Sheffield Doc/Fest is going digital this autumn, with a string of weekend collections playing in cinemas and streaming online.
The fractious relationship between a parent and their children has long been a rich seam for documentary cinema to explore, especially when filmmakers are using the medium to explore their own relationships. Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003) infamously told the story of the director, his complex relationship with his mother and both of their struggles with mental health through 20 years of video footage. Stories We Tell (2012) saw actress and director Sarah Polley discover that her father wasn’t who she thought she was. Tell Them Who You Are (2004) had Mark Wexler follow his father, the renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler, as the two dealt with a professional rivalry that spoke of more profound problems in their relationship. Each of these films eschewed a neutral tone for a more emotional and personal approach to the material while also utilising much use of archive footage, not only to signify the passing of time but also to illustrate the impermanence of memory.
Lynne Sachs’ Film About a Father Who follows many of these tropes as she gathers years of documentary footage – at one point she states that she’s been making the film for 26 years – to try and gain a better understanding of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Outwardly, Sachs Sr is an open book, a Utah businessman known for gregariousness and an eye for the ladies. But inwardly, he’s closed off, showing little emotion and keeping a myriad of secrets from those who are supposed to be nearest and dearest to him. Footage that emanates from the past few decades – alongside more formal contemporary footage and a sparely used voiceover from the director – paints a picture of a family typified by dysfunction.
As the large number of siblings – from different mothers, some of whom were kept secret from the others for decades – recount various stories of connection and abandonment, Ira sits as a kind of unknowable monolith as – in the modern day – he conveniently forgets about crucial questions about his past. His impassiveness does sometimes become a barrier as – even when his former paramours try to explain it – it becomes difficult to understand why so many women seemed to the be under his thrall.
While there is plenty of pain and recrimination to be had throughout the film, Film About a Father Who is not an exercise in condemning Sachs Sr. Indeed, it’s a heartfelt attempt to find out more about a man who doesn’t give to emotion easily. He’s not cold or heartless – just neutral and passive, his 1960s hippie demeanour going partway to explaining his seemingly carefree attitude to relationships and his children. He’s not a monster or a deliberately evil person – there are no massive and dark skeletons in the closet to be found, although there are plenty of secrets.
But as the film reminds us, he still leaves plenty of emotional wreckage in his wake. A meeting with one of his former lovers, who came all the way to the Philippines to be with him, reveals just how damaged she was when it all went south. One of his younger daughters – whose existence was kept from the rest of the family for decades – recounts how angry she was when, even though he would visit, she would be living in near poverty while he wanted for nearly nothing.
Footage from across numerous timelines is used indiscriminately throughout, with grainy VHS footage placed next to modern day interviews. The lack of clarity on timelines and what is happening is sometimes confusing, but one suspects that is the point as it echoes the confusion and chaos at the centre of the family dynamic. Film About a Father Who is a gently affecting piece of work – with moments of dry humour studded amongst the emotion – told with a subtle passion and grace.
Film About a Father Who is available to rent for £4 on Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects, or as part of a £12 pass for the Into the World collection, until 11.59pm 15th October 2020.
The 23rd edition of the Indie Memphis Film Festival will be like no other. Like most activities that rely on bringing groups of people together, theatrical film screenings were brought to a screeching halt in mid-March by the coronavirus pandemic. The shutdown came at a particularly bad time for Indie Memphis. In recent years, the nonprofit has expanded from throwing an annual celebration of the art of cinema to offering year-round programming. That led to a deal with Malco Theatres to take over a screen at Studio on the Square, where Indie Memphis could showcase the eclectic collection of independent, art house, international, and just plain weird films they have been bringing to the Bluff City since 1998.
“We were set for an April opening,” says Indie Memphis executive director Ryan Watt. “Malco had just put in the new seats a week before everything started shutting down.”
Mississippi’s Oxford Film Festival was one of the first of the thousands of festivals worldwide that had to unexpectedly figure out how to carry on in the new environment. Eventive, a Memphis-based cinema services company, stepped into the breach. Eventive, which was originally founded to overhaul Indie Memphis’ ticketing system, developed a new system that allowed festivals to present their programming online, and Oxford became the test case.
Watt and Indie Memphis artistic director Miriam Bale were watching closely. “I have so much sympathy for people like Melanie [Addington] at Oxford, who were out front. We did have the advantage of learning from them. But the other thing that was always a challenge was planning things out in advance. You’re thinking not ‘What do people need right now?’ but ‘What are people going to need and want in October?’ This has been both the longest and the shortest seven months ever. There’s new crises every week, every month. I think it’s been really hard mentally on everyone and really hard economically.”
Failure was not an option. “We made the decision early on: We’re not going to cancel,” says Bale. “We saw a lot of film festivals canceled. We were just gonna exist in whatever form we could.”
But would there even be films to show? Indie Memphis typically gets thousands of entries every year, but the pandemic hit just as many filmmakers would be finishing up their projects. Watt says submissions were down, but ultimately, the creative community came through. “I was very pleasantly surprised, considering there was basically no production from March on — aside from some intimate projects that people could do at their house.”
The plan that took shape over the long, chaotic summer was to mount what Watt calls an “online and outdoor” festival. During the festival, which runs October 21-29, all of the narrative features, documentaries, shorts, experimental films, and music videos will be available online through Eventive. Memphis audiences are invited to outdoor, socially distanced screenings at venues such as the Malco Summer Drive-In, the Levitt Shell, and The Grove at Germantown Performing Arts Center, as well as pop-up screenings at Shelby Farms, the riverfront, and the Stax Museum.
As things were coming together, the Indie Memphis crew got another shock. Watt, who took over as executive director in 2015, announced his intention to resign at the end of the year.
“It’s really bittersweet,” says Brighid Wheeler, senior programmer and director of operations. “There was a point a few years ago when it was just me and Ryan sitting in the office, scrambling to put a program together, not knowing the future of Indie Memphis. In the following years, what he has done — between the amazing team he’s assembled, incredible board of directors, etc. — is nothing short of incredible, and a true testament to what leadership looks like. His leadership has given Memphis and our filmmaking community what it has always needed and deserves: a place to grow, thrive, and create in the city we love so dearly.”
Under Watt’s leadership, Indie Memphis has grown from a cozy local festival to an industry leader. In 2019, the festival attracted more than 12,000 ticket buyers, and the organization’s revenue topped $800,000. He oversaw the expansion of artist development programs, including the Youth Film Festival and the Indie Grants program. Under his watch, Indie Memphis mounted a major push to increase diversity among both the filmmakers and the audience, with programs such as the Black Creator’s Forum. In a film industry historically dominated by white men, Indie Memphis 2020 stands out with 43 percent of features directed by women and 50 percent directed by people of color.
“Ryan is such a good executive director because he approaches it like a creative producer,” Bale says. “He knows what needs to be done. But even more than that, he loves recognizing the vision of people, whether it’s local filmmakers or all of his staff. He is so good at letting us all shine. … He’s so empathetic, and sees who people are and how they can best shine. And it’s really incredibly rare in this business.”
Watt says his decision was not taken lightly. “I will always call this a dream job. That’s why it’s really hard to walk away from it. It’s meant everything to me. This is a kind of job that just kind of becomes your identity. But at the same time, as I told the staff, everything I’ve done up till now has been five- or six-year stints, where I kind of dove into something that I had very little experience in, because of the challenge and the excitement. So I think it’s just sort of the right time to hand things off. But it’s been awesome — something I will always treasure.”
Highlights from the Indie Memphis 2020 Lineup.
Film About a Father Who– Many directors describe their works as labors of love, but few earn that title as thoroughly as Indie Memphis’ opening night feature, Film About a Father Who.
Lynne Sachs says she decided to make a movie about her father, Ira Sachs Sr., in 1991. “The first material I shot, which was with my dad on this trip in Bali, where I talk about my sister and me getting angry at him and running away, was shot on VHS,” she says. “The earliest footage is from 1965. I did not shoot that, but you can see Ira [Sachs Jr.] as a baby. He was just a few months old. My mom must’ve shot it. I can tell you — because I’ve mined every bit of it — that we have 12 minutes of footage of my whole childhood.”
Ira Sachs Sr. had a legendary career as a real estate developer and entrepreneur. He developed one of the first hotels in the ski resort town of Park City, Utah — ironically, now one of the centers of the film universe, as home to the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals. An early adopter of mobile phone technology, Sachs is seen early in the film wheeling and dealing while skiing down immaculate powder slopes.
But he was also an unreconstructed member of Memphis’ legendary counterculture. He smoked marijuana religiously and took pride in never venturing out to the square world beyond East Parkway. In the 1970s, he bought a crumbling Victorian home on Adams Avenue in Downtown Memphis for $14,000 and renovated it, at least enough to live in. It’s now the site of Mollie Fontaine Lounge restaurant.
“When my dad lived on Adams [Avenue], he never locked his doors,” says Lynne Sachs. “So when I look back on that, I can say, ‘Whoa, I had this kind of hippie life for part of the week, and isn’t that interesting? And isn’t that different from all the other middle-class kids’ parents?’ But on the other hand, you had no idea who was going to walk in. There was always this ambiguity between being very much a free spirit and being vulnerable and awkward and open to something that you don’t want. … It wasn’t easy to be growing older, but my dad’s girlfriends were always staying the same age.”
In this confessional documentary, Lynne Sachs creates a warts-and-all portrait of a mercurial and ultimately fascinating man. “I would have long periods of time, like a year at a time, where I was scared to make it, or I’d say I’ve had enough, this is exhausting. I had to reckon with that space between rage — which I had plenty of times — and forgiveness, which was part of almost every interaction that my dad and I had. I would go from one extreme to the other. A good photograph has a pure black and a pure white — and then it also has all of those grays in between.”
A Month of Single Framesscreened in the MODES2 program at the 2020 Vancouver International Film Festival. Here Lynne Sachs speaks with curator Tammy Banister about the film.
Explora Works of any genre and nationality. A section that focuses on the search for new filmmaking signatures. Pieces that can hardly be catalogued in specific genres, and that dilute the traditional idea of cinema by exploring innovative avenues that are close to video art, documentary or avant-garde cinema
Explora – Programme 1
Look Then Below Ben Rivers 2019 22:00 United Kingdom EXPCOL
The film conjures up futuristic beings from an eerie smoke-filled landscape and the depths of the Earth. Look Then Below was shot in the vast, dark passages of Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset. The netherworld of chambers, carved out over deep time, once held remnants of lost civilisations and now foretells a future subterranean world, occupied by a species evolved from our environmentally challenged world. Part three of a trilogy of speculative films with text written by Mark von Schlegell.
Da morte nace a vida Adrián Canoura 2019 12:55 Spain EXPCOL, B&W
The film forms part of the project CINEGALICIA 2019, inspired by the film Urxa, by Carlos A. López Piñeiro and Alfredo García Pinal. Extracting the film’s most mystic elements, in a journey between impressionism and expressionism, a path is recomposed through the ritual where life emerges from death.
Mikä aika on? What Time Is? Niina Suominen 2020 07:15 Finland ANI, EXPCOL, B&W
What Time Is? places the experience of time in the centre of contemplation. The human figures act as reference points for meditation on the passage and ending of time. The work gives us a chance to reflect on the transient nature of time and the relationship of the viewer to the conflict-ridden epoch in which we live.
AQUAMARINE Billy Roisz, Dieter Kovacic 2019 05:00 Austria EXPCOLQ
‘Aquamarine’ means not only the well-known light blue hue, but also what the colour is based on, the mineral beryl. Translated literally: the colour of the sea. The film Aquamarine takes a constellation of (blue-green) colour, maritime, liquid, and of course, mineral, as a starting point for setting the cited components in a jolting, undulating balance based on the track of the same name by MOPCUT.
A Month of Single Frames
Lynne Sachs
2019 14:00 USA EXP, DOCCOL
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an art residency without water or electricity. In 2018, she began her own process of dying. She gave material from the residency to Lynne Sachs who explored Barbara’s experience of solitude. Lynne places text on the screen as a confrontation with somatic cinema, bringing us all together in multiple spaces and times.
Houses (for Margaret) Luke Fowler 2019 05:00 United Kingdom EXPCOL
Luke Fowler constructed this tribute to Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait on the occasion of her centenary. Setting off to Tait’s native Orkney, Fowler creates a record of her life and work through images of her past dwellings and filming locations, excerpts from her production diaries, and the reciting of her poem ‘Houses’ in which she reflects on the meaning of home.
“Film About A Father Who” and a live online Q&A with director Lynne Sachs is screening in Sheffield on Saturday 3 October at 5:30pm, book your tickets here.
The film will be available on Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects and Doc/Player from Saturday 3 October at 7:30pm BST until Thursday 15 October at 11:59pm BST.
Documentaries on family members can be a filmmaker’s downfall. In pandering to a personal obsession they can struggle to connect with the viewer or worse still, follow a predictable narrative at the expense of developing their subject. But in the case of Lynne Sachs’ film, Sheffield’s early Autumn headliner, it is without doubt her greatest achievement to date.
“Film About A Father Who…” is Sachs’ attempt to understand her wayward and seemingly unknowable father Ira and the complex web of family ties woven by decades of his promiscuity. Filmed over the course of 35 years in a variety of formats, the film charts Ira’s multiple wives, innumerable girlfriends and his ever-growing list of offspring.
The result is an experimental collage of home footage, idle conversations and the occasional tense confrontation that will be familiar to any member of a recomposed family. Although her offbeat style isn’t for everyone, Sachs successfully creates a reflective, surreal atmosphere without neglecting the story’s intrigue, which delivers a surprising amount of twists and turns and a late, quite shocking, discovery.
Ira is a product of the 60s, a self-made hippy entrepreneur, but also the “kind of man who’s been able to keep profound secrets”. His mysterious, exciting life and its abounding unanswered questions trigger Sachs’ decision to start filming and reach out to more distant members of the family. The process sets off a broader debate between her disparate relatives and a reflection on the delicate, familial bond that they share : an irresponsible father.
While the story Lynne uncovers is fascinating in its own right, it’s the film’s unconventional style and refreshing disregard for chronology that sets it apart. As 8 and 16 mm film footage blends with mini-dv and digital, we encounter the family’s characters at different times in their lives; babies return to screen as adults and then reappear as teenagers. Although confusing at times, a little concentration and a gentle nudge from Lynne’s narration keeps the story moving.
Sequences are instead themed around emotions, thoughts and reflections. Combined with the mix of image formats and some artful editing, Lynne creates an effect that is eerily like recalling memories. The fact that characters contradict each other and that some mysteries are left unsolved contributes to this effect, lacing the film with the half-truths and suspicions, in the same way that all recollections inevitably are.
Without giving too much away, and despite Sachs’ sincere efforts to tease more information out of him, Ira remains shrouded in mystery. Paradoxically, he is as uninhibited in his personal life as he is tight-lipped and evasive in a family setting. Nonetheless, the countless discoveries that Sachs artfully reveals throughout the film are enough to satisfy, with a remarkable final twist that will take your breath away. In Sachs’ own words : “These are things that children shouldn’t know about their father”. Sachs goes on to conclude that her film is not a portrait or even a self-portrait, but rather her “reckoning with the conundrum of [their] asymmetry”.
It’s also a unique, brilliant film that has stayed with me ever since – go see it!
Frames & Stanzas: a Film and Poetry Workshop Beyond Baroque Literary/ Arts Center Thursday Nov 12, 2020 – Friday, December 4, 2020
In this virtual workshop, Brooklyn filmmaker and poet, Lynne Sachs, will share insights and experiences to help bridge poetry with cinema.
About this Event In this virtual workshop, Brooklyn filmmaker and poet, Lynne Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words. Over the course of three Thursday evenings, participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words. Sachs has always been fascinated by the interplay between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent, internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence.
Lynne’s virtual workshop at Beyond Baroque will include the screening of some of her own recent short film poems, including Starfish Aorta Colossus (2015), A Month of Single Frames (2019), Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home (2020), and Girl is Presence (2020) as well as excerpts from her feature Tip of My Tongue (2017).
On Wednesday, Dec. 3, before our final meeting on Thursday, Dec. 4th, Beyond Baroque will host a virtual, public poetry reading with Lynne, during which she will read from her new collection, Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019). Everyone is invited!
So please join us in this 3-week multimedia investigation of the sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences that all come together in a film poem.
On Nov. 12, participants will gain insights into this process with examples of filmmakers and poets whose practices explore and encompass both images and texts. Discussion will include (but certainly not be limited to!): the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on the moving image, live poetry and expanded cinema performance, traditional Japanese benshi performers who live-narrated silent films poetic approaches to observational documentary, the “cine-essay,” and more. Lynne will provide “prompts” for writing during the following week.
On Nov. 20, each participant will produce a short video piece (with your cell phone or a camera) that combines text written by another member of the workshop with footage of their current environment. Lynne will provide guidance and structure for making a short film poem over the course of the following two weeks.
On Dec. 3, our workshop will culminate with a live Zoom screening/performance of films produced in the workshop. Participants are encouraged to invite friends to the last hour of our workshop.
On Monday, September 28 from 7 to 9 PM EST, the renowned NYC Lower East Side literary gathering space KGB Bar will host my dear compatriot Paolo Javier and me in a two-person poetry reading and film screening. Of course, we both wish we were gathering together in the historic environment of the actual KGB Bar, but pandemic times as they are, this is not to happen. We accept the virtual world of Zoom, acknowledging the fact that in this particular cosmos, we can invite friends from around the country and world to join us. If you are in the midst of Yom Kippur that evening, please join us while you break your fast.
This will be my first poetry reading in pandemic times. I will be reading from my new (and first) collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press) along with some recent writing fresh from our shared, daunting now. In addition to reading from my book, I will screen a couple of film-poem collaborations, including Starfish Aorta Colossus (made with Paolo Javier, 2015), Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home (2020), and Girl is Presence (made with poet Anne Lesley Selcer, 2020)
We are grateful to KGB poetry programmer Jason Schneiderman who invited us to do this reading more than eight months ago.
Introduction by Jason Schneiderman
So we’re a poetry series—we call ourselves Monday Night Poetry at KGB—and Lynne Sachs is a poet, so you’ll be hearing her poems—but inside of Lynne’s work is also a challenge to the boundaries that have been drawn around poetry, and if we think about poetry as something distinct from other genres (not from other media, but from other genres), that definition of poetry emerged in two significant moments for me. One is the early modern period (or the renaissance if you like) when the sonnet entered English, and words for spoken voice became poetry and words intended to be sung to a melody became song—“lyric” having a claim to both of these genres, hence our continued use of “song lyrics” and “lyric poetry.” And then second is Modernism, when during the roughly forty year period from 1890 to 1920, poetry, like some sort of giant octopus began to absorb everything written that wasn’t obviously something else, like a novel, or a cookbook, or a bomb making manual—even though it was Amiri Baraka’s poem on how to make bombs that got Dial-a-Poem shut down in the 1960s. Poetry’s genre boundaries have always struck me as useful, I like them very much, but I also see how they can constrict as well as instruct. And one of the trends I see in contemporary letters is a move away from genre specialization. Rachel Zucker on a podcast confirmed my memory that in the 00’s, it was not cool for a poet to do anything but poetry, but now poets are reaching out past our boundaries, with notable moments like Warsan Shire collaborating with Beyonce. So how lucky we are to have Lynne Sachs, who for decades has been working at the boundary between poetry and film, and who will be presenting her own work, which engages the questions of medium, genre, image, and text, giving us a powerful sense of what art may look like going forward.
Please welcome Lynne Sachs.
And here’s some info on who we are and our poems: Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, New York; Cairo, Egypt; and Vancouver, British Columbia. After working as a freelance journalist and running an experimental theater company in Canada, he returned to New York City, where he lives with his family. From 2010 to 2014, Javier was poet laureate of Queens, New York. His collections of poetry include: The Feeling Is Actual (2011); 60 lv bo(e)mbs (2005); the time at the end of this writing (2004), recipient of a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award; and, Court of the Dragon (2015), which Publisher’s Weekly called “a linguistic time machine.”
Photo of Paolo with friend
When Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. Paolo Javier wrote the introduction, and artist Abby Goldstein did the design. On Sept. 28 at KGB, Lynne will read poems from her book as well as new texts written very recently.
“Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019’s best books of poetry. The graceful, diaristic poems … successfully distill events and themes in the poet’s life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail, and gentle humor. This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry’s initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist’s creative process.” – 2019 Staff Pick, San Francisco Public Library “These poems are innovative. They invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.” – Sharon Harrigan, Cleaver: Philadelphia’s International Literary Magazine
In a virtual version of its traditional preview party, Indie Memphis announced the lineup for its 23rd annual film festival. The opening night film is Memphis-born director Lynne Sachs’ documentary A Film About A Father Who. Sachs draws on 35 years of footage she shot of her father, Ira Sachs, Sr., to draw a portrait of a family struggling with generational secrets. Michael Gallagher, programmer for the Slamdance Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere in January, said “This divine masterwork of vulnerability weaves past and present together with ease, daring the audience to choose love over hate, forgiveness over resentment.”
Sachs is the most prominent of the Memphians among the dozens of filmmakers who have works in the 2020 festival. The Hometowner Features competition includes Anwar Jamison’s feature Coming to Africa, a bi-contentental production which was shot both here in the Bluff City and in Ghana. We Can’t Wait is director Lauren Ready’s documentary about Tami Sawyer’s 2019 campaign to become Memphis’ first Black woman mayor. The Hub is Lawrence Matthews portrait of Memphians trying to overcome discrimination, underemployment, and financial hardship in an unforgiving America. Morreco Coleman tells the story of Jerry C. Johnson, the first Black coach to win an NCAA Basketball title, with 1st Forgotten Champions. The detective thriller Smith is a neo-noir from director Jason Lockridge. Among the dozens of Memphis-made short films on offer will be “The Little Tea Shop,” Molly Wexler and Matteo Servante’s moving portrait of beloved Memphis restauranteur Suhair Lauck.
World premieres at Indie Memphis include Trimeko Melancon’s race relations documentary What Do You Have To Lose? and Cane Fire, director Anthony Banua-Simon’s incisive history of the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i.
Indie Memphis remains devoted to the latest in film innovation, but the festival’s Retrospective series alway offers interesting and fun films from years past. In 2020, that includes The Wiz, Sidney Lumet’s 1978 cult classic remake of The Wizard of Oz with an incredible all-Black cast, including Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow and Diana Ross as Dorothy. Joel Schumacher, the legendary writer/director who passed away this year, wrote the screenplay, which was adapted from a 1974 Broadway show. He will be honored with a screening of Car Wash, the 1976 comedy which is the definition of classic drive-in fare.
With film festivals all over the United States facing cancellation because of the coronavirus pandemic, the theme of this year’s Indie Memphis is “Online and Outdoors.” Screenings will take place at the Malco Summer Drive-In and at various socially distanced outside venues across the city. All films will also be offered online through the festival’s partnership with Eventive, the Memphis-based cinematic services company that has been pioneering online screening during the pandemic. “We hope to bring people together, in person and online, and provide inspiration and an outlet,” says artistic director Miriam Bale. “In order to counter Screen Burnout, we’ll be offering a series of what we call ‘Groundings’ throughout the digital festival, including a meditative film called ‘A Still Place’ by festival alumnus Christopher Yogi.”
You can buy passes for the 2020 festival at the Indie Memphis website. The Memphis Flyer will have continuing coverage of the fest throughout the month of October.
A drama about an aging pot farmer, an African-set romantic comedy, and documentaries on race relations and pioneering basketball coaches (check here for the best https://kurtuhlir.com/what-is-enterprise-seo/ services) , will be among the films screened as part of the 23rd annual Indie Memphis Film Festival.
Organizers of Indie Memphis – which is set to run Oct. 21-29, and is presented by Duncan Williams, Inc. – announced their slate of films during an online preview party on Thursday night. More than 230 features, shorts, and music videos, including a selection of work by Mid-South talents, will be shown during the fest.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic this year’s festival will consist of a mixture of online content and outdoor events. Shelby Farms, the Levitt Shell, The Grove at GPAC, the Stax Museum parking lot, the Downtown riverfront and the Malco Summer Quartet Drive-In are among the sites that will host outdoor screenings.
Screenings will occur nightly at the drive-in and on various nights at the other “lawn” venues. Most films will also be made available for streaming online. The “virtual” festival also will feature filmmaker panels, Zoom-style question-and-answer sessions after some movies, and other activities. Indie Memphis organizers note that beyond the programming that’s already been confirmed, other films and events are expected to be added over the coming weeks.
Outgoing Indie Memphis Executive Director Ryan Watt — who will be stepping down after this year’s event — said that the 2020 Indie Memphis will be a “truly unique festival experience to keep our audience safe and entertained while online and outdoors. My sixth and final festival at the helm is bittersweet, I’ll be soaking in every bit of the incredible program our team has assembled.”
Once again, Indie Memphis will showcase a diverse array of voices: the 28 in-competition films include work by 12 female filmmakers, 14 persons of color and 12 black filmmakers.
Seven different films will screen as part of the Narrative Competition, including Mario Furloni and Kate McLean’s “Freeland,” the story of a pot farmer dealing with the legalization and industrialization of cannabis, which threatens to destroy her idyllic way of life
Also on tap is “Executive Order,” Lázaro Ramos dystopian saga set in a futuristic Brazil where “an authoritarian government orders all citizens of African descent to move to Africa – creating chaos, protests, and an underground resistance movement that inspires the nation.”
The Documentary Competition will see the U.S. premiere of “Cane Fire” which looks at the history of the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi. The film interweaves “four generations of family history, numerous Hollywood productions, and troves of found footage to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast indigenous and working-class residents as ‘extras’ in their own story.”
Also among the docs being screened is “What Do You Have to Lose?” directed by Rhodes College professor Trimiko Melancon. The 74-minute film – which will get its world premiere at the fest — explores the history of race in the United States and will attempt to “shed light on the current political and racial landscape in America during the post-Obama age of Trump.”
Memphis-born filmmaker Lynne Sachs will present “Film About a Father Who,” a doc comprised of footage of her family shot over a 35-year period and presented as an “attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.” Other docs of note include Elegance Bratton’s “Pier Kids” which follows the lives of three LGBTQ homeless youth.
The Hometowner category will feature the work of several local filmmakers, including Anwar Jamison’s feature “Coming to Africa,” about a philandering financial executive who unexpectedly finds himself falling love with a beautiful Ghanaian schoolteacher.
Among the Hometowner documentaries are “We Can’t Wait,” director Lauren Ready’s film on Tami Sawyer’s quest to become the first black female mayor of Memphis. Also set to screen is “1st Forgotten Champions,” Morreco Coleman’s look at the life of Jerry C. Johnson, who would become the first African American coach to win a NCAA Division III National Basketball Championship in 1975.
As usual, Indie Memphis will present a variety of music-themed films. This year’s selections include a documentary about Ibizia DJ Jon Sa Trinxa, a film about the fondly-remembered Memphis recording studio Shoe Productions, and a collection of shorts by Andrew Trent Fleming focusing on classic albums from the iconic Stax Records label.
A series of retrospective films will be shown at Malco’s Summer Drive-In. The schedule will include a restoration of the 1986 motocross cult favorite “Rad!” Joyce Chopra’s 1985 thriller “Smooth Talk,” featuring a young Laura Dern, will be presented in resorted form as well. As part of a pre-Halloween event, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 horror film “House” will also be screened.
The festival will celebrate late filmmaker Joel Schumacher, who passed earlier this year. A pair of early films written by Schumacher – 1974’s “Car Wash” and 1978’s “The Wiz” – will also be shown as part of the Drive-In Retrospective.
A virtual pass that provides access to the online films starts at $25, while a Memphis pass, good for both online and outdoor events, starts at $100. To purchase, for a full schedule, or for more information, go to indiememphis.com
Vancouver International Film Festival 2020 (VIFF) is delighted to announce the complete programming lineup for the Altered States, Gateway, International Shorts and MODES film series for its 39th edition. Altered States celebrates fantastic cinema that defies traditional classification. Gateway showcases compelling cinematic worlds envisioned by East Asia’s most adventurous artists. International Shorts highlight the work of filmmakers pushing the boundaries of the short form. MODES presents works that subvert the dominant gaze and offer gestures of resistance.
VIFF’s entire film lineup will be available across the province on the new VIFF Connect streaming platform. VIFF’s $60 subscription will bring the festival’s world-class lineup into the homes of thousands of British Columbians starting at 12pm PDT on September 24.
MODES presents two Canadian premieres, nine North American premieres and representation from 18 countries, including Operation Jane Walk (performance) – Live Streaming Event, from Austrian artists Robin Klengel and Leonhard Müllner. This award-winning interactive online performance, set within the confines of a built-to-scale multiplayer shooter game (Tom Clancy’s The Division), is repurposed as an avatar-universe for a guided architectural tour of New York. An active experience, the audience chats live with the tour guides, presenting a dynamic group experience during these COVID-defined times. Additional highlights include: the North American premiere of Digital Funeral: Beta Version by Thai director Sorayos Prapapan, which examines the limitations of digital life within the cinematic form; the North American premiere of Becoming Alluvium by director Thao Nguyen Phan, about Vietnam’s troubled history and the Mekong river’s current ecological state; the Canadian premiere of director Lynn Sachs’ Oberhausen award winner A Month of Single Frames, in which she was invited to rework the material created by her friend and peer, Barbara Hammer, an experimental pioneer and queer icon; and Berlin’s Teddy Award winner, Playback, from director Agustina Comedi, a manifesto honouring a group of trans women and drag queens who faced the AIDS epidemic and fought the violence of the conservative ideals underpinning Argentina’s military dictatorship.
“Protest, resistance and the disruption of the status quo are becoming the defining acts of 2020,” says Tammy Bannister, Programmer and MODES curator. “This year’s artists explore radical acts of engagement within contemplative and virtual landscapes. From a self-organized funeral to the awe-inspiring natural environment of the Mekong River, these selected works tackle the complex architectures of our social fabric.”
All films will include introductions by VIFF Programming Curators or bonus content from filmmakers and creators.
MODES: Works that subvert the dominant gaze and offer gestures of resistance All, or Nothing at All (dirs. Persijn Broersen, Margit Lukács, Denmark/Netherlands | North American Premiere
Becoming Alluvium (dir. Thao Nguyen Phan, Spain/Vietnam) | North American Premiere
Bittersweet (dir. Sohrab Hura, India) | North American Premiere
A Demonstration (dirs. Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner, Netherlands/Germany/UK) | North American Premiere
Digital Funeral: Beta Version (dir. Sorayos Prapapan, Thailand) | North American Premiere
(e)scape goat (dir. Sid Iandovka, USA/Switzerland) | North American Premiere
The End of Suffering (a proposal) (dir. Jacqueline Lentzou, Greece) | North American Premiere
How to Disappear (dirs. Total Refusal: Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel, Michael Stumpf, Austria) | Canadian Premiere
In Times of Deception (dir. Michael Heindl, Colombia/Bolivia/Chile/Peru) | North American Premiere
A Month of Single Frames (dir. Lynne Sachs, made with and for Barbara Hammer, USA) | Canadian Premiere
Playback (dir. Agustina Comedi, Argentina) | Canadian Premiere
Operation Jane Walk (performance) – Live Streaming Event (dir. and performance Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Austria) | North American Premiere
