Cover Story
There’s just a lot more of it. Last year, for the first time in its 39-year history, the Nashville Film Festival broke the 20,000 attendance mark. When it opens this Thursday, April 17, for a week’s run at Regal’s Green Hills megaplex, another boost in attendance is likely. Whether you’ve been every year since the festival was called Sinking Creek, back at Vanderbilt throughout the 1970s, or you’re going for the first time, you could probably use some help sorting through the crowds, the tickets, and above all, dozens of different programming blocks devoted to features, documentaries, panels and workshops.
If so, you’re in the right place. Below, the Scene’s writers offer previews of this year’s NaFF attractions day by day, pointing out films you shouldn’t miss (as well as some you can safely skip). Along with those, we offer some practical tips for getting the most out of the festival. First, buy advance tickets, either at the downstairs Green Hills festival office or online at nashvillefilmfestival.org. Weekday matinees rarely fill to capacity, but weekend shows (especially at night) or any film featuring visiting celebrities will sell out long before showtime. The same is often true of movies showing only once at the festival: Usually, that means the film is something special, or at least has theatrical distribution. Plan accordingly.
Then take advantage of the social opportunities a festival provides—among them the once-a-year chance to have excited, animated conversations with hundreds of movie-mad viewers and filmmakers. Filmmakers tend to congregate on the patio outside the Green Hills box office and at the tables near the VIP area; audiences congest the lobby in lines snaking in every direction. Ask people what they’ve seen—by riding the buzz, you’ll likely find something interesting you wouldn’t know about otherwise.
And with that, enjoy the show.
☛ = Strongly recommended
THURSDAY, 17TH
THE DEAL (7 p.m.) Whenever anyone makes their “love letter to Hollywood,” be warned—all such correspondences tend to be roughly the same. Co-written by star William H. Macy, the independently financed The Deal reveals exactly nothing new: The biz is crooked, execs like it rough, art becomes crap, yada yada. It just happens to do it sprightlier than most. The shockingly winning duo of Macy and Meg Ryan play a producer and an exec pummeling a loving script about British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli into a Jewish-themed action vehicle for recent convert LL Cool J. Genial stuff, but surely Macy didn’t do Wild Hogs for this. Macy, co-star Jason Ritter, and director Steven Schachter will attend. (Matt Prigge)
SEARCHERS 2.0 (7:30 p.m.; also 4:30 p.m. April 18) Repo Man director Alex Cox knows the spaghetti Western better than anyone not named Sergio, and his appealingly scroungy road movie pays loving homage. Longtime Cox stock players Del Zamora and Ed Pansullo play former character actors who set out for Monument Valley, where they plan to bushwhack a Golden Age screenwriter (Sy Richardson) who mistreated them both as kids. The two bicker and banter over Al Gore, the Iraq War and Hollywood lore against a backdrop of desert vistas and blue-highways Americana, while the deliberately minor shot-on-video movie takes in the slow fade of the mythic West. The shaggy, shambling yarn climaxes with a Leone-trivia face-off that, like the movie, memorializes the forgotten heroes buried in the IMDB’s Boot Hill. (If ya got it in ya, pilgrim, take the trivia challenge at searchers2.com.) Watch for a cameo by a real outlaw, executive producer Roger Corman. (Jim Ridley)
SEARCHERS 2.0
TWO EMBRACES (8 p.m.; also 2 p.m. April 18) With his debut film, Enrique Begne joins the ranks of Mexican directors making poetic, elliptical movies about eclectic groups of strangers. Two Embraces is one of the better examples of the genre, even though its two stories—one about a teenager who falls in love with a surly grocery clerk, and one about a grumpy cab driver who gets involved in a passenger’s life—never seem to connect up cleanly, aside from the recurrence of disease, disgruntlement and near-desperate hugs. Still, the movie looks amazing, with shifting film stocks and startling rack-focus effects that indicate subtle changes in perception. And Two Embraces delivers this hopeful message: Even people who annoy you can be comforting to have around. In Spanish with subtitles. (Noel Murray)
☛ THE ART OF NEGATIVE THINKING (9:30 p.m.; also 7:30 p.m. April 19) This subdued black comedy is the debut feature from writer-director Bård Breien. Tori (Kjersti Holmen), a stern state social worker, has been called by a despondent wife to the home of Geirr (Fridtjov Såheim), who hasn’t left the house for two years since an automobile accident put him in a wheelchair. He spends his days alone in his room getting high, listening to Johnny Cash, watching Vietnam War movies and playing with an enormous loaded revolver. When Tori shows up with her positive-thought therapy group—including an ever-smiling quadriplegic and her husband, a stroke victim and a fallen-from-grace socialite—Geirr hijacks the group and leads them through a catharsis of negativity that proves sugar-coating your problems doesn’t make them go away. In Norwegian with subtitles. (Brent Rolen)
☛ YOU, THE LIVING (9:45 p.m.; also 9:15 p.m. April 18) Fans of Terry Gilliam and especially the serenely bizarre late comedies of Luis Buñuel are directed post-haste to the work of Sweden’s Roy Andersson, whose apocalyptic 2000 black comedy Songs From the Second Floor is among the best movies of the past decade never to play Nashville. This is roughly Andersson’s equivalent to Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty: a sketchbook of dreams within dreams, prankish sight gags and complexly orchestrated long takes linked by dour dark humor and intimations of impending doom. Yet the movie is buoyed by its left-field musical numbers and by Andersson’s Tati-like mastery of spatial slapstick—capped by a showstopper sequence involving that old life-of-the-party last resort, the pull-the-tablecloth trick. It may be the hardest I’ve laughed since the first Naked Gun. In Swedish with subtitles. (Jim Ridley)
YOU, THE LIVING
FRIDAY, 18TH
☛ YOUNG@HEART (1:15 p.m.; also 5 p.m. April 21) Stephen Walker’s must-see documentary profiles the Young at Heart Chorus of Northhampton, Mass., a choir of senior citizens (average age: 81) who spend their golden years rehearsing and performing rock tunes by the likes of The Clash, Sonic Youth and Coldplay. Their song choices (perfectly selected by their heroic director Bob Cilman) result in performances that are surprisingly free of irony: An exuberant “I Feel Good” celebrates the singers’ passion for life, while a performance of “Forever Young” nearly brings a jailful of inmates to tears. Even as fellow members fade suddenly into illness and death, the chorus gives its members a reason to live that they embrace with wisdom and grace. Movies don’t get much more inspiring than this. (Sam Smith)
YOUNG@HEART
☛ JUMP! (4:15 p.m.; also 3:15 p.m. April 19) Where Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom surveyed whiz-kid competitors in spelling and dance, Helen Hood Scheer’s entertaining doc follows the trend with a look at the best young jump-ropers in the world. Scheer focuses on five U.S. teams training for regional, national and worldwide honors, covering a range of ages, races and religions. All her subjects possess Olympics-ready commitment and competitive spirit, particularly the 12-year-old speed-jumper Tori. And the sport itself, unrestricted by standardized rules, proves to be not only an athletic test but also a ballet of creative choreography—making this a surefire audience-pleaser even for those who get winded climbing stairs. Scheer will attend, and live rope-jumping demonstrations are planned throughout the weekend. (Sam Smith)
JUMP!
URBAN ASSAULT: ESCAPE FROM POVERTY (6:45 p.m.; also 4:15 p.m. April 24) “The change in my life came the day I got shot,” says Taras Carter. Bound for revenge, he pointed a .38 long-barrel at the shooter but had a change of heart—and now they’re brothers-in-law. So opens Rob McDonald Jr.’s documentary about poverty in inner-city Nashville—an awkwardly organized jumble of statistics, stories, snapshots and solutions that nevertheless offers a revealing glimpse of life below the poverty line, from the Edgehill projects to East Nashville. The real standout is spunky Star (“not a statistic”) Martin, who overcame neighborhood shootings and a rape at age 11 to graduate high school, attend college and set her sights on the Oval Office. Only a fool would bet against her—even if the doc itself sometimes seems best suited for an after-church food drive. McDonald will attend. (Tony Youngblood)
☛ AMERICAN TEEN (7 p.m.) A Sundance sensation, Nanette Burstein’s sharply felt documentary about Warsaw, Ind., high-school seniors visits the hallways, bedrooms and basements where formative years are spent and finds things are not all that different regardless of when one is a teenager. The primary participants resemble their fictional teen-movie analogues—Hannah, the artistic outsider; popular mean girl Megan; Colin, the star basketball player in a hoops-mad community; and lovelorn band geek Jake—but are depicted with greater complexity than their Central Casting counterparts. High school years are frequently idealized, but Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) captures teenage angst and hope with such emotional potency that her film is unlikely to make viewers wistful. (Mark Pfeiffer)
☛ THROW DOWN YOUR HEART (7:15 p.m.) Banjo master Bela Fleck travels to Uganda, Tanzania, The Gambia and Mali to find the roots of his instrument and, more importantly, to meet and play with the various regions’ master musicians. That Fleck is shy and self-effacing works to enhance the film’s ultimate theme: music as the universal language. If this sounds like clichéd, feel-good territory, don’t be fooled. There are some truly stunning musical moments, including scenes of Fleck jamming with astounding Malian guitarist Djelimady Tounkara and engaging in a John Lee Hooker-worthy blues duel with n’goni master Bassekou Kouyate. Director Sascha Paladino wisely keeps the focus on the African musicians, and the sound recording is superb, capturing thumb pianos, akonting, kamelengoni, drums and enormous marimbas in all their rough-hewn glory. Fleck will attend. (Jack Silverman)
THROW DOWN YOUR HEART
☛ TAKING ROOT: THE VISION OF WANGARI MAATHAI (7:30 p.m.) Lisa Merton and Alan Dater’s documentary shows how one person can change the face of the Earth, giving environmentalism and activism a face other than Al Gore or Michael Moore. That person is Wangari Maathai, a native Kenyan who founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 to inspire local women to replenish the once thriving forests surrounding their villages. Defying the forces of colonialism and the crown-backed Moi government, the U.S.-educated Matthai began teaching the people about their rights and spoke out against Kenya’s ruling dictatorship at enormous personal risk. From this affectionate, rousing portrait, the Nobel Prize winner emerges as a warm, humble, but unstoppable advocate for human rights—proof that one small voice of dissent can shake nations. It’s news we need to hear. Merton and Dater will attend. (Brian Miles)
☛ PROPHETS RISING (9 p.m.) In their unsettling doc—which could have been titled Sympathy for the Angel—veteran Nashville filmmakers Loree Gold and Jane Pittman examine the groundswell of evangelical fervor in “the Protestant Vatican” without overt editorializing or skepticism. (From the movie’s first shot—a woman in angel duds flapping around a Middle Tennessee barnyard—many will feel none is needed.) Inspired, according to Gold, by P.J. Tobia’s 2006 Scene cover story of the same name, the doc profiles (among others) singer Sandy Powell, a dynamo who’s only slightly altered her secular stage show of “Great Balls of Fire,” and author James Goll, a rising star whose wife is facing a struggle with cancer. There are no rebuttal witnesses or outside observers to challenge, say, the push to convert Jews—one can imagine the outspoken and proudly Jewish Gold biting down on her lens cap—just the occasional note of cautious ambivalence in Minton Sparks’ drawled narration. The result is a movie that both sides may claim as ammunition. Gold, Pittman and several of their subjects will attend. (Jim Ridley)
☛ WERE THE WORLD MINE (9:30 p.m.) When Timothy (Tanner Cohen), the bullied gay kid in an all-boy high school, is assigned the role of Puck in their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he discovers the potion to create a magical pansy (of course) that turns his closed-minded peers and townspeople gay. Director Thomas Gustafson adapted his award-winning short musical “Fairies” into a full-length version that is even gayer than High School Musical. While it relies on stereotypes and is a bit heavy-handed in its message of acceptance, this is more the result of a still-intolerant culture where the teasing that Timothy endures is itself a fairy tale compared to the daily brutality some gay teenagers face. With lavish fantasy sequences and beautiful, emotive music, it’s the perfect dream for a mid-spring night. Gustafson will attend. (Brent Rolen)
WERE THE WORLD MINE
TEENAGE TUPELO (10:30 p.m.) You may remember J. Michael McCarthy from such films as Superstarlet A.D. and Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis. But you won’t forget the Russ Meyer of Memphis after seeing his 1995 saga of sin, sex, stripping, Sapphic lust and Scopitones. Stamped with the sleaze seal of approval by associate producer and exploitation legend David F. Friedman, McCarthy’s grainy-as-Kansas trash orgy looks and sounds like the audio-visual component of Satan’s bachelor party circa 1965, with a dual role for buxom big-haired bombshell D’Lana Tunnell as a rockabilly stud’s impregnated conquest and an exotic dancer with a posse of ass-kicking lesbian worshippers. And yes, that’s Scene contributor Edd Hurt as the director’s surrogate. McCarthy will attend. (Jim Ridley)
SATURDAY, 19TH
KINGS (12:15 p.m.) In the late 1970s, six friends leave Ireland’s impoverished Connemara to find a new life in London, where their paths divide. Thirty years later, they reunite for the wake of friend Jackie, killed by a train on the railway he helped build. Despite an overabundance of “cinematic” flashbacks, Tom Collins’ adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s play The Kings of Kilburn High Road rarely transcends either its stage origins or the conventions of the reunion-film genre. But as Ireland’s first bilingual picture (80 percent is in subtitled Irish-Gaelic), the film is a treat for the ears. And it features brilliant work from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Colm Meaney, Donal O’Kelly, and especially Brendan Conroy, whose award-winning turn as a lug who’s “always on the sidelines” but seethes with masked desperation is the heart of the picture. (Tony Youngblood)
CROSSING THE DUST (1:15 p.m.; also 5 p.m. April 22) Set on the day Saddam Hussein’s statue toppled in Baghdad, writer-director Shawkat Amin Korki’s drama provides an eye-opening Kurdish perspective on the Iraq War, focusing on the travails of two Peshmerga (Kurdish freedom fighters). While hauling rations to their comrades on the frontline, Rashid (Adil Abdolrahmadn) and Azad (Hossein Hasan) take mercy on a lost child unfortunately named Saddam (Abdola Awayd). Ignore the terrible subtitles and concentrate on the movie’s convincing details of everyday life in the war’s early days: avoiding death squads, contending with rolling blackouts, and searching vainly for peace. In English, Kurdish and Arabic with subtitles. (Brian Miles)
☛ FLOW: FOR LOVE OF WATER (2:15 p.m.; also 4:30 p.m. April 22) Fela Kuti once sang “Water No Get Enemy,” but Irena Salina’s alarming documentary Flow argues that we’re an enemy to the water, and that what we’ve been doing with it—polluting, exploiting, stealing from the poor—is slowly killing us. Flow is more an accumulation of facts than an artful film: the less said about the dramatic re-enactments, the better. But Salina’s string of anecdotes about disease-ridden reservoirs, sex-changing fish, and the bilking of third-world communities constitutes an overpowering argument that everyone needs to hear. Just don’t buy any bottled water on your way into the theater. Salina will attend. (Noel Murray)
☛ 45 YEARS OF CANYON CINEMA (3:15 p.m.) This beautifully assembled program hosted by Canyon executive director Dominic Angerame represents a sampling of the old-fashioned, succulently tactile pleasures of 16mm celluloid in the hands of artists in complete control of their medium. Stan Brakhage’s “Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse” is nothing less than an eight-minute visual grudge match between the aesthetic capabilities of film and television. It’s as close as the man ever got to “video art.” Kenneth Anger is represented by one of his best films, “Eaux D’Artifice,” a ravishing contrapuntal play of solids and fluids. Austrian anarcho-structuralist Martin Arnold’s “Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy” performs staccato turntablist scratching on footage from one of the old Rooney/Garland vehicles, revealing not-so-latent Oedipal comedy with a backbeat. In a somewhat similar vein, Ken Jacobs’s wide-screen wonder “The Georgetown Loop” takes an old “cattle-catcher” film of a turn-of-the-century train rounding a mountain pass and turns it into something of a vertigo-machine. What Arnold does with linear time, Jacobs does to deep filmic space.
Other filmmakers either follow the Brakhage hand-painting tradition, bend, scratch, or otherwise worry the physical surface of the filmstrip. Frédé Devaux’s “Ellipses” removes sections, slices and holes from the film, then “stitches” them back together to form quilt-like composite frames. Donna Cameron is an artist whose work exists at the juncture between film, painting and photography, and “Autumn Leaves” is essentially a motion-painting unfurling on handmade paper emulsion. Finally, Phil Solomon’s “Psalm III: Night of the Meek” is a found-footage symphony of loss and eventual rebirth, subjected to Solomon’s unique and indescribable photochemical treatment processes. Images appear and submerge into a turbulent sea of pure motion and metallurgy; Solomon’s cinema really bears comparison only with the massive Expressionist canvases of Anselm Kiefer. For anyone with even a passing interest in experimental cinema, the entire program is a must-see. (Michael Sicinski)
☛ THE BLACK LIST (4:45 p.m.) The personal is deeply political, and identity is a construct. Those may sound like tired protest chants, but that’s the thoughtful revelation you take from The Black List, an astute work that draws 20 African Americans from a wide swath and just lets them talk. Director/photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (whose Thinking XXX approached porn as portraiture) and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell collaborated on these intimate vignettes, and their fingerprints never smudge the lens. By letting Chris Rock, Toni Morrison and others tell their own stories, they present a rarely seen portrait of black America—exactly how a national conversation on modern race relations ought to begin. (Tracy Moore)
☛ PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND (5:15 p.m.) Named “Best Experimental Film of 2007” by the National Society of Film Critics, this startlingly moving film takes us on a tour of the United States via its cemeteries, minor monuments, and out-of-the-way historical markers. Over the course of the film, we and the film are tracing a chronological path through the American Left, paying near-silent homage to our comrades, those who fell in battle (slain by police or Pinkertons during strikes; felled by assassins) or those whose lives had simply run their natural course. Inspired by Howard Zinn’s magisterial People’s History of the United States, John Gianvito’s leftist vision is righteously ecumenical, encompassing Eugene V. Debs and Frank Little, Sojourner Truth and Malcolm X, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Cesar Chavez, and many, many others whom mainstream historical accounts have buried far more comprehensively than their undertakers.
In between these sequences, which allow us as viewers the rare opportunity to pay our respects by proxy, Gianvito provides a continual filmic refrain. He tilts his camera up, capturing trees rustling in the wind, light usually peering through the branches. In addition to providing a somber objective-correlative to the film’s consideration of the transience of both human life and populist politics, these sequences offer a vague inkling of a force that may still remain afoot in our world, a voice or a spirit or an idea alight on the wind. The concluding minutes of Profit Motive make this restlessness explicit, in a manner that practically recodes the entire film, shifting its terms from the elegiac to the cyclotronic, a conscious harnessing of available energies. Gianvito’s radical-left optimism looks ahead to a very different “coalition of the willing,” and suddenly seems not just hopeful but possibly prescient. Judge for yourself. Gianvito will attend. (Michael Sicinski)
☛ ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (5:45 p.m.) Bewitched by a friend’s underwater footage from beneath the Antarctic ice, Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Grizzly Man) travels south for more. There he finds an “ugly mining town” he’s appalled has ATM machines, aerobics facilities and yoga classes. But he also finds spiritual brethren in a group of scientists and willing social outcasts. Grumpy and proudly Herzogian—one interviewee is credited on-screen as “Philosopher, Forklift Driver”—Encounters starts out diaristic but snowballs, ever so slightly, into a valentine to the scientific worldview, depicting curiosity as the trait that truly makes us human and discovery as being inextricably linked with poetry. (Matt Prigge)
TRACING COWBOYS (7:15 p.m.; also 9:30 p.m. April 22) With only a mysterious sheaf of his vanished girlfriend’s photographs to guide him, a wanna-be British cowboy (Sacha Grunpeter) who idolizes Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and John Ford’s The Searchers follows her trail through Mexico, hoping to solve her disappearance. Not a mystery but a fragmented mood piece that skips back and forth in time, often confusingly, Jason Wulfsohn’s ambitious, often wordless, handsomely photographed feature means to trace the hero’s development from a carbon-copy cowboy to an individual, but the scrambled structure and shallow characters blunt the revelation. The gaunt, sad-eyed Grunpeter is a striking presence; sadly, the young screenwriter-star was killed in a car accident the last day of shooting. Wulfsohn will attend. (Jim Ridley)
TRACING COWBOYS
EDEN COURT (7:45 p.m.) Shroeder (Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon) is a trailer-park mope with an ex-prom queen wife (Kimberly Paisley-Williams) and a dead-end job at the local ball park; his wife thinks he’s fooling around, when in fact he’s planning to chuck it all and move to Australia. Pitched between broad farce and morose small-town desperation, director Paul Leuer’s film often resembles filmed regional theater more than a movie, and it struggles to find a tone that will accommodate both tearful confessions and a foot race between guys in hot-dog suits. But as a friend who starts out the morning with shoplifted champagne, Mad TV’s Stephnie Weir creates an earthy, funny portrait of a hard-living good-time gal that’s the best reason to see the movie. Even better than a foot race between guys in hot-dog suits. Paisley-Williams and Leuer will attend. (Jim Ridley)
AUGUST THE FIRST (8 p.m.) It’s refreshing to see any independent film following the idiosyncratic, personal model of Charles Burnett instead of sub-Juno quirk, but it’s especially nice to see an African American filmmaker make an effort to build on Burnett’s legacy. Set during a volatile high school graduation party, Lanre Olabisi’s debut feature observes the fragmented reactions of one middle-class black family when the graduate’s father—a native Nigerian long absent from the household—comes back home for the party, for reasons no one can discern. The dialogue gets too overheated at times, and there are a handful of dramatic scenes that feel forced, but for the most part August The First is intimate and relatable, not sensationalized or cutesy. Olabisi will attend. (Noel Murray)
AUGUST THE FIRST
SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA (9:45 p.m.) Molly Hatchet’s album covers come alive in writer-director-producer-star Tony Stone’s one-of-a-kind micro-epic: a largely wordless account of two 11th century Vikings fighting for their lives in the harsh New World (actually upstate New York) after their comrades are killed. Aided by blazing red title cards and sound design that plays up the unspoiled quiet—an ax’s thwack echoes like gunfire—the movie vacillates between casual anachronism (“This fish is really killer!”) and a rugged, brooding physicality that persuades even when the no-budget seams show. Does metal appear on the soundtrack? Do Norsemen shit in the woods? (Sez the movie, graphically: yes.) Stone will attend. In Old Norse and Abenaki with subtitles. (Jim Ridley)
SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA
THE SWEET LADY WITH THE NASTY VOICE (10 p.m.) Heard of Wanda Jackson? Then you already know she’s the queen of rockabilly, but this doc toots that horn anyway. With a growl in her voice and a shimmy in her shake, this “Fujiyama Mama” could dish the dirt and call in debts from Joplin to Jett. But Jackson seems too sweet-natured to divulge her secrets (ahem, Elvis). Instead, filmmakers Joanne Fish and Vincent Kralyevich (and commenters from Costello to Springsteen) handle the still-touring 70-year-old Jackson with fan-club gloves, bidding for her induction into the Hall of Fame. Why isn’t she there already? Don’t wait for an answer, especially from Hall prez Terry Stewart. But the petition starts here. Fish and Kralyevich will attend. (Tracy Moore)
TRAILER PARK OF TERROR (10:15 p.m.; also 9 p.m. April 23) Move over, Herschell Gordon Lewis, there’s a new gut-ripper in town: longtime Nashville music-vid whiz Steven Goldmann, who attempts to out-splatter the master with this yucky variation on Lewis’ rebel-hell classic Two Thousand Maniacs! An accident strands a busload of troubled teens in a haunted trailer park, where the tainted haints return to dismember, devour, de-spine and barbecue the living. This nasty-ass exercise in halter-top horror is more disgusting and mean-spirited than fun—but gore aficionados will applaud Goldmann for spilling blood by the five-gallon bucket. Goldmann will attend. With Trace Adkins as Satan. (Jim Ridley)
TRAILER PARK OF TERROR
SUNDAY, 20TH
☛ ALEXANDRA (noon) Aleksandr Sokurov (Russian Ark) is considered by many to be Russia’s greatest living filmmaker. His latest, an examination of the malaise and futility that is the Chechen War, also serves as a grand statement about the human waste of war at any time and place. Elderly Alexandra (Russian opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya) slowly makes her way to the front lines in order to visit her soldier grandson and, in a sense, witness a generation squandered. Although Sokurov’s specific statements on the Chechen conflict are regrettably simplistic, and not without a touch of reflexive chauvinism, Alexandra is nevertheless a rare modern work that hovers before one’s eyes like a faded sepia postcard—a missive from a past we’re still undergoing. In Russian and Chechen with subtitles. (Michael Sicinski)
THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION (12:30 p.m.; also 1:15 p.m. April 22) Alan Swyer’s documentary portrays Americans who have adopted Hare Krishna, Zen Buddhism, yogic spirituality and other Eastern faiths, describing how their ancient mystical convictions inform their 21st century lives. It’s an old story, and while the movie doesn’t have any new revelations, it does feature an impressive array of participants, including many of the leading figures of the 1960s’ Eastern craze. Particularly moving is brief footage of Amma, the famous “hugging saint,” as she beatifically embraces supplicants for hours on end. Swyer has essentially made a feature-length commercial for Eastern religions, but he’s also captured the poignant attempts of the converted to explain their epiphanies. Swyer and Master Charles Cannon will attend. (Donna Bowman)
☛ FILM WITHOUT BOUNDARIES (12:45 p.m.) Although the films in this collection were unavailable for preview, the program includes new work by reliable names in the experimental media field such as Ariana Gerstein and Leighton Pierce, both of whom have produced exquisite work in the past. Michael Robinson’s “Light Is Waiting,” however, is a flat-out masterwork, alone worth the price of admission. Structured around reprocessed footage of ABC’s Full House, the video depicts Saget, Coolier, the Olsens and all the rest entering a kind of abstracted, crimson-and-cobalt-suffused perceptual hell—a disorienting blast for the eyes and ears. Also on the bill: Olivo Barbieri’s “Sevilla (06)” continues the Italian photographer-turned-filmmaker’s explorations of aerial landscape views with his instantly recognizable “toy town” style. Using a very unique lens and focal length combination, Barbieri makes real cities resemble tiny living models, and in so doing reveals color and shape patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. But “Light Is Waiting” will be the bizarre, haunting film that you struggle to explain to your friends for weeks to come. (Michael Sicinski)
☛ IN THE COMPANY OF ACTORS (2:45 p.m.) This film diary chronicles the Sydney Theater Company’s Brooklyn restaging of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, starring none other than Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving among a fine Australian ensemble. The whole crew—director, writer, set designer, constructors, stage manager—chimes in on the unique collaborative spirit of theater, and the actors thrive on the immediacy of the medium and the power of the material. Director Ian Darling’s film pays tribute to the art of live theater, but it’s most essential as an intimate glimpse of one of the greatest screen actresses of our time at work onstage. (Sam Smith)
IN THE COMPANY OF ACTORS
THE PUSSYCAT PREACHER (3:15 p.m.; also 1:15 p.m. April 21) Former stripper/porn actress Heather Veitch’s journey from drug-addled sex addict to Christian missionary is chronicled in this low-rent documentary. With consternation from fellow churchgoers but support from her surfer-dude pastor, the platinum-blonde, artificially augmented Veitch recruits church ladies to convert sex workers. Fine, except Veitch still seems drawn to the darkness, and promotion for “J.C.’s Girls Girls Girls” straddles prudence and prurience. Questions of gender, religion and responsibility emerge, even if they mostly fly over Veitch’s head. Producer-director Bill Day’s earlier and similar doc, Missionary Positions, also features Jimmy DiGiorgio, a porn photographer of Shakespearean sleaze whose leering insight proves invaluable here. Veitch and Day will attend. (Cody De Vos)
THE PUSSYCAT PREACHER
☛ ONE BAD CAT: THE REVEREND ALBERT WAGNER STORY (4:15 p.m.; also 2 p.m. April 21) Albert Wagner was a womanizer and an alcoholic until the age of 50, when God put a paintbrush in his hand. He cleaned up, became a minister and began painting childlike, color-saturated story-pictures depicting his controversial views of the African American experience—lynchings, black men raping white women—for a mostly white clientele. Was the late Cleveland artist expressing internalized racism, as some critics claim? Were the less savory aspects of his character—among them a conviction for child molesting—too easily rationalized by eager collectors? Thomas G. Miller’s fascinating documentary lets us draw our own conclusions, confronting complex issues of racism, identity, accountability and commerce. Delroy Lindo narrates. Miller and Wagner’s daughter Bonita Wagner Johnson will attend. (Tony Youngblood)
☛ IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (5 p.m.) A gorgeous feat of near-wordless (but far from silent) filmmaking, Jose Luis Guerin’s romantic reverie visually erases the distance between foreground and background to blur near (in the moment) into far (in memory) as a sketch artist pursues what looks like a former flame through the streets of Strasbourg. The virtually plotless movie is a string of beautifully sustained trompes l’oeil: A billboard-sized face and a person on a park bench seem to exchange sidelong glances on the same plane, while people on opposite sides of a plate of glass appear to interact. Maybe this sounds pretentious, but that’s not how it unfurls: With the transformative addition of a minutely detailed sound design that makes every footstep and street noise pop, it’s like spending a spring day in kite weather at an outdoor café. In French and Spanish with subtitles. (Jim Ridley)
IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA
☛ SOZDAR: SHE WHO LIVES HER PROMISE (5:15 p.m.; also 3 p.m. April 21) Two weeks after Sept. 11, Nuriye Kesbir, an outspoken advocate for women’s rights as well as a gun-toting fighter in the Kurdish PKK resistance movement, traveled to the Netherlands—only to face prison and, worse, intended extradition to Turkey and certain rape and torture. Annegriet Wietsma’s riveting documentary considers Kesbir’s struggle in light of the Netherlands’ reverence for its World War II resistance heroes, wondering what pushes ordinary people to extraordinary heroism: in Kesbir’s case, it’s the same love of liberty that led her to reject her arranged marriage, intensified into action by Saddam Hussein’s genocidal 1988 chemical massacre at Halabja. As Kesbir paces in caged frustration in exile, the doc forcefully illustrates her bitter wisdom: “If freedom was easy to get, it would be unnecessary for so many people to die for it or be tortured for it.” Wietsma will attend. In Kurdish, Turkish, German and Dutch with subtitles. (Jim Ridley)
☛ SHAKE THE DEVIL OFF (6:45 p.m.; also 3:30 p.m. April 21) What starts off as a quaint tale of a vibrant parish priest in the predominantly African-American Treme neighborhood of New Orleans slowly morphs into an examination of what happens when things like God and spirituality meet head to head with a multinational corporation such as the Catholic Church. In the face of St. Augustine Parish’s flagging revenues—brought on by that little storm a few years ago, which displaced many parishioners—the archdiocese of New Orleans opts to shut down the historically significant parish, and to displace the heroic and ebullient Father Jerome LeDoux with a white pastor who makes Karl Rove seem charismatic. Peter Entell’s documentary of the ensuing uprising is about as no-frills as it gets, which may be for the best—there’s no artsy filmmaking to distract from the real star, the story. LeDoux will attend. (Jack Silverman)
☛ THE PENCIL-STAND (7 p.m.) It was just five years ago that the NaFF introduced the world to self-taught Arkansas filmmaker Phil Chambliss, whose lurid, surreal, endlessly quotable yarns of hatchet men and philandering barbers and Satanic desk jockeys snip the barbwire separating amateur from avant-garde. Since then, his films have literally gone halfway around the world; his admirers reportedly include everyone from Lucinda Williams and Eric Idle to Ethan Coen and (most recently) Bobcat Goldthwait. Welcome him back in triumph for a screening of his latest: a remake/expansion of an earlier short about a minister’s run-in with a blind pencil salesman. Watch for shout-outs to Williams, Dub Cornett and NaFF artistic director Brian Gordon, and be sure to stick around for Chambliss’ post-film Q&A. (Jim Ridley)
A NASHVILLE STATE OF MIND (7:45 p.m.) Miamians M.E.G. discovered a warm network of songwriters in Music City two years ago—and never left. Nashville State of Mind gives ’em all a big group hug and romanticizes their bonfires-and-brews lifestyle. It’s Nashville through a newcomer’s eyes, with performances and earnest face time from commercially minded pop artists—all transplants. Aaron Winters’ yacht-rock croon is a stand-out, but time is lost on mundane aspects of the musicians’ lives. The doc’s most riveting voice comes from Hank III, who offers a twitchy, cynical appraisal of Music Row. The production is slick, but the showboating editing tactics distract. The directors will attend. (Tracy Moore)
A NASHVILLE STATE OF MIND
☛ AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR (9:15 p.m.; also 1:45 p.m. April 22) The Rev. Carroll Pickett was a staunch capital-punishment supporter when he began working as a death-house chaplain in Huntsville, Texas. But in this powerful film, directors Peter Gilbert and Steve James (Hoop Dreams) chronicle the pastor’s wavering support for the death penalty, which reached a turning point with the case of Carlos DeLuna—an inmate executed in 1989 despite ample evidence of his innocence. Without overtly preaching an anti-death penalty message, the movie sheds light on a flawed justice system by simply yet eloquently relaying Pickett’s own complicated journey, which began with his grandfather’s brutal murder years earlier. A brief segment highlighting the town’s perverse pride in its executions is the movie’s one unsubtle note—but it’s hard to downplay the local diner’s morbid advertisement of a mean “Killer Burger,” or interstate billboards that proudly proclaim Huntsville as home to the original “Ol’ Sparky.” Gilbert and James will attend. (Sarah Kelley)
AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR
THE ASSASSIN (9:30 p.m.; also 4:30 p.m. April 23) If you’re going to steal, steal from the best. Taking a page from John Woo—and the index, dust jacket and much of the text from Jean-Pierre Melville—TSU alum Devin E. Haqq transposes Melville’s moody hit-man reverie Le Samourai to New York, playing the ice-blooded trigger man who defies cops and crooks alike as he edges closer to a nightclub singer. Low on thrills, slackly paced and amateurishly acted, the well-intentioned homage stubs its toe on the crime-drama clichés Melville nimbly hopscotched. But for the length of the movie’s showpiece—Haqq leading his pursuers on a foot chase through Grand Central, midtown Manhattan and Times Square—the first-time filmmaker pulls off the kind of ballsy 1970s-style location shooting that even big-budget features rarely try these days. Haqq will attend. (Jim Ridley)
THE ASSASSIN
MONDAY, 21ST
☛ OF ALL THE THINGS (6:45 p.m.; also 3:30 p.m. April 22) Fans of pop-culture ephemera should get to know Dennis Lambert, a successful Boca Raton real estate agent who 30 years ago wrote and produced hit songs like “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Baby Come Back.” Lambert also recorded one flop solo album that’s beloved in the Philippines, and when a promoter recently asked him to fly over for a mini-tour, Lambert reluctantly accepted, and his son Jody tagged along to make this likable documentary. Of All the Things is neither personal enough nor informative enough to be called great, but it’s both entertaining and moving to see Lambert reconnect with a part of himself he’d left behind decades ago. And the music is so good it’ll have viewers scouring eBay and iTunes to make their own Lambert anthologies. Both Lamberts will attend. (Noel Murray)
☛ THEN SHE FOUND ME (7 p.m.) The festival circuit is littered with slumming big-name vanity projects, but Helen Hunt’s disarming first feature as director isn’t one of them. One of the NaFF’s brightest surprises, this bittersweet comedy-drama about a jilted wife (Hunt) who suddenly hears from the dithery talk-show host (Bette Midler, in a welcome and worthy return) who put her up for adoption as a baby is a little gem: sad without being maudlin, sensitively acted by a seamless ensemble (including Matthew Broderick and Colin Firth as competing love interests) all working at peak form. Hunt rushes past some of the story’s tragic turns, but as a whole the movie has tart, smart writing (adapted from an Elinor Lipman novel), crack comic timing, and an abiding affection for all its neurotic characters—traits associated with Hunt’s As Good As It Gets writer-director James L. Brooks. Truth be told, I liked this more. Of note in the role of Hunt’s doctor: the festival’s single oddest cameo, a surprise I wouldn’t dream of spoiling. (Jim Ridley)
THEN SHE FOUND ME
THE COLORS OF MEMORY (7:15 p.m.) Iranian-born Dr. Parza (Shahbaz Noshir) travels back to his homeland from Hamburg, Germany, to perform an operation for an old family friend. From the moment he touches down in Tehran, the recently divorced doctor begins a journey of spiritual and romantic rediscovery, attempting to restore his family’s earthquake-stricken palm grove while searching for a long lost love. Amir Shahab Razavian’s melodrama has no shortage of heavy-handed symbolism—the dry palm-grove wells that must be unclogged for water to flow again, etc.—but the beautiful scenery and glimpses of cosmopolitan modern-day Tehran compensate. Razavian will attend. In Farsi with subtitles. (Brian Miles)
OUT AT THE WEDDING (8 p.m.) A scatter-brained New Yorker (Andrea Marcellus) disrupts her sister’s wedding when a misunderstanding makes everyone think she’s a lesbian. Afraid her staid Southern dad (Mike Ferrell) can’t handle the truth—she has a black boyfriend—she hires a real lesbian (Cathy DeBuono) to pose as her girlfriend. Guess what happens when the girlfriend and sister meet. It takes the appealing cast of Lee Friedlander’s sitcom farce roughly an hour to fight through the plot’s exasperating contrivances: If the heroine just used the pronoun “he” in an early scene, the movie would be shortened by half. But then the characters will behave with unexpected decency or compassion, and suddenly the movie makes up in heart what it often seems to lack in brain. Recommended to all who miss Will & Grace. Friedlander will attend. (Jim Ridley)
OUT AT THE WEDDING
☛ SONS OF LWALA (9 p.m.; also 5 p.m. April 23) Next time you feel like complaining about how bad you’ve got it, think about this film. If you missed the triumphant showing of Nashville filmmaker Barry Simmons’ documentary last month at TPAC, here’s one more chance to encounter the story of Vanderbilt med student Milton Ochieng’ and his family’s efforts to build a medical clinic in their impoverished Kenyan village. For more information about ways to help, see sonsoflwala.com. Simmons and Ochieng’ will attend. (Jim Ridley)
SONS OF LWALA
BUNNYLAND (9:15 p.m.; also 2 p.m. April 23) Christopher Guest couldn’t make this up. From the same stranger-than-fiction department as last year’s NaFF favorite The Urim & Thummim comes this profile of Johnny Tesar, the self-described “last Indian on the Trail of Tears,” a motor-mouthed East Tennessee entrepreneur whose every move has courted controversy with hunters, neighbors and business partners. His Waterloo was Bunnyland, a Pigeon Forge miniature-golf course with the questionable novelty of bonking balls around live rabbits; his stake ended in perhaps the weirdest legal challenge of all time, followed by a still-unsolved bunny massacre. Director Brett Hanover listens as Tesar, a.k.a. “Johnny Rock,” outlines his woes while showing off thousands of effusively described stone artifacts. The movie’s shot in long static setups that come uncomfortably close to oddball gawking, but Hanover lets each subject talk (and talk and talk) at length—in contradictory interviews that, considering this lawsuit-happy crew, may serve someday as depositions. Hanover will attend. (Jim Ridley)
TALKING GUITARS (9:45 p.m.) Dutch documentary filmmaker M. Claire Pijman explores the world of Flip Scipio, who builds and repairs instruments for some of popular music’s biggest stars. “My favorite guitars are those that don’t look so fancy, that have a simple look and a beautiful line, that play well and sound good,” Scipio says, and Pijman seems to have heeded the same criteria for her humble portrait of a master craftsman whose passion for instruments is palpable throughout the film. Highlights include impromptu jams featuring clients Jackson Brown and David Lindley, as well as some whacked-out off-the-cuff mayhem from avant-garde guitar hero David Tronzo. A rather disengaged Paul Simon, meanwhile, somehow manages to drain the life out of an otherwise interesting anecdote about one of his Scipio-modified guitars. Pjiman and Scipio will attend. In English and Dutch with subtitles. (Jack Silverman)
OTIS (10:15 p.m.) In Tony Krantz’s lame horror-comedy, a tubby sad-sack pizza deliveryman (Bostin Christopher) tortures and kills teenage girls until one would-be victim escapes, and her white-bread family plots revenge. Ostensibly a satire of picket-fence America, Otis can’t find enough traction to elicit a single thrill or chuckle—its sole achievement is that its misogyny somehow shines through its misanthropy. Daniel Stern, Kevin Pollak and Illeana Douglas bounce awkwardly off each other (literally and figuratively), and the two teenage protagonists are so lazily written that even their character templates (slacker boy and pretty blonde prom queen) are surely hanging their nondescript heads. Christopher will attend. (Cody De Vos)
TUESDAY, 22ND
A CONVERSATION WITH PATRICIA NEAL/HUD (6 p.m.) “I’ve done my time with one cold-blooded bastard,” Patricia Neal tells Paul Newman, in a voice like the last puff of a stubbed-out cigarette. “I’m not looking for another.” Special guest Lyle Lovett, Neal’s co-star in Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune, and Variety critic Joe Leydon host this evening with the Oscar-winning actress, which includes a screening of Martin Ritt’s 1963 drama Hud. Newman and co-star Melvyn Douglas are in top form, but it’s Neal’s bluntly sexy, knowing performance as a hard-bitten housekeeper you’ll fold away. (Jim Ridley)
☛ JOIN US (6:45 p.m.; also 2:15 p.m. April 23) Gifted documentarian Ondi Timoner (justly celebrated for her revelatory rock doc DiG!) turns an empathic eye to the country’s only live-in cult rehab center, where ordinary, working families struggle to distance themselves from their cruel, cultish church. It’s a harrowing recovery, fraught with guilt and outrage (severe child abuse was enforced as standard discipline by the pastor), but Timoner is patient with her subjects even as they falter, and she also lures the pastor, his wife and his henchman on camera. It ain’t Waco or Jonesboro, so don’t come looking for guns or Kool-Aid—it’s a barbecues-and-SUV’s middle class subdivision, and all the more terrifying for it. Timoner and several of her subjects will attend. (Cody De Vos)
JOIN US
☛ ANITA O’DAY—THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER (9:15 p.m.; also 1:30 p.m. April 23) Chronicling the life of one of the greatest female jazz artists, filmmakers Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden have brought to light the amazing career of the recently departed legend. The story of Anita O’Day is the story of jazz itself, from her early swing days breaking racial barriers through the heroin-heavy bebop era—she’s one of the few who survived—and beyond to jazz’s second coming in Japan. The documentary combines original interviews of O’Day in her late 80s (the hippest octogenarian you’ve ever heard) with archival footage visually filtered through the imagery of classic jazz album covers—and cut as frenetically as the singer’s own otherworldly rhythm. Cavolina will attend. (Brent Rolen)
ANITA O’DAY—THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER
WEDNESDAY, 23RD
☛ MOUNTAIN TOP REMOVAL (6:45 p.m.) The winner of this year’s Reel Current award for environmentally conscious filmmaking—former Vice President Al Gore will make the presentation 2 p.m. Friday, April 18 at Green Hills—Michael Cusack O’Connell’s documentary convincingly attacks the practice of mountaintop removal coal-mining: a perfect storm of ecological and economic devastation that levels the landscape, encourages flooding and removes thousands of years of soil buildup in a virtual eyeblink—all for a few measly inches of fuel. The doc’s urgency comes from citizen activists such as Maria Gunnoe and Ed Wiley, shown in electrifying confrontations with West Virginia’s stolid state government and the villain of the piece, mining behemoth Massey Energy. If there’s anything hopeful about the movie, it’s their contagious rage. O’Connell will attend. (Jim Ridley)
QUE VIVA LA LUCHA: WRESTLING IN TIJUANA (7:15 p.m.; also 2:30 p.m. April 24) In this corner: Extreme Tiger, idol of Mexican youth! His opponent: Pancho Cochando, a.k.a. “Horny Frank,” who takes his dirty-wrestler persona from a congressman who was busted in a thong. More fun than a folding chair to the skull, Gustavo Vazquez’s colorful doc depicts Tijuana’s wrestling mania as a ritualized safety valve that lets the entire society blow off steam, from the fans who warmly greet favorite bad guys to a subset of flamboyant gay grapplers who delight in baiting homophobes. Vazquez takes a skin-deep stab at cultural analysis, tracing the tradition back to the Aztecs. But the doc’s most entertaining when its spangled subjects are back-flipping, busting heads and bouncing off the ropes. As one grizzled groupie enthuses, “I like everything about that bunch of bastards.” Vazquez will attend. In Spanish with subtitles. (Jim Ridley)
☛ REFLECTIONS OF EVIL (9:15 p.m.) Going beyond “film maudit” into uncharted wilderness of celluloid oddity, Damon Packard’s flabbergasting magnum opus will pimp-smack viewers who think they’ve seen it all. Imagine Taxi Driver and A Confederacy of Dunces had a baby, and Lloyd “The Toxic Avenger” Kaufman dropped it on its head; Packard’s labor of love is even more deformed, as the writer-director-editor-cinematographer plays an obese watch-peddler staggering through the Los Angeles streets in the advanced stages of sugar poisoning. It got press when Packard deluged Hollywood with a reported 29,000 DVD copies, which earned him notoriety as well as the exasperation of quasi-celebrities like Jim Belushi (who ended up with multiple copies). Watching its sub-Godzilla dubbing and Packard’s eye-bulging star turn (not to mention the chunkiest vomiting scene on record), I’d be tempted to toss this squarely in the “so bad it’s good” bin—except that Packard’s imagination never flags, and neither does his obsessive nut-job vision and energy. (The pivotal flashback involves a young Steven Spielberg directing his first TV movie, while the hero’s sister vanishes into a backlot rabbit hole—a sequence as audacious as it is incomprehensible.) Laugh all you want, but if this mad genius had a dollar for every idea in his head, he’d have the budget of Indiana Jones 4. Packard will attend (see below). (Jim Ridley)
REFLECTIONS OF EVIL
COOK COUNTY (9:30 p.m.; also 2 p.m. April 24) White Bluff native Anson Mount shakes off beefcake roles (like the one he played in the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads) to play a psycho backwoods meth dealer in writer-director David Pomes’ gritty indie. It’s the kind of earnest vicarious-degradation drama that encourages actors to go overboard, and Mount occasionally overdoes the crazy-eyes act. But he’s especially good with veteran 24 character actor Xander Berkeley (as his newly straight brother) and Ryan Donowho (as his desperately responsible nephew). Together, they form a believably ravaged family unit, and the rural milieu rings true. Mount and Pomes will attend. (Jim Ridley)
COOK COUNTY
THURSDAY, 24TH
☛ THE WRECKING CREW (7 p.m.) Music Row had the fabled A Team of monster session players; the West Coast had the bruisers informally known as the Wrecking Crew—protean sidemen who brought the heat on everything from Bing Crosby sides to Pet Sounds and the Phil Spector wall of sound. Affectionately (if somewhat disjointedly) assembled by Denny Tedesco, son of the Crew’s guitar great Tommy Tedesco, the doc grants the spotlight to players’ players such as drummer Hal Blaine, sax man Plas Johnson and pioneering female bassist Carol Kaye. Their credits amount to a history of postwar pop; the main thing missing is footage from all those legendary sessions—but such is the studio sideman’s lot. If nothing else, the post-film talk with Tedesco and veteran Crew members such as keyboardist Don Randi (who will perform at the closing-night party) should be a blast. (Jim Ridley)
☛ RETURN OF THE RE-WORKED: THE DAMON PACKARD SHORTS COLLECTION (7:15 p.m.) In Reflections of Evil director-star Packard’s fake trailers, mock docs and frenzied mash-ups of “borrowed” film clips, Linda Blair’s misbegotten Roller Boogie gets a rude interruption from her more famous star vehicle; laser battles threaten an intergalactic disco; and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now faces ultimate madness—George Lucas preparing to inflict Jar-Jar Binks upon the world. Packard uncannily mimics the pomp of previews and featurettes, inflating them to hilarious extremes while reveling in the cost-cutter wonderland of his found-footage sci-fi. Not to be missed: his 1988 marvel “Dawn of an Evil Millennium,” the baddest-ass Super-8 zombie-apocalypse movie ever made distilled to one cerebrum-cooking coming attraction. (Jim Ridley)
DAMON PACKARD SHORT: “Dawn of an Evil Millennium”
☛ UP THE YANGTZE (9:30 p.m.) Yung Chang’s engrossing, visually stunning documentary explores one of the strangest sites on earth—China’s mammoth Three Gorges Dam project—and finds that the world’s largest hydroelectric dam is also a bottomless wellspring of local and global ironies. TVA on an unimaginably vast scale, set to displace some 2 million people, the dam will create a watershed that submerges entire cities. Among its unforeseen results, it has created a temporary industry for the region’s youth: serving as waitstaff on luxury boats that carry foreign tourists on “farewell tours” of the Yangtze River’s soon-to-vanish banks—where their own families scrape by. Chang follows the teenage workers’ schooling in international etiquette (“Never compare Canada to the United States”), English and the proper amount of subservience—the kind that draws compliments such as, “You were less obtrusive than I thought you were going to be.” Juxtaposing the cruises’ bubble world with the parents’ hardships on shore, Chang captures the full human scope of the dam’s mixed blessings and unambiguous curses, summed up in an unforgettable series of dissolves that washes away one family’s entire way of life. This year’s festival couldn’t end on a stronger note. (Jim Ridley)
UP THE YANGTZE
NAFF PANELS AND WORKSHOPS
☛ SINGLE SCREENS TO MEGAPLEXES (1 p.m. April 18) Ted Hatfield, Regal Cinemas’ director of film marketing, conducts a guided tour of film exhibition, drawing upon more than four decades in the biz.
☛ COVERING FILM (3 p.m. April 18) Critics David D’Arcy, Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly, and Steven Gaydos and Joe Leydon from Variety tackle trends and controversies in current film writing.
☛ MUSIC SUPERVISORS: THE ABC’S OF SONG PLACEMENT (2:30 p.m. April 19) Prepare the ol’ Nashville handshake—palm extended, CD-R enclosed—for this panel of music-supervision heavy-hitters including Jay Faires (3:10 to Yuma), G. Marq Roswell (The Great Debaters), Tracy McKnight (El Cantante), Evyen Klean (The Shield) and Brian Friedman (The Kentucky Kid).
☛ KODAK DEMONSTRATION (11 p.m. April 19) Remember celluloid? Get reacquainted as Eastman Kodak demonstrates its new high-speed 500 T 5219 35mm film with DLT dye layering.
☛ ACTOR TURNED FILMMAKER (2:15 p.m. April 21) Law & Order: Criminal Intent star Vincent D’Onofrio, who’ll be directing the upcoming feature Elvis and Me, Mimi in Nashville and Memphis, joins a panel with Joey Lauren Adams (Come Early Morning), Kimberly Williams-Paisley (maker of two short films) and Robby Benson (currently shooting Billy: The Early Years in Nashville) to discuss how it feels on the other side of the camera.
☛ DOCUMENTARIES: ART OR ACTIVISM? (4:15 p.m. April 21) Peter Gilbert and Steve James, the award-winning team behind Hoop Dreams and At the Death House Door, and Thomas Miller (One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner) talk about balancing passion and craft with the demands of the marketplace.
☛ NAVIGATING PRODUCTION INCENTIVES (11 a.m. April 22) Ca-ching! Tennessee Film, Music and Entertainment Commission executive director Perry Gibson answers the (multi)million-dollar question of state film incentives with help from Disney Studios VP Mary Ann Hughes and producers James Spies (The Contender) and Lawrence Mortorff (Billy: The Early Years).
☛ FILM FINANCING—SPLITTING THE CATCH 22S (1 p.m. April 22) Say, how ya gonna pay for that feature? Ask John Hadity, former VP of film and TV finance for Miramax; Music Row entertainment attorneys Steven Gladstone and Rob Baker of Gladstone Baker Kelley; and The Insider’s Guide to Film Finance author Philip Alberstat.
☛ FILM PRODUCTION: FROM INDIE TO STUDIO (3 p.m. April 22) Marc Evans, the Paramount senior VP of production behind such films as Mission: Impossible III and David Fincher’s upcoming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, describes how movies are shepherded from page to budget to backlot to screen.
☛ SCREENWRITING (3 p.m. April 23) Strike? What strike? Scheduled as of press time: scribes Howie Klausner (Space Cowboys), Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (Smallville, Spider-Man 2), Michelle Mulroney (Paper Man), Gren Wells (Southern Comfort) and moderator Steven Womack.
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