TIO AZ: Sedona Film Fest Opens With “This Piece of Ground”!

19 Feb TIO AZ: Sedona Film Fest Opens With “This Piece of Ground”!

Helmed by Executive Director Patrick Schweiss for 22 years of its 32 years, the Sedona Film Festival, (SFF), 2/21 – 3/1, has become world-renowned for bringing award-winning films and meaningful conversations to its growing community through filmmaker Q & As, workshops and seminars.

In keeping with his philosophy – and practice – Patrick framed the 2026 event around storytelling in general, rather than focusing only on one medium. To that end he opens this year’s festival with a solo historical play, “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground.”  That choice reinforces an institutional evolution, namely a commitment to presenting narrative art in both projected and embodied form across mediums.

Go here to check out the full festival schedule and scroll down to listen to a podcast featuring stage, screen  and TV actor, director composer John Rubinstein. Also learn more about Patrick Schweiss.

(Image is courtesy Sedona Film Festival.)

Global temperatures change as nations rise and fall and victories, real and imagined, get reinterpreted by the insiders du jour. It is only later, in quiet times, when we are alone, that private ledgers come out of desk drawers and we get to parse our past.

Case in point, upon reflection, the 34th president of the US, Dwight D. Eisenhower, came to understand the cost of command. Not just the lives lost in war, but the lives at risk with just about every decision he made. 

Living in Gettysburg, Eisenhower was surrounded by the physical ground of sacrifice. But in hindsight, the ground he was really standing on was memory. And memory is tenacious. It does not let you off easily. So it appears “Ike” spent his final years accounting to his conscious. Turf none of us can ever fully escape.

So, in “This Piece of Ground,” Rubinstein’s Eisenhower lingers not as a tribute to a former head of state, but as a  flash of conscience. In other words, the play trades spectacle for reckoning by inviting the audience into the private afterlife of a public figure. 

Rubinstein’s restrained performance poses a simple question: What remains when command fades? The answer is not just memory, more the consequences and related burden of having been the one in charge.

Over the course of two hours, Rubinstein’s Eisenhower finds the private weight beneath the public victory. The title, “This Piece of Ground,” refers directly to the former president’s farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the physical land where the play is set. Eisenhower retired there in 1962 to write his memoirs, raise cattle, and live quietly after the presidency.

Critics note that Rubinstein’s Eisenhower doesn’t command the room — he steadies it by reminding us that history’s quiet men often make the loudest noise. The solo format of the production encourages us to lean in and consider the costs of power and the lost art of political moderation.

John Rubinstein himself is a Tony Award-winning American stage, film, and television actor, composer, and director whose career spans more than five decades across Broadway, Hollywood, and regional theatre.

Born November 8, 1946, in Los Angeles, he is the son of famed pianist Arthur Rubinstein and dancer Aniela Rubinstein — an artistic lineage that deeply informed his early immersion in performance. 

Rubinstein studied theatre at UCLA before moving into professional work in New York. There he achieved early renown by creating the title role in the original Broadway production of “Pippin,” directed by Bob Fosse. The landmark debut established the artist as a charismatic musical-theatre leading man. He later won the Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for “Children of a Lesser God,” confirming his dramatic heft.

To learn more about his life and work, check out John Rubinstein’s podcast.

Patrick Schweiss, more:

Patrick Schweiss is Executive Director of the Sedona International Film Festival and theaters.

He took the helm at the festival 22 years ago and has overseen its growth from a 3-day festival to a 9-day celebration of independent film.

In 2012, Schweiss initiated and oversaw the festival organization as it built its own arthouse theatre venue – The Mary D. Fisher Theatre – where it presents year-round independent films, theatrical and ballet productions on screen from around the world, live simulcasts and live theatrical events, as well as other arts and cultural events.

In June 2022, the festival opened its newest addition: the Alice Gill-Sheldon Theatre. Now the event has two theatre venues that operate daily all year long!