The Defy Film Festival will celebrate experimental cinema this weekend at Studio 615 in East Nashville. This is Defy’s seventh year in Nashville, having established itself as an important screening stop for global filmmakers interested in deconstructing, remaking or simply doing without the narrative conventions of mainstream filmmaking. Expect everything from cracked cartoons and mangled music videos to surreal dramas and an award-winning horror film by a first-time Nashville director making its hometown debut.
Chest is a found-footage horror movie by local filmmaker Aaron Irons, who’s also known about town as a musician and audio engineer. Writer-director Irons grew up in East Tennessee, and his childhood was colored by the local legends and spooky stories his uncle would spin. One of “Uncle Shag’s” most memorable tales was about a pair of hunters who discovered a chest hidden in a cave behind a waterfall. The hunters hurried to fetch tools to cut the chest’s chains and break its locks, but when they returned the entire cave had disappeared. Irons and his neighborhood friends used to search for the cave — and the chest — while playing in the woods. And making a movie about the spooky stories from his childhood has been a longtime dream for Irons.
Chest’s kayfabe insists that the movie is based on true stories, and the film is presented as found footage that represents the last images captured by a television crew working on an episode of Dark Appalachia. Chest follows the crew as they prepare for their trip and arrive in the mountains to interview locals and search for the legendary chest. This is all played in talky ensemble scenes that quote Tarantino and fill in the blanks of the spooky story and the relationships among the crew. My favorite line in the film: “I don’t wanna get killed by some psycho mamaw!” But Chest is at its best when it indulgently delights in genre tropes: The film opens with a cannibal attack that reads like a punch line; the found footage features spot-on send-ups of paranormal television programming; and the show’s Australian host reminds me of Robert Downey Jr.’s shock-journalist character in Natural Born Killers. The best characters in the film are the suspicious and sly locals who are most familiar with the legend and the curse some say it casts.
Chest’s found-footage conceits are really just a framework for what amounts to a Southern folk-horror film that fits right into one of my favorite trends in contemporary cinema. Movies like A Field in England, The Witch and Midsommar have reinvigorated the horror genre with the fetid and feral threats of wild spaces and remote populations with cultures deeply connected to land and legends. Chest has a lot of fun demonstrating how folk stories, speculative history and just plain nosy gossip all combine to weave local legends that come to seem as real as the trees and mountains that make up these natural spaces — settings and themes that can equally seduce and overwhelm in a film like this. Fans of woodsy horror flicks will find a lot to like about Chest, including a rampaging climax that reads like Southern-fried Sam Raimi.
Attendant is an abbreviated feature with a run time of just over an hour. It tells the story of a mild-mannered flight attendant named Aiofe who is stood up by a married pilot and finds herself exploring the dramatic sandy seascapes of Cape Cod’s protected National Seashore. The setting is one of the stars here, and this poetic journey of self-discovery manages tones that recall vintage Michelangelo Antonioni. Attendant was co-written, produced and edited by director Rome Petersson and cinematographer Alice Millar. Petersson is a veteran filmmaker, a well-known New York-based gaffer and key grip. This is his first feature as director.
One of my favorite aspects of the Defy Festival is its focus on short films. This year’s schedule includes lots of brief movie comedies, shockers, dramas and mind-melting experiments over its two-day run. English filmmaker Rob Ryan’s “Time Bus” makes its U.S. premiere at the fest this weekend. This meta film-within-a-film asks big questions about the indignities of the movie business and the possibilities of traveling to the past or the future. After all, “No one doesn’t not love time travel.”
Rick Groleau’s “Type Cast” is an animated antique-shop conversation that vintage typewriter aficionados will relish before it takes an unexpected dark turn. Writer-director Sam Rudykoff’s “Cruise” turns the thankless job of cold-call telemarketing into a life-or-death workplace satire about the trust-eroding effects of capitalism. Local musician-actor-poet Clay Steakley’s “The Fire Cycle: A Reading From the Book of Regenesis” is a multimedia meditation on environmental patterns and natural rhythms. The short is making its debut at the fest.
In addition to the fest’s theatrical screenings, Defy will also have two programs of movies on loop in their lounge and lobby theaters. These films are free to watch and include Claire Marshall’s contemporary dance film “Love Song,” Abbey Johnson and Nora Masters’ On the Road-inspired queer music video “Kerouac,” and “The Death of James Dean” — a meditation on mortality and fame set to a Clyde Stubblefield groove by yours truly.
