown killer. The film, shot mostly in the Matanuska Valley and in Anchorage, promises a fair amount of grit and at least one blood-splattered shirt.

Contrast that with writer-director Suzi Yoonessi’s Dear Lemon Lima about a half-Yup'ik girl coming of age in Fairbanks. Yoonessi shot her film in Washington State, but she’s visited Alaska and was captivated by Native games competitions she saw in Fairbanks (think ear pulls and high kicks). Yoonessi’s protagonist, Vanessa Lemor, is played by Savanah Wiltfong of Eagle River. Vanessa writes to her diary, has a crush on a boy who disses her and, according to Peter DeBruge at Variety, doodles pictures of “rainbows and bunnies that poop pastel hearts.”

A still from the movie Godspeed, filmed outside of Palmer

How sweet.

DeBruge, incidentally, gave Dear Lemon Lima a somewhat lukewarm review, but called Yoonessi’s script “warm and witty” and gives her kudos for skillfully directing the young cast. His most descriptive prose is reserved for the film’s aesthetics. He reports a movie steeped in “candy-colored sheen” and writes the film is “perfectly suited to those who revel in kooky sweaters and self-conscious set decoration.”

Readers who want a glimpse of Fairbanks as a frosted cupcake can see some of Yoonessi’s world at dearlemonlimamovie.com. No one from the film returned emails from the Press in time for this story, but Wiltfong reports on her Faceboook page that the two festival screenings were “sold out” and that she loves Disneyland. The film is being screened now at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The darker film, Godspeed, is from an original screenplay by Cory Knauf, but it springs from a story by McKelheer, who says Knauf and director Robert Saitzyk joined him on drives around Palmer and Wasilla scouting locations.

They weren’t looking for glaciers and mountains, except as backdrops to give the film for places a faith healer might actually live. “And people on the outskirts of Palmer, they don’t want people knocking on their door—for any reason—so it was really hard to find those locations,” McKelheer says. (We caught him on the phone Tuesday, from his home in Hollywood.)

Much of Godspeed was shot on Leroi and Margaret Heaven’s farm near Wasilla, with its expansive views of the Chugach Range. Leroi Heaven is well known in the Mat-Su area, particularly for teaming up preservation-minded people to preserve Matanuska Colony era barns. “He’s a barn and cabin collector and they were really amazing during the shoot,” McKelheer says.

McKelheer says the scouting trips paid off in a different way. While knocking on doors around Palmer, the crew met a true-to-life faith healer, a Valley man McKelheer says helped him prepare for the movie role.

“That was kind of a last minute thing,” he says. “He was a great guy, and just when I was trying to get into this guy, I met this real-life character, a modern day faith healer.”

McKelheer says his film would have applied for the state of Alaska’s film incentives, (the state plans to subsidize $100 million in film production up year 2013; see “Raiders of the tax incentives,” June 18) but the ink was not yet dry on the incentive program while Godspeed was gearing up. “We knew were going to shoot it all in Alaska,” he says.

I haven’t seen either of the films so I won’t make any judgment about their artfulness, (or quirkiness or grittiness, as the case may be), but I can tell you that both films have a buzz about them. Last week at Cinevegas, the Las Vegas film festival now in its 11th year, Godspeed took a special jury prize for artistic achievement.

In Los Angeles, Dear Lemon Lima is competing against six other narrative features for a $50,000 cash prize to be announced Sunday. That prize is sponsored by Target, the department store chain. So maybe one day soon we’ll see racks of T-shirts depicting a frosting-colored Fairbanks or bunnies pooping pastel hearts.

scott.christiansen@anchoragepress.com