Now in its 37th year—a grandfatherly age for film festivals, many of which are less than a decade old—the Nashville Film Festival remains the biggest film event of the year in the city, a seven-day orgy of movie love that drew some 15,000 people last year. And yet, despite its growing size and visibility, it’s still a remarkably democratic event. When the 2006 NaFF launches Thursday at Regal’s Green Hills megaplex, on four screens, it will be open to anyone with a few hours of free time, nine bucks, and a schedule. From there, you’re on your own. To help navigate the many daunting choices, the Scene offers this handy road map—a guide to more than 50 features, documentaries and programs playing at this year’s festival, arranged by day and time. Inside, you’ll find not only what you shouldn’t miss but also what you can safely skip. With those tips comes some practical advice on how to get the most out of the festival. First, get tickets early. If the screening has visiting celebrities or a local angle, it will sell out long before showtime. That includes this year’s opening film, the Bell Witch shocker An American Haunting (7 p.m. Thursday), with star James D’Arcy and director Courtney Solomon; the world premiere of music doc I Trust You to Kill Me (7:30 p.m. Saturday), with Kiefer Sutherland attending; the talk with Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer and producer Stephanie Allain (1:30 p.m. Tuesday); the popular Tennessee Film Nights (Tuesday and Wednesday); and the closing-night feature Aurora Borealis (7 p.m. Wednesday), with Joshua Jackson in the house. The box office is downstairs in the Green Hills lobby; advance tickets can be bought at any time. Second, pay attention to the schedule. Some of the hottest movies—like The Notorious Bettie Page and Wordplay—will only screen once. Get tickets to those first. If a movie’s playing only once at the festival, chances are it’s something special: either it already has a distributor who doesn’t want to use up the audience, or the film’s got some commercial prospects. No matter what you’re seeing, arrive at least 20 minutes early for a place in line. Finally, ride the buzz. Talk to people in line—what else are you gonna do, shoot dice?—and you’ll hear good suggestions about what to see. Many times, the best movies will not be the ones with familiar faces. Live dangerously. That Hungarian stoner comedy or four-hour pediatric-cancer documentary will be something you’ll read about months down the line, and you’ll have missed your chance. If you see something exceptional, stay for the filmmaker Q&A, and ask questions about something other than the budget. More festival information will be available on the Scene’s Pith in the Wind blog, starting with a crash-course list of 10 films you shouldn’t miss. Now, somebody, please hit the lights. Capsules by Donna Bowman, Steve Erickson, Brittney Gilbert, Mark Mays, Noel Murray, Jim Ridley, Michael Sicinski, Jack Silverman and Sam Smith. * = highly recommended THURSDAY, 20TH *THE TWELVE DISCIPLES OF NELSON MANDELA (1:30 p.m.; also 7:10 p.m. Friday) Thomas Allen Harris filmed this strong doc as a tribute to his stepfather, Benjamin Pule “Lee” Leinaeng, who was one of 12 men involved in founding South Africa’s African National Congress during apartheid. As Harris investigates the life story of his greatest father figure, he contextualizes Lee’s role in history and re-examines his own life and the role of future generations left with the great work of those before them. In the recent documentary boom, Hollywood has taken to fictionalizing successful docs; Harris strikes a nice balance by mixing traditional interviews and found footage with reenactments of key moments in the men’s lives. Harris will attend the screening. —S.S. *DESIRE/THE FACES OF TENNCARE (4 p.m.; also 5:15 p.m. Saturday) Winner of this year’s Reel Current Award, given by former Vice President Al Gore, this documentary about the lives and dreams of several teenage girls in New Orleans shamelessly promotes itself as some kind of Katrina tie-in, but it could have been filmed anywhere. Over a five-year period, filmmaker Julie Gustafson interviews five girls of different race and class about sex, love, college, careers and pregnancy, and assigns them cameras for their own video diaries. The result is surprisingly complex and poignant, not only in how much these separate lives overlap, but in the simplicity and honesty with which these young people envision their own ideals and dreams for their futures. The film is preceded by Nashville filmmaker Molly Secours’ “The Faces of TennCare,” which recasts Tennessee’s health-care crisis in stark human terms with the help of photojournalist Joon Powell, narrator Minton Sparks and musicians Maura O’Connell, John Prine and Steve Conn. Gustafson and Secours will attend. —S.S. MILK & OPIUM (4:30 p.m.; also 7:30 p.m. Friday) Joel Palombo wrote and directed this winsome portrait of a 14-year-old boy from rural India, Swaroop Khan, who is a Sufi musician. With his ornery uncle, the talented youth sets off on a tour of the countryside to make a living, only to discover a strange new world of globalized Indian cities and modern malls. American kids may be equally disoriented without the fast pace and swiftly spliced style of our own children’s entertainment, but a bright, curious youngster will find this boisterous music movie a charming introduction to foreign film. In Hindi with English subtitles. —B.G. SHORTS PROGRAM 4 (9:25 p.m.; also 5 p.m. Friday) Gwyneth Paltrow makes her directorial debut with “Dealbreaker,” a short comedy about the little things that can kill a relationship. Fran (Arija Barekis) reflects on the many faux pas that ended all her previous relationships, like the dude who admitted to liking the Spin Doctors or the bizarre baby-talker. However, the killer event is the one that snuffs Fran’s current relationship—a Farrelly Brothers-style gross-out involving poor bathroom etiquette. The film’s little more than a Cosmo article come to life, and no wonder: it’s based on real stories from Glamour magazine readers. —M.M. THE LIFE OF AN AGENT (9:35 p.m.; also 4 p.m. Tuesday) Zsigmond Gábor’s 2004 documentary is probably the most tedious film that could possibly be made about an inherently interesting subject. It’s a collection of declassified training films for secret agents (and citizen-informers, willing and otherwise) during the 1950s and ’60s, presented with minimal commentary or embellishment. These low-budget government one-reelers are, in some ways, more compelling for their unselfconscious documentation of urban Hungary during the Kádár era than for their depiction of a uniquely Stalinist paranoia. One assumes the CIA has produced material just as damning, but we’ll have to wait for the fall of American capitalism to see that stuff. —M.S. FRIDAY, 21ST SHORTS PROGRAM 3 (2:15 p.m.; also noon Sunday) Matthew Swanson’s Japanese-cinema pastiche “Hiro” has been snapping up awards at fests around the country: it’s a trawl through the stereotypes in the HKFlix bargain bin, from nihilistic yakuza to a mysterious young wraith in flowing white. The Canadian filmmaker mimics Takeshi Kitano’s gorgeous wide shots better than Seijun Suzuki’s kinetic energy, but he shows promise. Carolyn McDonald’s “P.N.O.K.” takes a well-intentioned look at two soldiers whose task it is to inform families when a loved one is killed in action. Tears flow and vases drop right on cue, but fine performances and cameos by familiar faces like Danny Glover and Irma P. Hall compensate. —M.M. *IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS (4:30 p.m.; also 1 p.m. Saturday) James Longley’s deeply embedded documentary considers life in post-liberation Iraq through three stories, starting with a stunningly intimate, street-level sketch of a fatherless child whose relationship with his violent, opinionated boss mirrors the relationship of the Iraqi people with Saddam Hussein (or perhaps with their U.S. occupiers). The second segment, almost as revealing, examines how some Shiites are using their newfound democracy to restore religious fundamentalism. The first two-thirds are so powerful that audiences may not have much emotion left for the final section, about Kurdish farmers—but that’s more a flaw of mere human viewers than of Longley’s supernaturally wrenching film. Longley will attend the screening. —N.M. *THE TAILENDERS (5:15 p.m.; also 4:30 p.m. Saturday) Adele Horne’s fascinating documentary explores the paradoxes of Gospel Recordings, a missionary operation that has taped Bible stories and songs in over 5,000 of the world’s 8,000-plus languages and dialects. Trainees match cassettes to the various dialects in migrant labor villages in Baja, California; field workers record new languages in the Solomon Islands; and the filmmakers ponder the dynamics of control and chaos in this sonic evangelism. The missionaries’ low-tech “hand-crank” solutions are ingenious, but the vast gulf between their Jesus scripts and the life-worlds of their targets creates friction that lingers long after the sound waves have rippled away. Horne will attend the screening. —D.B. CHANCES: THE WOMEN OF MAGDALENE (7 p.m.; also 2:30 p.m. Wednesday) At Nashville’s remarkable Magdalene House, the Rev. Becca Stevens and a network of volunteers provide shelter and a shot at recovery for women with histories of prostitution and drug abuse. The women’s blunt personal stories form the most compelling parts of Tom Neff’s earnest, polished profile, which amounts to promotion for the program and its good works. As documentary, it’s limited: we see very little of the day-to-day life inside the shelters, while a project pairing Magdalene House residents with Music Row songwriters takes up too much of the movie’s focus—it comes as an intrusion when a son’s funeral turns into a music montage. But the Magdalene women interviewed on camera have fought for their second chances, and the hard-won hope on their faces can make you forgive a lot. Neff and Stevens will attend the screening. —J.R. *51 BIRCH STREET (7:20 p.m.) In recent years, documentaries like Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation and Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are have attempted to use the form as family therapy, but they’ve often been marred by bitterness and bad faith. To its credit, Doug Block’s uneven but powerful examination of his parents’ marriage never feels like a settling of scores. The film was inspired by two incidents after the death of the director’s mother: his 83-year-old father’s marriage to his former secretary, and the discovery of his mother’s daily diaries. Seeking explanations while sifting through family secrets, Block finds his parents examples of a generation in which men were supposed to be emotionless wage-earners and women happy homemakers; their troubled marriage shows the harm these rigid roles caused. Because Block grounds the film in individual experience, it goes far beyond mere sociological generalizations, leading to a moving finale. Block will attend the screening. —S.E. FORGIVING THE FRANKLINS (9:15 p.m.; also 5:15 p.m. Sunday) A send-up of religious hypocrisy so shrill and strident it makes the previous NaFF hit Saved! look like manna from Pat Robertson, Jay Floyd’s smugly self-righteous satire borrows its premise—a traumatic accident liberates a repressed family’s libido, making them freaks to the intolerant squares all around—from John Waters’ A Dirty Shame without Waters’ wry generosity. The sexual awakening of the stiff husband (Roberson Dean) and wife (Teresa Willis) carries a real erotic charge, but the movie squanders its flickers of goodwill by making every other Christian a cartoon grotesque and veering into ludicrous melodrama. The ending is especially hysterical—it’s like the Reefer Madness of provincial bigotry. Floyd will attend the screening. —J.R. FOR THE LOVE OF DOLLY (9:35 p.m.; also noon Monday) Jeanette once told her sister, “You chose to get married and have kids. I choose to follow Dolly.” She’s not the only one. Tai Uhlmann’s documentary follows Dolly Parton’s most rabid fans as they create, purchase, write, dream and discuss all things Dolly. This includes Jeanette’s friend Melisa, who moved to Nashville to be closer to the buxom country legend; the pair go so far as to collect blonde hairs from the upholstery of a traded-in car that once belonged to Parton’s assistant. Rather than mock these individuals, though, Uhlmann provides a delightful glimpse of how one performer can touch so many people’s lives in so many unexpected ways. Uhlmann will attend the screening. —B.G. THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT (4 p.m.; also 1:15 p.m. Saturday) Like the landmark Paradise Lost documentaries, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s infuriating account of a North Carolina man railroaded for a grisly rape-murder commands your attention more fiercely than any courtroom drama. In 1984, a white Winston-Salem woman named Deborah Sykes was found murdered; local police arrested a black teenager, Darryl Hunt, who was convicted by a white jury on the flimsiest of evidence. He refused a plea bargain, maintaining his innocence; he got a life sentence. Thus began a 20-year ordeal as Hunt’s defense battled the police and the prosecution, leading to any number of gasp-inducing twists and a desperate search for the real killer. More than 10 years in the making, Stern and Sundberg’s film is public service at its most grimly compelling. Darryl Hunt himself will attend the screening. —J.R. INTERKOSMOS (9:45 p.m.) Without question, the best avant-garde musical ever made about the East German space program’s fictitious 1970s race to colonize Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons—and I’d say that even if there were (or would ever be) another. Writer-director Jim Finn’s one-of-a-kind film incorporates NASA footage, berserk production numbers, high-school-play space-capsule interiors and straight-faced “newsreel” footage to create a fantasy that’s at once bare-bones minimal yet weirdly grand: Rushmore’s Max Fischer Players Present Solaris. Not to mention that it’s frequently funny as hell—as when one cosmonaut (Finn) woos his chilly comrade with a broken-transmission rendition of “The Trolley Song.” —J.R. SATURDAY, 22ND YOUTH OR CONSEQUENCES 2006 (11 a.m.) In February, a group of at-risk kids from East Nashville’s James A. Cayce Homes teamed up with director Wes Edwards and coordinator Julie Alexander to make a short film. The result, “Leap Year Nightmare,” tells the terrifying tale of two teens who take their basketball rivalry to the school gym—which has been padlocked and haunted since 1901. Also on this program of teen-made films: Ben Easton’s “Arley’s Balloon,” Molly Proffitt’s documentary “Endurance,” and Michael Lauderdale and Quinton Pope’s Nashville-shot drama “A Way Out,” in which a hot-shot basketball prospect weighs school or the streets. —J.R. ONE DAY IN PEOPLE’S POLAND (12:45 p.m.) Maciej Drygas’ documentary combines two major focal points of this year festival: the turbulent past and unsteady present of Central Europe, and the time-capsule treasures buried in the world’s film archives. Drygas, a one-time assistant to Krzysztof Kieslowski, sifts through black-and-white footage shot in 1962 for a look at life in communist Poland as it was actually lived by civilians. If you’re intrigued, also check out the Polish drama My Nikifor (1 p.m. Sunday), with Krystyna Feldman in a gender-bending turn as the famed naïve painter; and a pair of comedies, the boisterous Bal-Can-Can (7:30 p.m. Thursday; also 1 p.m. Friday)—in which a Macedonian and an Italian chase a carpet containing a grandmother’s corpse through an obstacle course of Balkan crooks all the way to Kosovo—and the poker-faced Czech farce Wrong Side Up (9:25 p.m. Friday), your one chance this festival to encounter a man sexually obsessed with mannequins. On screen, anyway. —J.R. *SO MUCH SO FAST (3:30 p.m.; also 2 p.m. Monday) Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan (Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern) directed this wrenching documentary which spans the last five years in the life of Stephen Heywood, a man diagnosed with ALS (what is commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease). Even in the face of impending death, Heywood maintains a wonderful wit and optimistic attitude that make his struggle inspiring rather than depressing: the filmmakers present his gradual decline and its effect on his family with a frankness that allows an honest look at crumbling mortality. A haunting and beautiful film. Ascher will attend the screening. —B.G. MUSIC IS MY LIFE, POLITICS MY MISTRESS (7 p.m.; also 2:30 p.m. Monday) The late multitalent Oscar Brown, Jr. recorded 11 albums, produced two musicals and worked with luminaries such as Muhammad Ali and Studs Terkel; he was also a fervent political activist and community leader. So why have so few heard of him? In his kinetic but maddening documentary, donnie l. betts allows Brown to tell his own story, deferring to his subject’s self-deprecating charm and lively performance footage. It’s all exciting and valuable, but while betts covers the breadth of Brown’s musical career, he rarely plumbs the depth of his politics. We end up learning what Brown wants us to know, not what good investigative journalism could have taught us—and his life deserves more than a cursory glance. betts will attend the screening. —M.M. IN A NUTSHELL: A PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH TASHJIAN (9:15 p.m.; also 5 p.m. Monday) Elizabeth Tashjian was a performance artist (and painter and singer and songwriter) who gained cult celebrity status when she opened a nut museum in her home. Much more than just a display of various nuts, Tashjian’s project was a celebration of nuttiness and all it entails. Due to her unapologetic ways, financial tactics and eccentric behavior, Tashjian eventually lost her museum and her freedom after she was confined to a nursing home against her will. Her story, in Don Bernier’s documentary, becomes a searing example of how those who dare to be different sometimes pay an enormous price. —B.G. ALMOST HEAVEN (9:30 p.m.) A German woman’s dying wish mirrors the dream of half of Nashville: to play country music at the Bluebird Café. Director Ed Herzog fashions this maudlin premise into a droll humanist road movie in which terminally ill Helen (Heike Makatsch, last seen in Love Actually) leaves behind hospital, husband and home to pick and grin in Music City. Airport mayhem sends Helen instead to Kingston, Jamaica, where she meets a crafty local named Rose (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Herzog faithfully conforms to road/buddy-comedy orthodoxy, though Makatsch’s doe-eyed pluck and Amuka-Bird’s steppin’-razor’s edge enliven their familiar paces. It’s hard to tell whether the sly digs at white tourists and the natives’ recidivism, especially from Rose, are jabs at the legacy of colonialism or Herzog’s own naïveté. Still, can you really dislike a film that has both Loretta Lynn and The Abyssinians on the soundtrack? In English and subtitled German. —M.M. *THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (10:30 p.m.) Mary Harron’s facile but hugely entertaining black-and-white biopic seems most interested in its subject—a studious Nashville girl who became the world’s most celebrated fetish pinup—as an object. A zippy, startlingly sweet elegy for the relative innocence of postwar smut, it casts Page’s early years in fairly conventional lives-of-the-famous terms, briskly sketching her religious roots and unhappy adolescence in Nashville. But the movie’s Bettie, played with sunny forthrightness by Gretchen Mol, passes from one eager shutterbug to another, culminating in her “notorious” bondage shoots with photographer Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer) and his mother-hen sister Paula (Lili Taylor). The movie is disappointingly slight as biography, but Mol makes a bigger impression than she ever has onscreen before, and cinematographer Mott Hupfel’s silvery evocation of the 1950s is never less than gorgeous. (The film opens May 12 at the Belcourt.) —J.R. HATCHETS, HOBOS & BAD CHECKS (2:45 p.m.) In 2004, when the NaFF gave self-taught Arkansas filmmaker Phil Chambliss his first public screening after 30 years of homemade movies, about 40 people showed up—and those 40 people couldn’t talk about anything else the rest of the week. Word has spread from San Francisco to London, and now Chambliss returns in triumph with three of the damnedest pieces of homegrown surrealism you’ll ever see: the “spicy” cinematic love letter “Free,” the amazing black-and-white horror opus “Shadows of the Hatchet-Man,” and Chambliss’ just-completed 62-minute epic The Pastor and the Hobo, a feast of riotous non-sequiturs and lusty amateur performances that resembles backwoods Beckett. Picture David Lynch and Ed Wood spending 32 years nursing their feverish visions on the graveyard shift at the Arkansas Highway Department—you still don’t have a clue what’s in store. Chambliss will attend the screening. —J.R. SUNDAY, 23RD *THE REFUGEE ALL STARS (1:30 p.m.; also 4;30 p.m. Monday) Did you ever think you’d hear the phrase “uplifting documentary about civil-war refugee camps?” The people of Sierra Leone suffered 10 years of civil war that forced many to flee for their lives into neighboring countries. At a refugee camp, six talented musicians pass the time entertaining the downtrodden with a vibrant mix of musical styles from all across the African Diaspora, from reggae to soca. A chance to record in the studio calls the musicians back home. But some, still suffering the post-traumatic shock of having limbs chopped with a machete, choose to remain in the camps. As the others forge on, they show the transformative power of music and the intense pull of one’s home, as well as the iron will of the citizens of Sierra Leone. If there’s justice in the world, the Refugee All-Stars band will experience success similar to that of Buena Vista Social Club. Director Zach Niles will attend. In English and Krio with English subtitles. —M.M. BED STORIES (3:15 p.m.; also 2:30 p.m. Tuesday) Its title sounds like a new Cinemax series, but Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s film offers far more unfulfilled desire than hot sex. Its structure is deceptive—at first, it appears to be a collection of unconnected vignettes, all revolving literally and figuratively around a bed. Gradually, the connections between the characters become apparent, although almost every scene is a two-hander. Serebrennikov shoots each scene in a single take, with a mobile camera, but he’s equally enamored with language: his characters are prone to baroque rants, recalling his compatriot Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome. If there’s something a bit gimmicky about the concept, Serebrennikov shrewdly varies the mood from scene to scene: the presiding tension keeps the brief (69-minute) film interesting. In Russian with English subtitles. —S.E. *EL PERRO NEGRO: STORIES FROM THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR (4 p.m.) Largely avoiding the Ken Burns lockstep of most recent historical documentaries, Hungarian director Peter Forgacs depicts the build-up to the 1936 Spanish Civil War in haunting you-are-there terms, using home movies shot by a variety of citizens—including Joan Salvans, a wealthy wool merchant’s son who was butchered only days into the war, and Ernesto Noriega, who continued to film from inside his prison cell. The film clips range from lavish formal events to desolate Madrid streets, where no one wears neckties lest they be executed as bourgeoisie; images of riderless horses and a dog eating a discarded baby render Buñuel and Dali redundant. Forgacs will attend the screening. —J.R. *AL OTRO LADO (TO THE OTHER SIDE) (6:40 p.m.) A beautiful trilogy of interwoven stories, set in Mexico, Cuba, Morocco and Spain, about three children who leave their homes in search of their fathers, all of whom who have crossed borders and bodies of water to “the other side.” The children are not only ignorant of the landscapes beyond their backyard or neighborhood, but of the greater realms of sexuality, violence and mortality; their journeys too are a sort of crossing over, from childhood into adulthood. Mexican director Gustavo Loza, punctuating his awe-inspired perspective with images of dreams and spirits, gives the three tales a magical scope that would be perfectly suited for Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. —S.S. LIVE AND BECOME (6:45 p.m.; also 1 p.m. Monday) In Radu Mihaileanu’s epic, a non-Jewish woman places her son on an airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, where he grows up conflicted by his role between the two cultures. Sirak M. Sabahat, who plays the son in later years, will introduce the screening. Sponsored by the Nashville Jewish Film Festival; in Amharic, Hebrew and French with English subtitles. —J.R. LOOK BOTH WAYS (7 p.m.) Writer-director Sarah Watt’s multi-character Australian drama follows a group of middle-aged professionals as they undergo varied existential crises over a long weekend. Watt adds some pleasing stylistic touches—most notably animated interludes that illustrate one character’s anxieties about life’s everyday dangers—but after the first hour it’s obvious that she has few revelations to offer about messed-up modernity. (“Stick it out” and “Love conquers all” seem to be the bullet points.) While it’s perfectly serviceable as a wanly uplifting comedy-drama, Look Both Ways tries too hard to piggyback on the whimsy and pop-pathos of such established auteurs as Jean-Pierre Jeunet and P.T. Anderson. —N.M. JOURNEY FROM THE FALL (7:30 p.m.; also 4 p.m. Monday) Saigon-born U.S. director Ham Tran’s Sundance selection juggles two narratives of postwar Vietnam: a fighter imprisoned in a communist re-education camp after the 1975 fall of Saigon, and the perilous flight of his family toward a new life overseas. Tran will attend the screening. In English and subtitled Vietnamese. —J.R. *WASSUP ROCKERS (9:15 p.m.) The first movie by teensploitation provocateur Larry Clark I haven’t hated—in fact, a major, startling improvement over his previous work. In Kids and Bully, Clark offered a vision of adolescence that both demonized and objectified teens; the main difference here is that he’s focusing on characters he actually likes, a group of Latino skate punks from an L.A. barrio. The first half is a quasi-documentary re-creation of their daily life; in the second half, they venture into Beverly Hills and the movie becomes a likable farce reminiscent of ’80s teen comedies. Clark displaces his own exploitative tendencies onto white women and gay men, lending the movie an uncomfortable streak of misogyny and homophobia. But while he mostly plays racial tension for laughs, he still has a lot more to say about it than Crash’s Paul Haggis. —S.E. *FILM WITHOUT BOUNDARIES (9:35 p.m.) One seldom flocks to experimental cinema for star-power, but the best films in this year’s avant-garde collection feature bravura performances by Eli Wallach and Pam Grier. Austria’s Peter Tscherkassky completes his cycle of skull-rattling found-footage works with “Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine,” a 17-minute short that many considered the best film (of any length) at last year’s Cannes film festival. What begins as a scratch-DJ remix of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly soon tips its hand, revealing a latent mini-narrative of death and intra-celluloid damnation. Nearly as satisfying, if not quite as accomplished, is “Reckless Eyeballing” by Chicago’s Christopher Harris. Using looped soundtrack phrases and contrasting visual material from blaxploitation films and Birth of a Nation, Harris constructs a complex meditation on African American women’s place in the cinema, as both lookers and the looked-at. No other entries in the program match up to these two films, but a few come close: Nana Swiczinsky’s “Vanishing Points,” a funkily mod color study recalling the Op Art paintings of the 1960s, and Siegfried Fruhauf’s “Mirror Mechanics,” an engaging widescreen work that bears similarity to Tscherkassky’s more meticulous efforts. —M.S. *DANIELSON: A FAMILY MOVIE (9:45 p.m.; also 12:15 p.m. April 24) Neither a performance film or a straight documentary, this lo-fi peek into the life and music of Daniel Smith (mastermind and literal older brother of Christian indie-rock faves The Danielson Famile) takes a variety of approaches to the material, from animation to Rashomon-like retellings of Smith’s origins. Director JL Aronson’s fascination with Smith is infectious, but the movie might’ve been significantly improved if he had been a touch less admiring and posed some direct questions to Smith—such as how well he thinks his twee costume shtick works onstage, and whether he’s bothered that his old colleague Sufjan Stevens (who appears here) has eclipsed his success largely by stealing his act. Still, the good music and good vibes here outweigh the journalistic lapses. Aronson will attend the screening. —N.M. A LION IN THE HOUSE (1:15 p.m.) Simply put, Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s devastating documentary is one of the two or three best movies in the entire festival, perhaps even this year—although its unflinching portrait of children fighting cancer over a six-year period in the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital is something any parent will dread. Themselves parents of a cancer survivor, the filmmakers document an agonizing cycle of fragile hopes, new treatments, temporary remissions and terrifying relapses: parents age and children wither over the course of the film’s gripping four hours. And yet the overall impact is cathartic rather than depressing, in keeping with the Isak Dinesen quote that provides the film’s title—which says that you don’t know what it’s like to be alive until you’ve lived with lions. Kudos to the filmmakers and to the unimaginably brave kids and parents who gave them permission to film—some of whom will reportedly attend the screening. —J.R. WORDPLAY (1:45 p.m.) New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz has driven people to drink on Sunday morning, and in Patrick Creadon’s diverting doc, he emerges as the benignly sadistic lord of a realm of word-crazy puzzleheads—the kind of folks who can’t help but notice the flip of a consonant turns Dunkin’ Donuts into “Unkind Donuts.” Creadon follows Shortz to the national championship in Stamford, Conn., pausing for profiles of the main contenders as well as puzzlemaster Merl Reagle, whose tutorial on the history, form and construction of crossword puzzles is riveting. Enjoy Creadon’s film as a peek inside an obsessive subculture, an encouraging rebuke to mass culture’s creeping anti-intellectual bent—or your chance to see the linguistic equivalent of Celebrity Poker Showdown, pitting Jon Stewart against Ken Burns, Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina, former President Bill Clinton and the Indigo Girls. —J.R. SWEET LAND (4:15 p.m.; also 4:15 p.m. Monday) Writer-director Ali Selim’s first feature is one of those little gems that keeps audiences from tossing in the towel on regional American cinema. Selim’s absorbing film charts the slow-burning romance of a taciturn farmer (Tim Guinee) and his German mail-order bride (Elizabeth Reaser) in 1920 Minnesota, under the eyes of a community still reeling from World War I. The low-budget period evocation is offset by Selim’s sturdy storytelling and a fine offbeat cast—including Brits Alan Cumming (who co-produced) and Alex Kingston as Midwestern farmers. And Reaser, beautifully matched with Lois Smith as the same character in later years, should be a star. Selim will attend the screening. —J.R. MONDAY, 24TH TO TULSA AND BACK: ON TOUR WITH J.J. CALE (7 p.m.) When Vanity Fair asked Eric Clapton to name his favorite person of all time, he unhesitatingly picked J.J. Cale “because he’s got such a grasp on how to have a great life.” Having avoided the spotlight for decades, Cale—whose influence is greater than his modest celebrity would suggest—has crafted an exceptionally simple and appealing existence for himself. Jörg Bundschuh’s doc follows Cale on the road in 2004 with old playing buddies from his early Tulsa days, interspersed with archived footage and gorgeous shots of the tour bus rolling down the highway. Like its subject, the film is understated and laid-back—proof that the less you try to be intriguing, the more intriguing you are. Bundschuh will attend the screening. —J.S. THE GIANT BUDDHAS (9 p.m.) From Christian Frei, director of War Photographer—an acclaimed doc that has similar flaws—comes this meandering, nearly experimental look at the Taliban’s 2001 destruction of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan statues. The film features amazing Al-Jazeera footage of the demolitions, as well as a visit to a Chinese tourist attraction that started to build replicas before abruptly denying the project’s existence. But Frei smothers these tasty nuggets with frou-frou sauces, such as a framing story about a woman’s return to her girlhood home and some dreamy historical reenactments. If he could manage to tell the story straight, he’d have a documentary as monumental and tragic as its subject. —D.B. *CZECH DREAM (9:35 p.m.) Hey, Prague—you got Punk’d! In this subversive Central European slice of reality TV, a kind of I Club Huckabees, Czech film students Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda protest the kudzu creep of globalization with a stunt that’s worthy of the Yes Men. As “hypermarkets” (i.e., homegrown Wal-Marts) invade the Czech Republic, the directors commission a massive ad campaign for an everything store called “The Czech Dream.” Thousands show up for the grand opening, expecting implausibly huge discounts on everyday staples—only to get a rude surprise. At that point, the emptiness of “The Czech Dream” takes on a whole new meaning. The filmmakers sometimes come off as smug jerks, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong about the insidious effects of chain colonization, or the infernal effectiveness of something-for-nothing come-ons even in political pitches. If their outrage about the evils of advertising seems ho-hum, no wonder: to Americans, shilling is like air. In Czech with English subtitles. —J.R. CPEEP SHOW (9:45 p.m.) Don’t let FBI thugs catch you attending this rare public screening of a blistering 1965 film by writer-director J.X. Williams, a tough-guy auteur who went underground in the 1980s—perhaps because he had dirt on the Mafia, the Feds and some of the biggest names in showbiz. Is Williams real, or is he some kind of weird Thomas Pynchon creation, a film-noir phantom whose trail leads only to calculated dead ends? Only film historian Noel Lawrence knows for sure, and his multimedia conspiracy carnival should be one of the festival’s must-see events. Hey, that junkie in the surveillance tapes looks like Frank Sinatra…. —J.R. THE SUN (6:45 p.m.) Following studies of Hitler (Moloch) and Lenin (Taurus), Alexander Sokurov concludes his series of films about 20th-century tyrants with the Japanese Emperor Hirohito (Issey Ogata), who claimed divine authority. The result may be the most Christian film this very Russian and generally conservative director has made—a hymn to the virtues of humility. Focusing entirely on the day in 1945 when Japan surrendered to the U.S., Sokurov cuts out most of the political context, sympathetically focusing on Hirohito’s ritualistic routine (e.g., the study of hermit crabs) before revealing this particular day’s significance. Filled with dim, cavernous rooms (many so dark they’ll be unwatchable on video), distant sirens, and appallingly beautiful ruins, the molasses-paced film is as much an environment as a narrative. In Japanese with English subtitles. —S.E. SMALL TOWN GAY BAR (7:15 p.m.; also 1:30 p.m. Tuesday) Writer-director Malcolm Ingram had a hit at Sundance with this doc about the hole-in-the-wall gay bars sprinkled throughout small-town Mississippi. Smack dab in the Bible Belt’s buckle, where just down the road there are plenty of homophobes ready to mouth off (or worse), these places are like the headquarters of a secret society; its members toil through their daytimes just trying to blend in with the crowd. Here the bar owners are heroes, creators of a safe haven where patrons can be themselves when the sun goes down. Executive produced by Kevin Smith, the movie’s full of fascinating characters from both sides of the issue, all sure to offend someone or another. Ingram will attend the screening. —S.S. FAR OFF TOWN: DUNEDIN TO NASHVILLE/“THE BALLAD OF PETER LaFARGE” (9:25 p.m.; also 2 p.m. Tuesday) Though this documentary is ostensibly about New Zealand music legend David Kilgour’s recent trip to Nashville, where he recorded the fine Frozen Orange LP with members of Lambchop, director Bridget Sutherland is mainly interested in the clash of old and new in Music City. Sutherland shuffles impressionistic imagery of decaying 20th century Americana while Nashvillians wax rhapsodic about the heyday of country music, when legends would work their way from the Ryman to Tootsie’s to Ernest Tubb’s in a single night. Then she watches The Clean co-founder Kilgour as he walks Nashville’s current path of legends: from Kurt Wagner’s basement to producer Mark Nevers’ studio to Grimey’s. You have to know something about indie rock to follow everything that’s being implied in Far Off Town, but it’s hard to miss the inspirational message delivered by interviewee Dan Tyler: “Bad music can kill a culture.” Preceded by Sandra Hale Schulman’s “The Ballad of Peter LaFarge,” a portrait of the unjustly forgotten folksinger who penned Johnny Cash’s still-searing protest anthem “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” Sutherland and Schulman will attend. —N.M. TUESDAY, 25TH TENNESSEE FILM NIGHT 1 (6:30 p.m.; also 10 p.m. Wednesday) Past festivals have made me dread this program of local shorts every year; it’s a pleasure to report this year’s crop represents a major step forward, whether in ambition (relocated Persian filmmaker Pouria Montazeri’s mystical mini-epic “Shams & Rumi: The Fragrance of Axis Mundi”) or simple observational detail (Carlos Griffin’s Antioch-shot “La Taqueria,” which makes good use of a taco trailer’s restricted space as well as Yuri Cunza’s convincing lead as its two-timing owner). The second Tennessee Film Night is more even, but then you’ll miss Scott Rouse’s “Van Heffer”—a hilarious bluegrass send-up that’s going to be as big a fixture on musicians’ buses as Spinal Tap. Filled with insidery winks from Vince Gill, Del McCoury, Jerry Douglas and virtually any member past or present of the Station Inn Mafia, it documents the high loathsome sound of a foppish hillbilly singer (co-writer Shane Caldwell, on a roll) who deservedly rises to obscurity. Watch for Puckett’s Grocery, Station Inn mainstay J.T. Gray and a perfect deadpan line reading from none other than Doc Watson. Also on the program: Ted Speaker’s “Losing Faith,” Travis Laurendine and Mark Mulcahy’s time-lapse piece “Blink of an Eye,” and Eric Williams’ sci-fi creep-out “Early Retirement,” with an eerie William Tyler score. —J.R. BEYOND BEATS AND RHYMES: A HIP-HOP HEAD WEIGHS IN (7:15 p.m.; also 2:15 p.m. Wednesday) Director Byron Hurt probes the psyche of hip-hop culture by questioning rap music’s often misogynistic, sometimes violent and homophobic themes. A handheld DV cam follows Hurt from venue to studio as he questions the genre’s stars, and his stalker’s approach to interviewing yields some interesting results, like the weariness on Russell Simmons’ face as he answers questions he’s been asked thousands of times. But if you’re a hip-hop fan, your face may take on a similar expression: this issue is one of the genre’s most argued topics. One of the doc’s high points—the reaction of Busta Rhymes when asked about homophobia in rap music—speaks more strongly to the pervasiveness of hyper-masculinity in rap than Hurt’s entire film. —M.M. LOVING ANNABELLE (7:30 p.m.; also 1:30 p.m. Wednesday) One of those festival also-rans you buy a ticket to, your interest piqued, only to walk out wishing you’d seen the documentary playing next door. If another option is tempting you, spare yourself writer-director Katherine Brooks’ clichéd soap opera about a bad girl (Erin Kelly) sent to Catholic boarding school who tries to get in her teacher’s dress. It’s competently shot and blessed with a decent budget—and a pretty explicit sex scene, if you stick around—but even then, this is the kind of movie you’d expect to find on cable around 2 in the morning. Brooks will attend the screening. —S.S. TENNESSEE FILM NIGHT 2 (9 p.m.; also 7:30 p.m. Wednesday) Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this year’s crop of locally made shorts is the high quality of acting—the films here feature substantial turns by some of Nashville theater’s sharpest talents. Standouts include David Alford, wrenching as a man struggling with impending divorce in William M. Akers’ “Breathe”; Harry Clay as the quietly simmering owner of an African American barbershop in Robert Poole’s “The Earl Thompson Movement”; Kai Porter’s award-winning meltdown as an addict in Trey Mitchell and Greg Hallmark’s “Pieces”; and Cecil Jones and Joe Keenan, delightful as a pair of sparring nursing-home residents plotting their big escape in Todd Scott’s bittersweet “Herman’s Room.” By the time wronged housewife Arita Trahan gets a nifty cat-and-mouse face-off with other woman Denice Hicks in Josh Nix’s accomplished suburban noir “The Big Aries,” you’ve seen a surprisingly meaty portfolio of local talent. Speaking of portfolio pieces, it’s fun to pick out which films are shot by the program’s MVP, cinematographer Jeffrey Stanfill, whose work is consistently striking. He’s going places. —J.R. *BLACK BRUSH (9:15 p.m.; also 4:30 p.m. Wednesday) Imagine that Cheech & Chong are Hungarian. Now imagine that they’ve been doubled and directed by Jim Jarmusch in full-on black-and-white deadpan—you’ve got a hint of the tone of this very funny, ramshackle stoner comedy about four slack-ass Budapest chimney sweeps who try to improve their lot in life by stealing a goat that craps hashish. The director, Roland Vranik, served as assistant to Béla Tarr on the magisterial Werckmeister Harmonies, but the similarity doesn’t extend beyond the long takes in gorgeous B&W ’Scope: it’s hard to imagine Vranik’s former boss depicting the Bollywood-esque drug trip of a billygoat. Share it with a bud. In Hungarian with English subtitles. —J.R. BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (9:45 p.m.) Terry Gilliam’s personal documentarians Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe—directors of The Hamster Factor and Lost In La Mancha—make their feature filmmaking debut with this adaptation of Brian Aldiss’ novel about Siamese twins who become cult rock stars. The movie’s portrait of the U.K. rock scene circa 1975 is fairly rich, showing how glam and pub-rock coalesced into the first pissy taste of punk. But while Fulton and Pepe deserve a nod of appreciation for making a mockumentary that’s more about texture and mood than cheap jokes, the movie only makes sense about 25 percent of the time; if it has any insights into what it’s like to be a celebrity freak, they’re buried beneath the stark imagery and densely allusive editing. —N.M. BEAUTIFUL OUTSIDERS (9:30 p.m.; also 5:15 p.m. Wednesday) This block of offbeat short documentaries is a must-see simply for Nashville director James Clauer’s award-winning 21-minute film “Aluminum Fowl,” which has already garnered hotly coveted festival slots at Sundance, Rotterdam and South by Southwest. Co-produced by sometime Nashville resident Harmony Korine and French fashion designer/producer Agnes B., Clauer’s film is a category-defying marvel: a semi-documentary about black Louisiana cockfighters, shot in a lyrical yet earthy style that suggests Terrence Malick working in tandem with Les Blank. It’s haunting, funny and otherworldly, just like the performance pieces Clauer used to stage at Lucy’s Record Shop. Clauer will attend the screening. —J.R. WEDNESDAY, 26TH *THE ODDEST CINEMA IN THE WORLD (7:15 p.m.) This program joins the earliest and the latest films from Winnipeg wunderkind Guy Maddin, and the contrast is instructive. Maddin’s 1988 debut feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, finds the auteur in thrall to surrealism and body-horror in a way that belies the unbridled pleasures of his later films. Maddin’s newest release, the short “My Father Is 100 Years Old,” marks his second collaboration with Isabella Rossellini after 2003’s The Saddest Music in the World; she wrote this one-woman show as a tribute to her dad Roberto. “My Father” is an oedipal about-face for Maddin—the story of a man who gave everything he had to his children, and the world. Highly recommended. —M.S. *WORLD MIRROR CINEMA (9:30 p.m.) A ghostly marvel from Austrian director Gustav Deutsch, who takes three ancient strips of archival film—street scenes outside movie theaters in 1912 Vienna, 1929 Surabaya, and 1929 Portugal—then zooms in on long-vanished pedestrians and passers-by, telling their individual “stories” with similar-looking clips. The effect is mesmerizing: if you’ve ever pored over an old photograph or postcard with a magnifying glass, you’ll be transfixed by the flickering strangeness of the images and Deutsch’s reconstructed histories. It’s a perfect closing-night selection for a film festival—a peek into the movies’ distant past, rich with possibilities for the future. —J.R.
