NIFF Wrap-Up
Caliber of films matches attendance at this year’s film festival
If this year’s Nashville Independent Film Festival seemed more harried than in previous years, that’s a measure of how the 33-year-old festival has grown. In the mid-1990s, when the festival was rebounding from the brink of extinction, it was more successful as a social outing than as a showcase for movies. That was exactly what the event needed to revive community interest, but it still left people hoping that the NIFF’s caliber of selections would someday match its booming attendance.
By all agreement, this year’s festival did. Last Wednesday through Sunday, the lobbies at Regal’s Green Hills megaplex were almost comically congested, and early estimates suggest the NIFF easily broke last year’s 10,000-plus attendance record. This year, the movies justified the turnout. For this, special credit goes not only to NIFF directors Brian Gordon and Kelly Brownlee and staffer Mandy McBroom, but to the festival’s energized board and its selection committees. Previously weak areas such as gay/lesbian programming and experimental shorts were uncommonly strong.
Stronger still was the documentary lineup—no surprise, since docs have been outclassing features on the festival circuit for some time. Rob Fruchtman and Rebecca Cammisa took top honors for Sister Helen, their moving portrait of a salty Benedictine nun struggling to manage a South Bronx halfway house. No less wrenching, however, was runner-up Daughter From Danang, a portrait of a Pulaski-raised Vietnamese refugee’s startling reunion with her birth mother.
Features, as always, were a mixed bag. The festival opener, Martin Guigui’s Nashville-lensed Colored Eggs, was by a landslide the NIFF’s worst film, an inept, maudlin tearjerker that had audience members choking back unintended laughs. By comparison, the overwrought gridiron saga The Slaughter Rule looked like The Last Picture Show. Several people groaned that Shemie Reut’s autism study Paradox Lake won the top dramatic prize—especially over the audience-award winner, the Australian comedy La Spagnola—but its near-experimental, sci-fi treatment of the subject was impressive enough to compensate for its awkward narrative.
My own favorite was Werckmeister Harmonies, a two-and-a-half-hour, black-and-white opus by Hungarian director Bela Tarr that dwarfed everything else in the festival for ambition and achievement. Despite ponderous sequences, this examination of natural disorder and imposed order, an allegory of fascist upheaval, pulled off some of the most masterfully orchestrated single-camera set pieces I’ve ever seen. Even people who walked out bewildered were heard excitedly puzzling it over throughout the weekend. Its presence in the festival lineup ushered the NIFF onto a whole new plane.
Not that the festival was without problems. There were an unusual number of technical glitches, including a blurry screening of Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me and a failed start for Demetria Kalodimos’ sold-out Injurious George. The worst time was had by Chicago filmmaker Michael Gilio, who discovered FedEx had lost the only print of his engaging comedy-drama Kwik Stop. It arrived, finally, but only in time for his last scheduled screening. Meanwhile, the festival caused some hard feelings by not refunding advance ticket holders who didn’t show up in time to make sold-out screenings. Overall, the philosophical paradox of an indie festival in a corporate megaplex was never clearer: A contract that guaranteed George Lucas’ Attack of the Clones the theater’s largest auditorium forced the NIFF to rearrange its own screenings at the last minute.
So what can the NIFF do next year, especially with longtime festival director Brownlee moving on? More high-profile foreign films would be cool. So would eliminating programming conflicts among movies vying for the same audience. Although politics will make it difficult, the NIFF should can or at least condense its local-filmmaker blocks unless it has enough festival-worthy films. And since the John Waters talk was successful, how about an actual retrospective next year with a filmmaker in attendance? Given a few more high-powered sponsors, anything is within the festival’s reach.
The mystery remains why Nashvillians will turn out in droves for films at the NIFF that they routinely ignore all year long. The new print of Robert Altman’s California Split likely would’ve drawn 200 people for one showing at the festival. When it opens at the Belcourt this Friday, it’ll be lucky to get that many viewers all weekend. The NIFF’s ultimate triumph will be to foster an ongoing curiosity about all facets of moviegoing. All weekend, cinephiles said how great it felt to hear hundreds of Nashvillians buzzing about film. Here’s hoping that buzz becomes a steady hum.
—Jim Ridley
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