The directorial debut of Natalie Portman, prize-winning films from Cannes and Sundance, and a slew of music documentaries — oh yes, and a Polish mermaid musical — will have slots at this year's Nashville Film Festival.
That can't be said for all but a fraction of the roughly 5,000 submissions that deluged the Nashville festival, running April 14-23 at Regal's Green Hills megaplex. But as the festival offered a sneak peek at its 47th lineup, artistic director Brian Owens said the ruthless paring-down of titles has produced a sturdy slate of features, docs and shorts across the board.
"Sundance was really good this year, and we'd had a lot of those films already submitted to us," said Owens, sitting with NaFF film competition manager Melissa Lummus at a conference table covered with spreadsheets and lists in the festival's offices within the Nashville Public Television complex.
Closing in on a half-century, the Nashville Film Festival has changed considerably since Mary Jane Coleman launched the Sinking Creek Film Celebration in Greeneville, Tenn., in 1969. Its early focus on experimental, regional and documentary film broadened by the 1990s to include the rise of independent film — a shift reflected in its 1998 name change to the Nashville Independent Film Festival.
Five years later, even that was too confining. It became the Nashville Film Festival, period, and last year some 42,000 people attended more than 280 films from 47 countries over the festival's weekend-to-weekend berth. One of those selections — Gabriel Osorio Vargas' Chilean animated short "Bear Story" — took home the Oscar two weeks ago in its category, where it was competing with another NaFF '15 title, Don Hertzfeldt's "World of Tomorrow."
In recent years, the festival's received a boost from Nashville's higher national profile and its reputation as a party town, an enticement to visiting filmmakers and festivalgoers alike. The NaFF hopes to capitalize on that momentum with a roster of local, regional and even world premieres, intermingled with top films from the festival circuit that extends from Cannes in May to Toronto in the fall to Sundance and South by Southwest in the year's early months. A taste of what you can expect this year:
Special Presentations. Local cinephiles have been clamoring for a look at Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster since it polarized audiences last year at Cannes; those who recall his dumbfounding NaFF selections Dogtooth and Alps won't want to miss this surreal romantic fantasy with Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, set at a luxury hotel where guests have 45 days to find a mate, or ... best to move along. Natalie Portman adapts an autobiographical novel by Israeli novelist Amos Oz for her directorial debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness, while Love & Friendship (starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny) is the Jane Austen adaptation you always knew Metropolitan's Whit Stillman had in him.
A family crisis grips the husband and sons of a slain war correspondent in Joachim Trier's Louder Than Bombs, featuring a knockout cast: Isabelle Huppert, Amy Ryan, Gabriel Byrne and Jesse Eisenberg. The documentary offerings here look just as strong, starting with Sundance award-winner Weiner, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's by-all-accounts unimaginably candid portrait of the fall of scandalized New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Watch also for episodes of American Epic, a miniseries on American regional music from executive producers Jack White, T Bone Burnett and Robert Redford.
Spectrum. The festival's world cinema program is a mix of established masters — Werner Herzog (the digital-life meditation Lo and Behold, Reveries in a Connected World), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cemetery of Splendor), Terence Davies (Sunset Song) — with burgeoning talents such as Athina Rachel Tsangari (Chevalier) and Ingrid Veninger (whose He Hated Pigeons will have a different musician at each festival date providing a live soundtrack). Plus two docs of special note: Ido Haar's Presenting Princess Shaw, which explains how a New Orleans caregiver for the elderly came to discover she was a singing sensation in Israel; and David Farrier and Dylan Reeve's Tickled, which has already drawn a lawsuit over its zesty exposé of a tickling-fetish video maker's shady tactics.
Documentaries. As reports from last weekend's True/False doc fest in Columbia, Mo., suggested, nonfiction film is a fertile field allowing myriad stories and subjects to flourish. The NaFF's program, arguably its best for several years now, makes room this year for a Terrence Malick-produced portrait of literary figure and environmentalist Wendell Berry (Laura Dunn's The Seer: A Conversation with Wendell Berry); a star-studded salute to Chicago improv guru Del Close featuring everyone from Amy Poehler to Bill Murray (Todd Bieber's Thank You, Del: The Story of the Del Close Marathon); a Marisa Tomei-produced wakeup call about the depletion of the world's seed stocks (Taggart Siegel and John Betz's SEED: The Untold Story); a son examining his father's treasure trove of photographs capturing undiscovered insects in the Amazon (Jake Oelman's Learning to See); and a California principal struggling to rescue students from drugs and dire home situations (The Bad Kids, from Lost in La Mancha directors Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe).
Will Allen's Holy Hell startled Sundance audiences with its 20 years of footage shot inside the compound of a California cult. It should make for interesting viewing alongside Paradise Lost co-director Joe Berlinger's Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru, granted access behind the scenes of the self-help titan's motivational spectacles. The activist heroine of Nanfu Wang's real-life thriller Hooligan Sparrow faces a threat more powerful than any cult: the Chinese government, which makes her an enemy of the state as she seeks justice for six schoolgirls allegedly raped by an official and a school principal. At the other end of the documentary spectrum are Jesse Moss' well-received The Bandit, about the long friendship between Burt Reynolds and Smokey and the Bandit stuntman turned director Hal Needham, and Nicole Lucas Haimes' Chicken People, a kind of unfaked Christopher Guest film inside the high-stakes world of competitive poultry shows.
Narrative Competition. A fine cast led by David Oyelowo, Dianne Wiest and Chi-Raq's Teyonah Parris fleshes out Maris Curran's sober character study Five Nights in Maine in the wake of a suicide. The stars are mostly behind the camera, though, for Collective: Unconscious, an omnibus project in which five directors (e.g., Thou Wast Mild and Lovely's Josephine Decker) take turns filming enactments of each other's dreams. In Demimonde, Hungarian director Attila Szász (whose period thriller The Ambassador to Bern was a highlight of NaFF '15) reaches even farther back for a suspenseful mood piece set in a prostitute's quarters in 1910, while Derek Kimball's atmospheric Neptune examines a 14-year-old girl's obsession with a vanished boy. And about that Polish mermaid musical that wowed folks at Sundance — The Lure, directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska — did we mention they don't just break hearts? They also eat them.
New Directors. Anna Rose Holmer shook up Sundance viewers with The Fits, her unclassifiable drama about an 11-year-old Cincinnati girl who joins a dance troupe suddenly beset by a violent malady. It may look downright staid, however, compared to a French sci-fi comedy (The Elk), an experimental Japanese coming-of-age drama (Tamago), and an Italian comedy about a kid obsessed with Brazilian soccer (Banana). British novelist Helen Walsh makes her directorial debut with the tense psychological portrait The Violators, while writer-director-star Andre Hyland follows a string of shaggy comic digressions during the eventful weekend of The 4th.
Graveyard Shift. NaFF's late-night slot for all things freaky, programmed by Scene contributor Jason Shawhan, has at least one buzz title from the horror world as well as The Lure: Jaron Henrie-McCrea's Curtain, which puts a new twist on the old shower scene when a woman discovers a mysterious portal behind her bathtub. Also up are the latest from gorehounds The Butcher Brothers, titled A Beginner's Guide to Snuff, as well as horror films from Egypt (Maskoun) and Romania (Be My Cat: A Film for Anne, in which a filmmaker proves the gruesome extent of his desire to work with Anne Hathaway).
Music Films. The Austin music scene is represented with two docs that sound like must-sees: A Song for You: The Austin City Limits Story, which gathers clips and testimonials from the long-running public-TV series; and Honky Tonk Heaven, a tribute to the glorious dance-hall dive The Broken Spoke. Scott D. Rosenbaum's Sidemen: Long Road to Glory hopes to do for veteran Howlin' Wolf/Muddy Waters players Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith what 20 Feet From Stardom did for unsung backup singers, while Rob Hatch-Miller's Syl Johnson: Any Way the Wind Blows, featuring an original Yo La Tengo score, honors the overlooked soul great. Punk label Fat Wreck Chords is paid homage in A Fat Wreck; speaking of collisions, the doc SHU-DE! details what results when a Baltimore beat-boxer finds common ground with Tuvan throat singers. With all that, there's still room to salute a singer-songwriter and bandleader with a string of '80s hits. Who can it be now? Colin Hay — Waiting for My Real Life.
Tennessee Films. Fewer selections in the local-filmmakers section should mean higher quality, and advance word is potent on Soul, the rape-revenge thriller from Make-Out With Violence cinematographer turned director James King, which stars screenwriter Casey Fuller as an artist traumatized by his lover's brutal murder. Also promising is Josephine, a Civil War tale of a woman's undercover search for her soldier husband, with which musician Rory Feek makes his feature debut as writer, director and editor. Matt Riddlehoover, staking out a claim as the John Waters of the urban South, returns with What's the Matter With Gerald? And who could resist a doc from filmmaker Rachel Lambert about a society of middle-aged female Bon Jovi fans that convenes in Hendersonville, Tenn. — especially one titled Mom Jovi?
A full lineup of guests and films will be announced shortly before the festival, with full coverage to come in the Scene and on our arts and culture blog Country Life. Tickets go on sale to NaFF members April 4 and two days later to the general public at nashvillefilmfestival.org.
