Day Three (Friday, June 12)

What’s in a venue? Plenty, as it turns out. Moving the Festival Formerly Known As Sinking Creek from the gated seclusion of Vanderbilt to Hillsboro Village has made a huge difference in the appeal and accessibility of the event—not to mention the box office. In its first three days the Nashville Independent Film Festival has tripled the attendance of last year’s first three days. Thus far the festival has had at least three sell-out shows (the Best of Tennessee Wednesday night, the animation fest Thursday, the Gay & Lesbian Mini-Fest Friday), and except for the after-midnight show of Juicy Danger Meets Burning Man every show I saw Friday night had at least 200 people in the audience.

I know it sounds crass to count heads. But I can’t help but wonder: Where did all these people come from? If 2,000 people will show up for movies they’ve never heard of, why won’t they turn out for Kusturica’s Underground or Melville’s Le Samourai when such films play regular bookings at the Watkins Belcourt? Maybe the framing device of a festival gives the movies the feel of a social event. If hundreds of people are taking a risk on seeing the same obscure features, they’ll still have a shared experience to discuss later.

That goes for kids also—not the easiest audience to please with unfamiliar product. In the mornings, the NIFF shrewdly programmed unreleased children’s movies to take advantage of summer vacation and day care. It could’ve been a disaster, but the experiment worked: The theater was full, the kids were appreciative, and the festival gained exposure to a whole new audience. Plus Friday’s morning show, the locally filmed puppet comedy Lunker Lake, would’ve seemed out of place anywhere else in the festival. The Peppercorn Players’ galumphing yokel puppets were cute (though tailor-made for merchandising tie-ins), and Ruby Guidara’s clever production design managed to camouflage the puppeteers in a subtle way. The movie itself, however, suffered from slack pacing, dull linking segments by a surly A. Wilford Brimley, and human characters with all the charisma of potholders.

Still, the morning slot allowed the NIFF to recognize a Nashville-lensed indie feature, even if a minor scandal erupted when the film shut off before the closing credits—as all the crew members and puppeteers sat in the audience. “We’re gonna riot!” shouted someone who may have provided the voice of a talking fish. The moral of this story: Puppets have feelings too.

I missed the afternoon and early evening shows—the Lou Ferrigno doc Stand Tall; the music-video program; the feature Paradise Falls, which had excellent word of mouth—but I returned for the screening of Les Blank and Maureen Gosling’s 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams, one of the best movies ever made about the agony of making movies and the strength of will required to realize any artistic vision. The week’s previous features had brought in large crowds, and except for the roundly disliked Full-Tilt Boogie, they were generally well-received. But Burden of Dreams seemed to mark the moment when the festival became something more than a bunch of consecutive screenings.

Watching director Werner Herzog defy God and nature to finish his hellish production of Fitzcarraldo—a process that entailed avoiding native warfare in the Amazonian jungle, coping with flash floods and quicker droughts, and dragging a steamboat over a hill—the filmmakers in the audience laughed and groaned out of sympathy. And yet there was a significant shift in the festival’s mood in the lobby afterward. Part of it was the sheer crush of people, which raised a heat even an electric fan couldn’t cut. Perceptibly, though, conversations were livelier and more animated, spilling over into the coffeehouse Fido across the street (where director Blank, a lanky, laconic figure with a Whitmanesque beard and a dry wit, retreated after the screening) or into the nearby brewpub Bosco’s, where the Jazz had Da Bulls singing the blues. All through Hillsboro Village, you heard laughter or music or excited voices. “This is the greatest thing,” said one Nashville director, who’d shouldered his own burden of dreams for the past year, juggling work schedules and a shifting crew base. “I’m just walking on clouds.”

An even larger (and rowdier) audience turned out for the Gay & Lesbian Mini-Fest immediately afterward. Screams of laughter greeted Joel Moffett’s “My Body,” a frantic farce in which a repressed nerd’s night of passion with a hunky butcher leaves him with an indefatigable boner and the limp corpse of his closeted self. The slapstick is often more manic than funny, and it winds up with a maudlin resolution, but the film’s sheer speed and exhausting energy are something to behold. The only distraction was some kind of lovers’ quarrel in the row behind me: a man kept loudly comparing his partner to the erect hero onscreen, while his embarrassed companion hissed, “Behave!”

Jenni Olson’s “Blue Diary” combined nicely muted street scenes of San Francisco with melancholic narration, as a young lesbian reflects sadly on an all-too-brief encounter with a straight girl. (“I’ve been there,” groaned the burr-cut woman behind me, and several people laughed.) The piece was well-conceived, no longer than it should’ve been, and quite affecting. Tom E. Brown’s “Don’t Run Johnny” amusingly recaptured the stentorian no-budget bombast of vintage Ed Wood, as a Criswell stand-in invites us to observe a just-notified AIDS sufferer in spastic flight. The movie’s parody of Woodsian melodrama was met with uncomfortable laughter, especially by dazed viewers who’d never heard of Glen or Glenda? The final film in the program, Christine Russo’s “Virgin of the Sea,” seemed like some amateurish, badly filmed throwback to the late 70s, when cavorting queens lip-synching to Abba and “Lady Marmalade” might’ve seemed remotely daring.

The midnight show, Juicy Danger Meets Burning Man, followed Canadian performance artists Tom Comet and Christine Taylor on an epic road trip to the “Burning Man” festival on the alkali flats of Nevada. There, surrounded by thousands of spoken-word performers, art terrorists, and sunbathing pagans, they juggle chainsaws and bowling balls and make slaw by tossing heads of lettuce into a lawnmower. I remember catching Comet’s act a few years back with the Jim Rose Circus, and David Vaisbord’s film proves he performed all the most memorable stunts, including that ever-popular balancing-a-running-lawnmower-on-your-nose routine. The movie is simply a competent, unquestioning account of their journey and their act, but the footage of the festival supplies enough determined weirdness for three John Waters flicks. And the Burning Man, an 80-foot wooden sculpture that gets built and torched every Labor Day weekend, blows up real good. If you want surefire documentary material, young filmmakers, remember these magic words: performance artists burning stuff.

Saturday brings more Les Blank; an audience with The Maestro (not Kenneth Schermerhorn); a day-long block party on Belcourt Avenue; the “ABC’s of Independent Film” workshop with Coke Sams, Jeff Lipsky, and Peter Wentworth; and Topless Women Talk About Their Lives. We’ll save you some Milk Duds.

Day Two (Thursday, June 11)

“I don’t know what the word independent means,” says the pint-size moppet auteur in the funny Independent Film Channel ads that kick off each screening. You and me both, sister. Today’s Nashville Independent Film Festival lineup at the Watkins Belcourt brought one of Japan’s top-grossing animated features, which has been acquired (and dubbed) for home-video release this fall by those free-wheeling indie spirits at Disney. Later came a short presented by Fox and an hour-long promo for The Cartoon Network. The tangle of financing, acquisition, and ownership is positively Gordian. If you try to define what’s independent by weeding out anything with a taint of corporate commerce, you’ll probably consign yourself to a lifetime watching stick figures dance in a zoetrope—or wish you had.

Me, I got no problem with a little commercial taint. One of the pleasures of Kiki’s Delivery Service, the Japanese animated feature that started yesterday’s round of screenings, is the high-powered vocal talent that fleshed out the round-eyed, round-edged character designs—especially the late Phil Hartman, God rest his soul, who made a scene-stealer of a skeptical feline sidekick. On the other hand, a nice thing about this feature by Japanese animation superstar Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke) is that its story is more than an excuse to market a bunch of toys and soundtrack albums. Kiki (voice of Kirsten Dunst) leaves her family at age 13 to pursue her destiny as a witch; fresh out of options, she puts her broom-riding powers to work by delivering cakes for a bakery. The character animation is a little stiff, but the pictorial effects of Kiki flying through the city are frequently dazzling.

The grade-schoolers who packed the morning screening started tuning out past the 90-minute mark. But they wolf-whistled when they got a flash of Kiki’s undies—hey, I remember being in fifth grade—and they perked back up for the exciting runaway-zeppelin finale. When the credits came up, the two 9-year-old wiseguys beside me hollered, “Yay! It’s over!,” so nobody would accuse them of liking something so uncool. Nevertheless, they laughed every time Hartman’s Gigi the cat made a well-timed wisecrack.

That afternoon, I could either attend the highly touted documentary workshop at the Pancake Pantry (with The American Experience‘s Margaret Drain, P.O.V.‘s Lisa Heller, the Independent Television Service’s Lois Vossen, and producer Maxine Wishner) or the program of short subjects at the Belcourt. I heard the workshop was great (and absolutely mobbed), but I was glad I didn’t miss the shorts. Thanks to a lot of new venues—particularly cable networks such as the Independent Film Channel, Bravo, and fX Movies—short subjects are finding a wider audience, and filmmakers can stretch out and experiment in a five- to 10-minute format without the risk or expense involved in making a feature.

Which is helpful when you’re making something like Stephen Berkman’s “Room 103,” a black-and-white study of capital-P paranoia studded with Kafka in-jokes (it was shot in Prague), or Patrick Cady’s “Gossamer,” a dreamlike, largely silent whatsit that resembled a Jeunet et Caro remake of Eraserhead. The latter, which had something to do with urban alienation, glowing boxes, and pulsating cocoons, left a lot of people scratching their heads, including me. But I loved its burnished look, and its butterfly imagery actually holds together in a way that approximates dream logic. Chris Kairalla’s “Play the Game” makes obvious jokes about Madison Avenue as the province of alien invaders, but the jokes are still pretty funny, especially when we learn the horrible secret behind alien abduction: demographic research!

Even a short subject can go on too long—hence “Nude Descending,” which flogged its one smutty joke about a nude model who’s worried his ying-yang will misbehave in front of an art class. That wasn’t true, however, of Corky Quakenbush’s “One Hand, Left,” which wrung every laugh out of its goofy premise (the rivalry between a concert pianist’s two hands) in an admirably brisk running time. Apart from “One Hand, Left,” my favorite was Perry Lin’s “17 Years to Earth,” in which an Asian-American girl’s diary reveals a lifelong exercise in self-delusion. Carrying the notion of the untrustworthy narrator to its extreme, Lin’s film finds a simple but effective way to handle issues of ethnic self-hatred and body-image obsession.

As soon as the crowd from that screening was emptied out onto the mean streets of Hillsboro Village, the mob in the lobby was ushered in for the animation fest, always the most popular single event on Sinking Creek’s schedule. The audience makeup was more diverse than in past years: the sold-out crowd had plenty of familiar scenesters—actress Susan Davis, the Connection’s DJ Russell, Ormond Family chronicler David D. Duncan, members of Holtzclaw—but there were also dozens of folks who’d probably never set foot in the Belcourt before.

That might explain why the program was so much fun. Once again, the shortest pieces worked the best: Tim Cheung’s sick, sick computer-animated “Gabola the Great,” which demonstrates why you shouldn’t just yank a rabbit out of a magician’s hat; Luke Jaeger’s free-associative “Five Dreams,” with its Secret Service wedding and commando attack on Arnold Schwarzenegger; Pavel Koutsky’s “Duel,” a clever collage that shows kids losing their individuality as they get literally funneled through a narrowing education process. Many of the cartoons expanded the form, including Jeff Scher’s staggering “Yours,” a psychedelicized riot of tinting laid over an old pop-song film clip; and Seamus Walsh’s macabre stop-motion “The Old Man and the Goblins,” a cross between The Nightmare Before Christmas and a George Pal Puppetoon.

After sitting through the endless “George Namahage,” an assaultive Japanese cartoon filled with electronic doinks, vomitous colors, and acid-casualty graphics, the entire audience felt as if its popcorn had been laced with angel dust. Luckily The Cartoon Network’s hour of rarities and outtakes came along to cleanse everyone’s palate. The program was somewhat misleading: many of the selections were promos familiar to the channel’s regular viewers, and none were especially risqué. Still, the audience roared at vintage Tex Avery and Friz Freleng propaganda shorts, relieved to be watching Daffy Duck and the Three Little Pigs instead of scowling Asian bogeymen.

The last show of the night was a screening of Jeff Lipsky’s feature Childhood’s End, and it’s too bad more people didn’t stick around to see it. Apart from cable, the festival circuit is the last best hope for risky, offbeat narrative films like this one, a frank, sobering, and very moving comedy-drama that follows three unformed high-school grads—a callow photographer, the daughter of the older neighbor he covets, and a painfully shy mutual friend—as their careers, personalities, and sexualities take shape in the wealthy suburbs of Minneapolis.

Lipsky, the October Films cofounder here making his writing and directing debut, writes dialogue that is frequently awkward but more often penetrating and original. Just when you think a character has closed a conversation with some glibly cutting statement, a listener will fire back a “How so?” or “What do you mean?,” and a real knock-down/drag-out discussion will begin. His sex scenes are remarkably candid and intimate, and he makes effective use of Everytown locales (kitchens, diners, back roads) as backdrops for life-changing moments. Before the film Lipsky said he was fascinated by that last period in young people’s lives when they aren’t set in their ways, and he allows us to watch his actors sharpen and define their roles—this is the rare movie about teens that doesn’t wedge every character into inflexible stereotypes. And he’s got a great eye for unusual but telling details—the squeak of gym shoes, the ways women of vastly different degrees of modesty undress. I didn’t expect to like Childhood’s End when it started. I didn’t expect to love it when it ended.

The post-film Q&A didn’t get going until a quarter to midnight, and by that time the 50 or so people left were absolutely beat. Lipsky, a direct, witty, and extremely approachable man, probably didn’t get as many questions as he would’ve liked, but his film was still warmly received. Asked if he would’ve picked up Childhood’s End if it had come to him at October, Lipsky said he definitely would—which a couple of audience members said later they found hard to swallow. But Lipsky made an excellent point: despite all the conventional wisdom about getting a bankable star for your indie feature, the most profitable (and memorable) indie films have often had no-name casts—In the Company of Men, Clerks, She’s Gotta Have It, Stranger Than Paradise. Most people wanted to know what happened to the film’s terrific cast of largely unknown actors, and Lipsky passed on the depressing news that, after completing Childhood’s End, actress Heather Gottlieb—who gives a wonderful performance as the shy Rebecca—quit acting altogether. Please, somebody, if you know Heather Gottlieb, urge her to reconsider.

The great thing about having a film festival in Nashville is that there’s no need to try to impress potential distributors, no need to hype Film A over Film B. All you have is a large audience that likes movies, likes moviemakers, and likes them both more every year. And as festivalgoers, we just want to see something we couldn’t see otherwise. I’m sorry Childhood’s End hasn’t found a bigger audience, but I’m grateful that it wasn’t given a token release and dumped into the back 40 of some megaplex. And I’m grateful to the NIFF for showing it here.

Friday brings Les Blank and Burden of Dreams; the Gay & Lesbian Mini-Fest; and the midnight showing of Juicy Danger Meets Burning Man. Also, Saturday is the big block party in Hillsboro Village, with the “Gonzo Filmmaking” contest open to anyone with a camcorder. See you tomorrow.

Day One (Wednesday, June 10)

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m fried. It’s just after midnight, and I’ve spent the past 10-plus hours at the opening day of the Nashville Independent Film Festival (NIFF). I arrived at the Watkins Belcourt shortly after noon, just in time to find a local news crew photographing patrons against the poster for Taste of Cherry. (Hope it made every broadcast.) I left about 11:30 p.m., as the last few patrons were straggling out of what has been, by far, the best film yet shown at the 29th annual edition of the Festival Formerly Known as Sinking Creek.

Of course, the festival’s only been underway for one day, and to my jaded eyes that day had the weakest lineup of the whole event. But that didn’t deter the crowds. I left a half-hour before the evening’s “Best of Tennessee” program and returned to find the screening sold out; the afternoon panel discussion of Full-Tilt Boogie was nearly as full. If the festival is drawing this kind of attendance in the middle of the week, count on lines around the block for the rest of the weekend. Congratulations to NIFF executive director Michael Catalano and his team of assistants for getting out the word.

Oh, yes, the films. The documentary Frank Sinatra: The Bobby Sox Years was a big disappointment, a lazy treatment of the Chairman’s early apprenticeship with the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey big bands. If you’ve seen one A&E Biography episode, you know the drill: loads of “historical” stock footage overlaid with simple-minded generalizations. (One nugget of wisdom: “Frank Sinatra’s life was uniquely American.” That took research.) What’s more, the screening was hindered by barely visible, oddly framed video projection that broadcast the image at an obvious slant—not the ideal conditions under which to judge a movie’s merit. Nevertheless, I did get to see Ol’ Blue Eyes’ amazing rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” and there’s a choice snippet of Sinatra’s jaw-dropping World War II short “The House I Live In,” which proposes a novel strategy for building ethnic tolerance: bombing “Japs.”

The Cajun double feature that followed, “Annie & Eddie” and “Good For What Ails You,” suffered from identical problems: overlength (especially a willingness to let people ramble on lovably forever) and a substitution of quaintness for genuine substance. But each had its moments: a demonstration of alligator feeding and tending in the former, some nifty examples of alternative bayou healing practices (especially the homemade cough syrup and the spellbreaker) in the latter.

At least those weren’t as self-congratulatory as Full-Tilt Boogie, the documentary that tells you working on the Robert Rodriguez-Quentin Tarantino vampire flick From Dusk Till Dawn was even more fun than you thought it was. You don’t learn much about why the script was written, why the actors wanted to do it, or why it merited a two-hour behind-the-scenes documentary, but if you stick around long enough, you’ll see Juliette Lewis sing karaoke and George Clooney and Tarantino exchange spittakes. (Lewis and Clooney are extremely engaging; Tarantino needs to avoid any substances that contain caffeine, sugar, or self-esteem boosters.) You’ll also see Harvey Keitel deliver a stultifying monologue on the art of acting and the actor as storyteller—strong stuff coming from a guy who’s playing a vampire hunter in a titty bar. To be fair, some fans in the audience (and there were several) told me they thought this was every bit as good as From Dusk Till Dawn. But the movie’s lack of perspective is maddening: it bashes the I.A.T.S.E. union for threatening to strike the set, but from the movie’s chronology, the strike threat apparently forced Dusk/Dawn‘s producers to provide health benefits for the crew. Kudos to the audience member who asked whether the two events were related.

Despite the tepid response to the movie, the filmmakers themselves came across well at the post-film panel discussion, sponsored by the Film Music Workshop (whose Betty Rosen served as moderator). Director Sarah Kelly passed along the reason Tarantino was glad the movie was showing at the NIFF (“I hail from fuckin’ Tennessee,” said the Knoxville-born auteur). Veteran music supervisor Lonnie Sill encouraged budding filmmakers to help their chances of landing a certain cut by building “artist to artist” relationships—i.e., taking their case directly to the performer. Producer Rana Joy Glickman, who looked really cool in her spangled hat, likened the process of documentary filmmaking to “trying to assemble a puzzle without having the box top.” Local film composer Leonard Wolf was among the many musician/filmmakers in the audience; so was Bug Music’s John Allan (of Four Hundred amp-smashing infamy).

The standing-room-only (no exaggeration) evening show of works by Tennessee filmmakers was a mixed but pleasant bag. “Shatterhand,” by Brent Stewart and Greg Hallmark, had some handsome, moody Pixelvision camerawork in black-and-white, but it was hurt by stilted writing and acting and a melodramatic surprise ending. Stewart and Hallmark are talented guys, though: they’ll be back. “Obit,” by David McClister, used a popular student-film theme—the last moments of a suicide victim—as the occasion for some first-rate cross-cutting and strobe-light montage by editor Stacie Schwarz.

Schwarz also turned in commendable work on a late evening entry, Ken Carpenter’s likable, innocuous TV pilot Carter Raye. If we had a network, we’d pick up this less hormonal, better-written, appealingly cast Dawson’s Creek of a sitcom—but nobody knew why it was showing at a film festival. Still, Schwarz was one of the heroes of the night. So was cinematographer Armanda Costanza, who worked on no less than four of the festival entries, including Peter Neff’s sweet, sentimental “Dear Mr. Goodlife,” which could serve as a location reel for the state and local film commissions.

Bob and Dominic Giordano’s scroungy tall tale “Blind Spot: A Grifter’s Fable” packed an entire movie’s worth of plot into its short running time, but its grubby low-key raunch was a breath of toxic air amidst the earnestness of the other selections. And Bobby Anderson’s popular “A Look in Her Eyes” created a modern-day fairy tale (in verse!) around a burly jock, a starry-eyed girl, and the slacker hero who worships her from afar.

The documentaries, however, were the brightest spots of the night. “Tradition,” by Scott Colthorp, is a Koyaanisqatsi-like rendering of a UT football game, which sounds just awful; but its amusing, at times astounding time-lapse shots of marching-band formations and traffic elicited laughs and applause, and it did something few of the other selections managed—it recast familiar sights and events in a new light. Curt Hahn’s “Jubilee,” a promotional history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers that was filmed pro bono, has a lot of rousing concert footage and a house-rocking guest spot by the Fairfield Four, who command the screen in closeup as surely as Muddy Waters did in Scorsese’s The Last Waltz.

Best of all was “Tell About the South,” the first film in a projected trilogy about Southern literature by documentarian Ross Spears. The film boasts exemplary use of archival photos and music, intelligent narration that gives equal weight to African American and white literary traditions, and pointed interviews with everyone from Alice Walker to Pat Conroy. It gets unwieldy during the final section on Thomas Wolfe and Zora Neale Hurston, and the recreations of scenes from various books are unnecessary padding. But its superior quality—as well as its lengthy running time—should’ve earned the film its own festival slot. Instead, it was tacked onto a bill that already lasted three hours, and during the first reel change most of the exhausted audience bolted.

Let’s hope they’ll regain their strength for the festival’s best days, which still lie ahead with The Cartoon Network’s Rarities show, Les Blank, Jeff Lipsky, John Pierson, and Saturday’s all-day block party. If you want to share your thoughts on what you’ve liked or haven’t liked at the festival, e-mail me at mr.pink@mail.nashscene.com. , and I’ll post some of the responses. Or just tell me at the screenings. I’ll be the one with the red eyes and the zombified stare, unless I get to bed right this instant. See ya tomorrow at this same location.

Footnote: When I got there, a Belcourt staffer was dragging off the metal cans containing Taste of Cherry. The wondrous Abbas Kiarostami film turned out to be a surprise moneymaker during its five-day run at the Watkins Belcourt, thanks largely to Iranian patrons who traveled from as far away as Florence, Ala., to see it—and no thanks to The Tennessean, which couldn’t even dredge up some pathetic wire review to cover one of the most important foreign films of recent years.