In January, Brian Owens trudged back and forth up the icy streets of Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival. He would arrive back at his hotel at 1 a.m., eyes bleary from full days of indie features and documentaries — and what did he do to unwind?
Watch movies on his laptop.
You would too, if you had the workload Owens faces. As artistic director of the Nashville Film Festival, celebrating its 46th year next month at Regal's Green Hills megaplex, Owens faces the task of filling some 200 festival slots from a record number of submissions: a whopping 3,550 shorts, features and docs. That means missing out on some desirable films — and some painful messages to established filmmakers who didn't make the cut.
However tough the process is on Owens, though, it's good for festivalgoers. This year's NaFF, running April 16-25 over two weekends, boasts higher-profile features, a documentary slate that looks strong even for that typically first-rate slot, and music films boasting hometown heroes alongside subjects from Japan, Africa and Haiti.
Previously announced features include the Sundance prize winner Slow West, with Michael Fassbender's acclaimed turn as a gunslinger; the comedy Adult Beginners, with Nick Kroll, Joel McHale and Rose Byrne; and Country: Portraits of an American Sound, which focuses not on musicians but on country music photographers such as Raeanne Rubinstein, Henry Diltz and David McClister. But with the lineup close to locked down — with the usual caveat that festival guests and films are notoriously subject to last-minute change — Owens offered a sneak peek at this year's roster.
Local audiences have been wanting a peek at the indie drama Manglehorn since it was announced last year. Not just because of its stars and pedigree — Al Pacino as a small-town locksmith drawn into a tentative friendship with bank teller Holly Hunter, under the direction of the never-predictable David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) — but because filmmaker Harmony Korine has a rare dramatic role fresh off the game-changing success of his Spring Breakers.
It's playing in the Special Presentations section, home to films outside competition for jury prizes, where it's joined by Shira Piven's comedy Welcome to Me, with Kristen Wiig as a lottery winner who spends her winnings on an absurdly self-focused TV show; ace Freedom Riders documentary historian Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution; the offbeat Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, with Paul Dano and John Cusack as the troubled Beach Boys frontman at different stages; Gren Wells' directorial debut The Road Within, with Zoe Kravitz, Dev Patel, Robert Patrick and Kyra Sedgwick; and a movie that sounds like a NaFF ready-made, Brett Haley's wistful romance I'll See You in My Dreams, with Blythe Danner as a widow in her 70s whose fires are rekindled by Sam Elliott and pool boy Martin Starr.
Of the 16 slated documentaries, 12 were directed by women, a NaFF first. In My Father's House, by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work), charts the painful reconciliation of rapper Che "Rhymefest" Smith — co-author of Kanye's "Jesus Walks" — with the homeless alcoholic father who hasn't seen him in 20 years. In Mo Scarpelli and Alexandria Bombach's Frame by Frame, Afghan women photographers risk their lives to document life under the Taliban. One of the fest's most anticipated entries, the Sundance favorite Welcome to Leith, watches the unfolding showdown between North Dakota homeowners and the white supremacists who literally move in to take over their town.
Director Debra Granik documents the real life of a fascinating bit player from her Oscar-nominated Winter's Bone in Stray Dog, while Aviva Kempner's Rosenwald tells the story of the Sears Roebuck co-owner who devoted his efforts and fortune to racial equality and African-American education (and whose papers are housed at Fisk). Hal Holbrook's career-long fascination with Mark Twain forms the basis for Scott Teems' Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey. Timothy Kane and Annika Iltis' The Barkley Marathons takes viewers inside East Tennessee's notoriously grueling 100-mile endurance run; a far different kind of endurance run is celebrated in Demetra Stavrakas' star-studded SNL-at-40 testament Live From New York!
Among the music films, one irresistible entry is Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, Jeanie Finlay's account of the unknown singer who donned a mask in the late 1970s and passed himself off as Elvis returned from the grave. Elvis will not be on hand for the screening, but other musicians will appear with their films, schedules permitting: newgrass pioneer Sam Bush (Revival: The Sam Bush Story); Fugees' Pras Michel (Sweet Micky for President); Japanese country music idol Tomi Fujiyama (Made in Japan, executive produced by Morgan Spurlock); and the mighty Blind Boys of Alabama (How Sweet the Sound — The Blind Boys of Alabama).
Wayne Price's Heartworn Highways Revisited catches up with a new generation of Americana artists influenced by Guy Clark, David Allan Coe and other artists featured in the classic 1976 documentary. A world away from Nashville, Danielle Bernstein's Imba Means Sing follows three children from the slums of Kampala to international success with the African Children's Choir.
In the Spectrum section devoted to cinema's farthest reaches, the festival is performing a public service for local cinephiles: what will be the only Nashville screening of Goodbye to Language, by the movies' ageless explorer Jean-Luc Godard. Because it's in 3-D, The Belcourt couldn't give it a run; because it's Godard, Regal wouldn't. Whether you find it a brilliant experiment that alters your way of watching a movie or a migraine-inducing nightmare, thank the NaFF for letting us make up our own minds. Watch also for The Story of Film director Mark Cousins' documentary 6 Desires: D.H. Lawrence and Sardinia; the raw Maori period adventure The Dead Lands; Vicky Krieps' star turn in the erotic drama The Chambermaid; and one of the most talked-about movies from the past year's festival circuit, Cannes Critics' Week prize winner The Tribe, a brutal Ukrainian gang drama told in unsubtitled sign language.
If it's a different kind of cinematic extremity you're looking for, the festival's Graveyard Shift of late-night freakouts offers a plethora: local band Linear Downfall's film project Sufferland; the possession shocker Another; the highly touted French horror fantasy Horsehead; and the Belgian bloodbath Cub — what happens when a Scout troop on a hike runs across a serial killer. We can't top Graveyard Shift programmer and Scene critic Jason Shawhan's description of it as "the movie we've been imagining since Weird Al's 'Nature Trail to Hell' in 1984."
Tickets will go on sale to members online April 8 and to the general public April 10. Watch nashvillefilmfestival.org and the Scene for updates.
