The box-office verdict on last week’s Nashville Film Festival is in: high on celebrities and Tennessee, mixed on Central Europe and cancer. An estimated 16,000 people attended the 37th annual festival, and on the Saturday night that Kiefer Sutherland premiered his music documentary I Trust You to Kill Me, you’d swear every one of them was wedged into the downstairs lobby of Regal’s Green Hills megaplex, holding cellphones aloft like lighters during “Free Bird.” The next afternoon, however, crickets essentially chirped outside one of the festival’s finest films, A Lion in the House, a harrowing documentary about life and death in a Cincinnati pediatric oncology ward.
To be sure, a four-hour documentary on any topic is a tough sell, and tougher still when happy endings are in scarce supply. (Those who stayed were seen dabbing their eyes in the lobby, especially after a wrenching Q&A attended by some of the film’s subjects.) But the weak turnout showed the difficulty of getting audiences to take a chance on the unheralded treasures that sustain film festivals. Other strong documentaries, including Adele Horne’s The Tailenders and Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan’s So Much So Fast, didn’t get the attendance they deserved; nor did robust comedies from Macedonia and the Czech Republic. Once you get people there for Kiefer Sutherland, how do you get them to check out some under-the-radar doc or foreign film?
It’s a question that hounds every (remaining) arthouse in America. It was also one of the few troubling areas in an otherwise successful year—a sturdy platform for 2007. The high-double-digit attendance increases of the late-1990s may have slowed, but the plateau has given the NaFF’s core staff and returning volunteers room to refine the process. Only the party music that blared through Green Hills’ paper-thin walls during Alexander Sokurov’s hushed docudrama The Sun caused any gritted teeth. Otherwise, thanks to festival stalwarts such as coordinator Mandy McBroom and yeoman Pouria Montazeri, ticket sales and screenings ran smoother than ever before, with scarcely a technical snafu or computer glitch to be seen.
That’s amazing, given the ticket run on films such as the Sutherland doc, the opening-night film An American Haunting, the unusually good Tennessee Film Night programs, and Nashville director Tom Neff’s Chances: The Women of Magdalene, which snagged the Tennessee Spirit Award. (Nashville filmmaker James Clauer got honorable mention for his short “The Aluminum Fowl,” but his consolation prize was a doozy: a notice that his film was just accepted into Cannes, the Super Bowl of film festivals.)
What didn’t work this year? Very little. As a social event, it appeared to be a blockbuster. The downstairs lobby buzzed late into the night, the outside VIP area was a refreshingly low-key Shmooze Central, and guests such as Magnolia Pictures’ Neal Block and For the Love of Dolly director Tai Uhlmann were seen checking out thrift stores and honky-tonkin’ on Lower Broad with the Belcourt’s hoarse ambassador Toby Leonard. And for all the films that slipped through the cracks, it was a pleasure to hear audience members excited over festival finds such as Ali Selim’s period romance Sweet Land, the powerful courtroom saga The Trials of Darryl Hunt (which split the NaFF’s documentary honors with A Lion in the House) and Doug Block’s wonderful family portrait 51 Birch Street, one of the week’s most purely enjoyable films.
Yet it’s still disappointing that the NaFF misses out every year on plum titles from the festival circuit. MIA this year were the Sundance hit Old Joy and Taiwanese director Tsai-Ming-liang’s provocative The Wayward Cloud, films that NaFF artistic director Brian Gordon wanted dearly. They made sense for Nashville: Old Joy stars musician Will Oldham, who sometimes records here, while Cloud is the kind of hardcore arthouse item that would never play here any other way. But both films were denied. At a time when observers bemoan the state of foreign and indie distribution, has it occurred to anyone to cultivate the enormous untapped audience between the coasts, in cities like Nashville? A festival screening is as much a promotional tool as an honor. I didn’t care for An American Haunting (see above), but its opening-night buzz will likely boost its local take this weekend. Similarly, the one sold-out show of The Notorious Bettie Page amounted to a fanfare for its opening next week at the Belcourt.
The surprise, perhaps, is how many diverse audiences the festival managed to attract without overlapping. The largely African American crowd for the hip-hop doc Beyond Beats and Rhymes and the Oscar Brown Jr. profile Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress—which drew local heroes Eddie George and actor jeff obafemi carr—shared few members with the Hispanic audience for the immigrant saga To the Other Side. Yet both groups likely brought out a large number of first-time festivalgoers. None seemed more enthusiastic than a group of kids from East Nashville’s Martha O’Bryan Center, whose rowdy, uproarious Q&A after the full-house screening of their film project “Leap Year Nightmare” was a festival highlight. They’ll be back—and maybe they’ll spread the word.
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