Renegade Independent Film Festival
7 p.m. June 20 at the Belcourt Theatre
$7, tickets available at the Belcourt box office, 846-3150
The Nashville Independent Film Festival may have the ultimate proof of its success: It has inspired an alternative. As Sundance begat Slamdance—an indier-than-thou festival designed to show scruffier works outside the mainstream—so the NIFF begets RIFF. The Renegade Independent Film Festival, which takes place 7 p.m. Thursday at the Belcourt, was founded by a collective of local writer-directors. Some of their films were selected by the NIFF, but crew members couldn’t get into the sold-out screening. Others were either turned down or didn’t meet the submission deadline.
“So many filmmakers in town never get to see their work on the big screen,” says Mark Naccarato, RIFF’s organizer and an editor at WTVF-Channel 5. “We figured Nashville’s film community could use another kick in the pants.” Naccarato says the majority of local directors make short narrative films as calling cards for future feature work. Fifty years ago, these would have played as part of a typical theater presentation—a kind of cinematic appetizer. Now, Naccarato says, there’s hardly anywhere to show them outside the festival circuit.
Three weeks ago, Naccarato and his fellow RIFFers decided to create their own festival. Along with Naccarato’s “The Crusader,” a vigilante-superhero saga shot in mock reality-TV style, the seven-film lineup includes shorts by Zac Adams (“True Love”), Bob Giordano (“Wasted”), David Van Hooser (“Scene of the Crime”), and Chris Conner and J. Thomas Bailey, whose Donald Barthelme adaptation “The Space Between Things” sounds especially promising. A silent-comedy throwback, Alan McKenna’s “Silent Affair” screens alongside a supernatural thriller, Glen Weiss’ “Shutter.” Most are the work of first-time directors.
“You have to forgive a lot,” Naccarato says. “Nobody could get Anthony Hopkins to star, and nobody had a George Lucas budget.” His own film, persuasively shot with newsroom sets and a large cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, cost about $2,500. He made it, he says, “to convince people they can trust me with something bigger.”
That’s a common goal in the RIFF camp. The RIFF’s press kit promises “deeply personal points of view that are untainted by Hollywood executives or arthouse politics.” Technically, that’s true, but from the films that were screened in advance, it’s clear that independent is a matter more of means than content. “Shutter” is a blatant copy of Stephen King’s Needful Things; others are largely one-joke ideas that move toward a closing punch line. “They’re not art films or experimentals,” says Naccarato, who moved here from Pittsburgh in 1993 and was inspired to start writing screenplays by Pulp Fiction. “When you’re just starting, you should know the rules before you break them.”
Indeed. If there’s a typical flaw in the RIFF films I saw—and Nashville films in general—it’s either a basic unfamiliarity with film language or a reliance on overused ideas. In “Shutter,” a horror piece, the camera is across the room when intimacy is called for, and it’s close up when distance is needed to camouflage cheap resources (such as an immobile fake squirrel). Other films use images basically to illustrate narration, which defeats the purpose of visual storytelling. The camera is rarely used expressively. The remedy: Some time spent watching movies as something more than a commodity, which would result in stronger sophomore efforts.
Naccarato is the first to admit a lively, active local film culture would boost the city’s sluggish film infrastructure. He wants to see Nashville become a movie-mad town like Austin, where moviegoing and moviemaking go hand in hand. “Nashville hasn’t broken out yet as a film center,” he says. “We just need people to see what we can do.”
Other short films by Nashville directors will be playing throughout the week at unrelated events. Tracy’s “Scales and Tails” will screen before Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at this weekend’s Belcourt birthday bash. And Travis Nicholson and Blake McClure rented out the Belcourt to show their NIFF contender “High Noon at Midnight” next Tuesday. As for RIFF, Naccarato hopes it will become a yearly attraction, maybe with multiple nights and workshops. “I’d love it to be annual,” he says. “Even if I don’t have anything in it. I think it’s really cool.”
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