What do you give a film festival celebrating a decade of outstanding programming and the kind of audience building that turns a weekend at the movies into a tiny institution? Defy Film Festival is an annual high point for cinephiles in this movie-loving city, and filmmakers from around the globe know the festival’s reputation as an outlet for bold, unique cinema. Founders Dycee Wildman and Billy Senese first brought Defy to East Nashville in a scrappier, weirder form back in 2016. The 2025 edition of the fest is bigger, bolder and built to last.
“For the past 10 years, Defy Film Festival has been a powerful reminder of the importance of independent art in all its forms,” reads an emailed statement from Senese and Wildman. “We’re definitely pulling out all the stops to make our birthday feel special!” The fest’s 10-year anniversary includes mind-bending shorts, a Southern observational documentary renaissance, video art and a visionary debut feature by a former Nashvillian.
$eck was a painter and photographer when he lived in Nashville. Now he’s based in Brooklyn, and he’s just released his first feature film. So Far All Good premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this spring, where it was nominated for the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature. Ace (Rasan Kuvly) has just been released from jail — he stole a car on a dare, and has a history with anger issues. He’s heartbroken when he gets back on the street and finds no family or friends celebrating his homecoming.
$eck unwinds a Joycean dérive with Ace drifting between locations, interacting with various friends and acquaintances. The director is an enthusiastic formalist, dropping in striking images of European oil paintings to demarcate his scene breaks, and supporting it all with a propulsive Cuban jazz soundtrack and layered musical sound design. These mix with the director’s handheld, run-and-gun footage into a feature that’s notable for its inventive editing — there’s a magic rhythm between $eck’s kinetic cinematography and his cuts. $eck’s cast gives refreshingly unpolished performances, and it’s not clear how much of the film is written and how much is improvised. When the actors engage with bystanders in public spaces, the line between the film’s world and the real world gets only more blurry. This is a landmark debut from a natural filmmaker, and So Far All Good is my top pick at the fest.
The festival’s commitment to local voices is particularly strong this year. “We have more Nashville films in this year’s program than ever before,” Senese and Wildman explain. “Being able to celebrate local voices alongside global ones has always been our hope, and this year it feels like that vision has truly come together.”
Chris Crofton: Nashville Famous
Nashville filmmaker Seth Pomeroy headlines the festival with his documentary Chris Crofton: Nashville Famous in Saturday night’s closing feature slot. Crofton is famous in Nashville for his musical and comedy performances, his old radio show on WRVU, and his Advice King column right here in the Scene. Pomeroy captures his subject on stages and in hospital beds, loudly drunk and quietly sober. Crofton crashed into Nashville’s cultural consciousness in the early 2000s, when he led the Alcohol Stuntband through their shambling shows at the long-shuttered Slow Bar. What’s followed is the two decades of volatility and blown opportunities you might expect from a creative career based on alcoholism. Pomeroy’s funny film documents every breakthrough gig and every missed magic moment. A beautiful-loser story can be a bore, but this film was made over 10 years, and Pomeroy wisely spent a lot of that time with his camera simply filming the comedian off stage while he rants, remembers, regrets and reassesses. Nashville Famous is tragicomic. It plays like a sad musical, punctuated by graceful moments in which Crofton is heartfelt and transparent about his outsized need for artistic recognition — and his lifelong love of roller skating. Nashville Famous gives me hope that the 2020s are coming out of a documentary film slump.
In a text message Senese writes, “Have you seen Clovers? OMG is it good. I want everyone to see Clovers.” The film by Jacob Hatley and Tom Vickers is making its world premiere at the festival. The movie paints a portrait of Southern small-town life in Asheboro, N.C. It’s a documentary about family trauma, addiction, jail time, dead-end jobs and an illegal video-gambling casino in a nondescript commercial strip. Clovers serves as an oasis for the lonely souls of Ashboro who while away the hours — and their meager paychecks — huddled around flashing screens. The casino specializes in video games from an old Chuck E. Cheese location that have been modified into gambling machines. The documentary pictures its working-class subjects with openness and warmth, allowing them to tell their stories of loss and violence and dreams deferred. This is an unforgettable film with a haunting finale, and it proves that Pomeroy isn’t the only Southern documentary filmmaker who still understands the fundamentals of the form: observe and record. Hatley and Vickers get it, and so do Allison Inman, Sean Clark and Jace Freeman. The local trio’s latest short film, “Baxter Bi-Rite,” opens the doc block on Saturday.
I’ve been excited about John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office since the festival teased it months ago. Lilly developed the isolation tank in the 1950s before leading pioneering research in an effort to communicate with dolphins in the 1960s. He took a lot of LSD and thought cosmic entities were controlling the coincidental happenings in human lives. A documentary about Lilly should be particularly interesting to cinephiles, as the good doctor’s work inspired the science-fiction cult classics The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Altered States (1980). The movie is narrated by Chloë Sevigny, and it’s the most Defy-coded film at this year’s festival.
Defy is unique in its broad notions of what a film festival can be. The fest has teamed up with local artists to produce a zine celebrating their 10th anniversary, and they’ve created a pair of retrospective movie programs revisiting highlights from 10 years of curating.
Local artist/curator John Holmes of New Media Nashville is curating an interactive video art display, and Defy is hosting its first Thursday night kickoff party featuring a collaborative live music/video performance by Gardening Not Architecture and Dycee Wildman at Main Street Gallery in East Nashville.
“We are carving out a space for the work you won’t see anywhere else,” explain Wildman and Senese. “From the beginning, our focus has been on staying true to who we are: championing artists with distinct voices, the ones with something to say and the guts to say it their way. We call it ‘Defy’ for a reason.”
