Last night I hit the Nashville Film Festival for their 8 P.M. screening of the Frayed Shorts program. Every year the Frayed Shorts selections celebrate abbreviated gross-outs, small scares, small sized celebrations of sex, and tiny terrors. After a go for broke introduction by Jason Shawhan — is anyone better? — we were off and running into a wide variety of films that elicited very different responses from the audience.

“The Call of Charlie” is a “fish” out of water tale that re-imagines H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu as a mid-level office drone who needs to get set up on blind dates. The makeup effects are pretty good in this one and the mix of ridiculous humor and bloody gore is pretty perfect. Lovecraft has proven to be challenging to translate to screen, but this rom-com works much better than most adaptations precisely because of its irreverent take on Lovecraft’s mythos.

“Pearlies” turns the Tooth Fairy story into a horror tale about an evil little tooth-collecting German rat. The effects here are really well done, and there’s even a Poltergeist reference for the keen-eyed. If you like monster movies and scary fairy tales this one really delivered.

“Summer’s Puke is Winter’s Delight” by Sawako Kabuki is a crudely rendered pornographic cartoon set to a soundtrack of the sound of people throwing up. It made me so queasy I had to plug my ears as best I could. I wouldn’t want to watch this one again, but I have to believe this was exactly the effect the director was hoping for. Bravo.

Renata Gasiorowska’s “Pussy” is a simple animated story about a single girl at home trying to masturbate. She experiences a few funny fails before the titular part detaches from her body and begins running around her apartment building. After a bit of slapstick chaos the two come to an agreement: the girl writhes on the floor while her pussy runs all over the house rubbing up against candle sticks, rolling around in the soft bristles of a brush, and running beneath the tassels hanging from the edge of some furniture upholstery. The best part of the film is its chromatic, psychedelic climax. Of course, this is one Frayed Short with a happy ending.

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I stuck to shorts again on Monday, checking out the Grow Up Already program of narrative films in the afternoon. Overall these coming-of-age movies were super impressive — Damià Serra’s “On The Roof” features a cast of great young actors dealing with sexuality, bullying and the personal dynamics that can become complicated and even violent when boys begin to become men. Samedi Cinema reminded me of movies about going to the movies like Cinema Paradiso with its story about a couple of young pals trying to raise enough money to score tickets to the last movie at a theater in a village in Senegal. I also liked James Dunstan’s “Spilt Milk”. I met Dunstan on rush line last Friday and have been comparing notes with him at the fest since then. I was glad to catch his movie about an abused girl who falls in love with her lifelong friend. It’s a heavy story that Dunstan tells with confident visual stylistics while coaxing solid performances from his cast of young adult and child actors. Ending short films can be a tricky task, and the finale here was too vague and overly sentimental for me, but it was one of the only false moments in an otherwise very impressive work. My favorite film in the group was “Emma.” This flick about a high school student losing her hair to alopecia completely surprised me as one of the best films I’ve seen at the fest. Emma is shot in gorgeous black-and-white, and it features a really impressive performance by Hailey Kittle from the 2nd Generation television series.

On Tuesday I’ll be checking out the evening screening of the Frayed Shorts. Here’s the trailer for “Actual Food Porn…”

More to come…

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I’ll be posting about the Nashville Film Festival this week — the event got underway this past Thursday afternoon. I saw a number of films before the fest for my annual preview I write for The Contributor. On Thursday I went to pick up my credentials, and was able to score a ticket for the Stars in Shorts program on Friday — the movie had gone to rush status likely because of the “stars” in these short movies.

A highlight in the program included “Break” in which a well-to-do, elderly British couple befriends a struggling, working class couple with a small child. “Break” stars John Hurt who’s fantastic of course. The acting is strong all around, and the relationships between the struggling young adults and their elderly counterparts are quickly established and thoroughly believable. That said, the film’s dramatic ending — which includes a double suicide — was too big of a leap too quickly for me. Short films can be tricky when it comes to pacing, and I wish writer/director Nick Moss might have tried to tell a smaller story with an arc and an ending the audience could’ve more fully invested in.

On Saturday I saw the Experimental Showcase which will screen again on Thursday at 3pm. I’d definitely recommend this showcase for the amazing cinematography in Line Klungseth Johansen’s “Process: Breath” and the visionary assemblage of silent film footage and the aesthetics of alchemical engravings in Stacey Steers’ “Edge of Alchemy” which must be one of the best animated films at the festival. Russell Sheaffer and Aaron Michael Smith’s “Etude 1a: Release (I)” uses found footage of cowboy culture and livestock to tell a poetic history of the American West. The movie is sometimes mesmerizing even if it ended way too early for my taste. “This is Yates” is the best thing I’ve seen at the fest so far. Josh Yates’ montage of home movie footage is a visionary exploration of memory, family, everyday life in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and it reminded me of cinema’s capacity to transform the blunt and the brutal into something beautiful, even incandescent.

Over Saturday and Sunday I also saw two programs of short documentaries. I recommend both programs which will screen again this week. Documentary Showcase I will play again on Wednesday at 5:30 pm. I really liked “Four Quarters of Silence” which told the story of the Texas School for the Deaf’s varsity football team, and “The Moderators” which illuminated the work days of the real life people who are making sure that Facebook isn’t awash in dick pics. My favorite of the program was Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck’s “10 Meter Tower” which pictures a succession of everyday Swede’s attempting to will themselves to jump into a pool from the titular tower. It’s a simple premise that results in high anxiety and hilarity alike and the filmmakers’ commitment to mostly static shots picturing their protagonists trying to will themselves to jump is a masterstroke. Documentary Showcase II screens again on Monday at 3:30 pm. Adam Roffman’s “The Collection” gives a history lesson in movie advertising while also offering gorgeous eye candy for lovers of letterpress printing, and Edvard Karijord and Bendik Mondal’s “I’m Free” is actually a student film that blew away the festival jury who decided it belonged in the main competition instead of in the student category. The movie is a poetic meditation on the life of a mentally ill man whose disappearance continues to haunt the family and friends he left behind.

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Welcome to Leith will screen in Nashville at Lipscomb University’s Shamblin Theatre, tonight at 6:30 P.M. The documentary tells the story of a group white supremacists who attempt to take over a small, North Dakota town to create a racist utopia. The flick wowed at Sundance before screening at the Nashville Film Festival. I previewed a handful of the fest’s social issue docs, including Leith, for The Contributor. Here are some of my thoughts along with some insights from Nashville Film Festival Artistic Director, Brian Owens …

Welcome to Leith speaks the unspeakable on behalf of the citizens of a small town who are dumbfounded when white supremacists attempt to turn their community into a haven for contemporary neo-Nazis.

“One thing that was fascinating to me is that the filmmakers got on the ground and in the middle of it,” says Owens. “You are there. You feel the danger and the threats. It’s a documentary, but it plays almost like an existential horror film.” Leith demonstrates cinema’s particular power: radio and television broadcasts are full of stories about race in America. But when it comes to non-fiction storytelling nothing communicates like the best documentary films.

“In a really good documentary, there’s not a reporter between you and the subject,” says Owens. “All they’re doing is holding a camera and letting these people tell their own story. It puts you in other people’s shoes in a way that other mediums can’t.”

If you’re itching to see a film tonight or you want to see one of the oddest and most extreme features of the state of the nation’s racist landscape take a look at Welcome to Leith.

Here’s a really great interview with the leader of the film’s neo-Nazis that serves as a great primer for tonight’s screening…

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Back to covering the Nashville Film Festival, I saw three movies today that were all worthy of eyeing. One was strange, one was good and one started out harsh and ended up brutal….

H.: H. tells the story of two couples in Troy, New York and a meteor that explodes in the sky and affects the town in strange ways. This film was poetic and impressionistic and loosely hung on Greek mythology — the women in both couples are named Helen, a black horse is sighted every time a strange phenomenon occurs, the massive stone head from a Greek statue of a woman mysteriously floats down a river. The film touches on children and the loss of children as well as the confines of marriage and monogamy. The acting, dialogue and cinematography are all pretty seamless here, but if you’re a big fan of tidy endings and structured plots this is not the film for you. I found it to be a lovely, melancholy, meditative exploration and gave it 4 out of 5 in my Audience Choice voting. Fans of Blonde Redhead will find a lot to like here.

Country – Portraits of an American Sound: A local-centric production made in cooperation with the Country Music Hall of Fame, Country tells the evolution of American country music as a sound and also as visual expression, covering the costumes, stage sets, and hairstyles that have defined the music’s image. The film also celebrates the photographers who’ve documented the music’s ever-changing look. It’s an apt history of the music and a revelatory exploration of the genre’s visual evolution. The film’s Achilles heel is its jumbled organizing and the too-long coda that ends the flick. A trip back to the editing room would’ve encouraged a 4 for my Audience Choice vote. As is, I gave it a 3.

The Tribe: The Tribe was described by the Nashville Scene as the “most disturbing” film at the fest. Jason Shawhan killed his programming of the Spectrum selections of edgy films at the fest this year and most of the movies I saw just happened to be his picks. Shawhan introduced the movie as having no voice-overs or subtitles and being presented entirely in Ukrainian sign language. Tribe tells the story of a teenage boy going to live at a boarding school for the hearing impaired. Upon arrival he’s introduced to the intense social hierarchy that dominates student life at the school. At first, he’s ostracized as the new guy, but he shows his mettle and is accepted into the gang’s inner circle of thievery, drug dealing and prostitution. Tribe is like Lord of the Flies without talking. There’s not even any music in the film. The movie starts rough and ends brutal, and it features long sex scenes, lots of physical violence and even a gut-wrenching abortion scene. The last scene in the movie is one of graphic revenge. The Tribe is a must-see if only for reminding every young filmmaker at the fest that your story should be told visually and it should make sense and move viewers even if it’s told in Ukrainian sign language. I gave The Tribe 4 out of 5. The Tribe screens one more time on Friday April, 24 at 1:15.

This NSFW trailer for The Tribe should make you want to skip work to get to the final screening this Friday…

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The following post includes reviews of three documentaries I screened before this year’s Nashville Film Festival. All three films are social issue documentaries that I wrote up in Nashville’s street newspaper, The Contributor. For non-locals the street paper is written and sold by Nashville’s homeless community and includes selections from freelancers like myself as well as articles and news items by the paper’s editor and staff writer. These docs all deal with the kind of human rights issues I like to focus on in the cultural coverage I often provide for the paper. If you can’t get to the fest, look for these films to pop up in various formats over the next 24 months. If you live in Nashville, click through to the fest site at the end of the article and check out the schedule as at least two of these films are still screening through the end of the event this Saturday.

Here we go!

Every spring the Nashville Film Festival brings Hollywood to Music City, giving both celebrity watchers and cinephiles plenty to stare at. This year’s documentary films look particularly strong and movies about racism, war, mental illness, civil rights, poverty and democracy will strike a familiar chord for readers of The Contributor.

Growing up isn’t easy and the social challenges of adolescence can be confusing, awkward and disorienting. Milestones like a first dance or a first kiss are the rites of young adulthood, and How to Dance in Ohio shows the humor and the hardships shared by a group of budding young men and young women whose tales and troubles are revealed in their autism therapy group sessions, at their schools and in their homes.

“It’s one of those things where once you see it you have to fall in love with it,” says Nashville Film Festival Artistic Director Brian Owens. “The filmmaking is fantastic, but the stories are so moving. You rarely get to see young people like this struggling to strike out on their own. This is a universal story, but there’s a layer to their struggles that makes this film so unique.”

Ohio is special because it makes an eloquent statement on the behalf of it’s subjects who – by definition – find communicating to be so difficult. Welcome to Leith speaks the unspeakable on behalf of the citizens of a small town who are dumbfounded when white supremacists attempt to turn their community into a haven for contemporary neo-Nazis.

“One thing that was fascinating to me is that the filmmakers got on the ground and in the middle of it,” says Owens. “You are there. You feel the danger and the threats. It’s a documentary, but it plays almost like an existential horror film.” Ohio and Leith demonstrate the particular power of cinema: We can read books about mental illness and radio and television broadcasts are full of stories about race in America. But when it comes to non-fiction storytelling nothing communicates like the best documentary films.

“In a really good documentary, there’s not a reporter between you and the subject,” says Owens. “All they’re doing is holding a camera and letting these people tell their own story. It puts you in other people’s shoes in a way that other mediums can’t.”

If Leith is a film about how racism can tear a community apart, Rosenwald is a movie about how the experience of racism might also bring unconnected cultures together through their shared understanding of violence, injustice and loss.

This documentary tells the story of Julius Rosenwald, a first generation American Jew who becomes the head of the Sears and Roebuck chain and transforms it into an empire. Rosenwald’s a tough business man who makes profits a priority, but privately he’s a religious Jew who feels a sacred duty to share the rewards that his endeavors create.

“I had a minor in African-American studies in college,” says Owens. “As much as I’ve studied that period that lead to the Civil Rights Movement there are still stories that pop-up and surprise you.” Rosenwald tells the story of a hard working man who makes good and does good by partnering with Booker T. Washington to build schools for African American’s all over the South.

“The filmmaker found such a big number of interviewees – it’s such a wide range of people we learn this story from,” says Owens about the surviving students from the Rosenwald schools who are this film’s primary narrators. But, the real genius of the movie is how its subject simultaneously illuminates the wider social, historical and geographical phenomena that preceded the Civil Rights Movement: the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Jim Crow-era South, the Great Migration and the compassionate connections between Midwestern Jews and Southern African-Americans.

Another don’t miss film tells the story of Agel, a former child soldier who flees the Sudanese Civil War for a new life in Australia only to return to the country as a basketball star when South Sudan gained its independence in 2011.

“He was such a great subject,” says Owens of Agel, “strong enough and charismatic enough to carry a film. He’s probably the only human being who’s ever lived that story.” But with a movie like this any human being can be moved by it. We Were Rebels will make its North American debut at the Nashville Film Festival.

Find a full schedule online here…

As a teaser, here is an interview with the directors of Welcome to Leith talking about their film for the Sundance Film Festival…

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I’ve been spending the last few days checking out various selections at the Nashville film festival. My assistant, Antonia Oakes, came up with a preliminary itinerary of films to which I’ve added a few of my own choices. The flicks I’ve seen so far highlight various countercultures and outsider aesthetics in one way or another. Most of the films only screened once so I haven’t felt the need to be super timely in my reporting since the fest started. That said, I wanted to file this report so that we could start the discussion regarding the first half of the fest. For those of you not in Nashville, let these capsule reviews serve as teasers as all of these films will be popping up in theaters on disc and online over the next 24 months or so. Here we go…

6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia – Catching the first screening of the fest last Thursday evening, 6 Desires is the latest documentary by Mark Cousins whose The Story of Film series is required viewing for any contemporary student of cinema. This latest project finds Cousins recounting a 1921 trip Lawrence and his wife took to Sardinia and it uses Lawrence’s book about the place as a map. Along the way Cousin’s illuminates Lawrence, his book and the land and people of Sardinia along with the political and cultural history of the place. Fans of Cousins will love the conversational tone of this one and it also marks the first movie Cousins has made that relies primarily on original footage. 6 Desires is a film about an author and a place, but it also documents the raw sensibilities of a filmmaker coming into his own.

Goodbye to Language: Antonia found an online synopsis for this Jean-Luc Godard film in 3D: “The idea is simple / A married woman and a single man meet / They love, they argue, fists fly / A dog strays between town and country / The seasons pass / The man and woman meet again / The dog finds itself between them / The other is in one, / the one is in the other / and they are three / The former husband shatters everything / A second film begins: / the same as the first, / and yet not / From the human race we pass to metaphor / This ends in barking / and a baby’s cries / In the meantime, we will have seen people talking of the demise of the dollar, of truth in mathematics and of the death of a robin.” —Godard in a handwritten synopsis written in verse and first posted on Twitter. As far as the film’s “meaning” goes, I don’t have much to add. I’d need at least another viewing to find something more comprehensive to say and I already feel lucky having had the chance to see this at all. I can tell you the movie is full of unforgettable images, statements and ideas. I can also tell you that all these years since Breathless Godard is still a provocateur and a prankster, and for all of its seeming incomprehensibility there is no doubt that there is a very firm hand on the wheel of this poetic, vivid, silly, infuriating, dizzying journey of a film.

(T)error: This documentary lets viewers peek through a keyhole at an F.B.I. domestic terrorism sting in progress. The movie captures the day-to-day life of Shariff, a former Black Panther and a Muslim turned informant. The movie unwinds with the tenseness of a thriller, blurring the lines between right and wrong, and hero and villain, and highlighting the controversial tactics the F.B.I. has used since 9/11 in their quest to stop another terrorist attack. The film is an indictment of contemporary law enforcement and anti-terrorism tactics that prey on vulnerable ex-felons to inform on their friends and neighbors to make convictions whether the threats uncovered are real or simply created by the bureau. Required viewing for anyone concerned about the balance between safety and freedom in America.

The Boy and the World: This trippy, wordless, psychedelic cartoon tells the story of a young boy in rural Brazil who journeys to a big city in search of his father. The idyllic surrounds of the boy’s country life are drawn in colorful crayon scrawls, but the industrial city and its squalid slums are rendered in the sharp lines and clashing juxtapositions of grotesque collages that make this movie one of the most vividly audacious films I’ve seen at the fest. Add to that a gorgeous soundtrack that ranges from samba to hip-hop and this tale about poverty, oppression and the love of family adds up to a truly moving and memorable film. Definitely a don’t miss selection for fans of animation.

L’il Quinquin: This intense, three hour film was originally a French miniseries. It tells the story of a group of young kids living on a coast in rural France where a series of grisly murders upsets the everyday life of their small town. Featuring an amazing cast of non-actors the flick features a seductive combination of sensibilities that I think Jim Ridley of the Nashville Scene described as the Coen Brothers meet Bresson. What starts off as a whodunit gradually unwinds into an existential exploration of the evil that lies in the hearts of men, and children.

The Black Panthers – Vanguard of the Revolution: This PBS produced Independent Lens film tells the history of the Black Panthers who grew from a self-defense organization in Oakland, California to become an international force for anti-capitalist revolution. The movie also documents the F.B.I.’s ruthless and illegal Counterintelpro tactics that were used to destroy the group through systematic harassment, spying and perhaps even political assassination. I’ve seen every Panther doc I’ve ever been able to get my hands on and this one is full of footage and interviews I’ve never seen. It’s a comprehensive summing-up of what I consider to be the most important revolutionary group of the 1960′s as well as a chilling indictment of current relations between cops and African-American populations where the same wanton violence and oppression seems to be back with a vengeance.

Here’s an interview with Jean-Luc Godard from the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 where the master discussed Goodbye to Language…

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Kevin Schreck is a first-time director whose Persistence of Vision tells a tale of artistic obsession, tracing the career of master animator Richard Williams. Williams is best known for 1988′s Who Framed Roger Rabbit which seamlessly mixed live action and animation, putting the director on the map as one of the master storytellers in the medium.

The success of that film lead to a breakthrough for Williams’ pet project – The Thief and the Cobbler. Conceived in 1964, the movie began as an animated version of the satirical Persian folktales that feature the character Nasrudin – a kind of Sufi fool whose failures teach moral and social lessons. Several versions – and failed funding schemes – later, Williams won two Oscars for Roger Rabbit and made a deal with Warner Brothers to fully finance and market his self-described “masterpiece.”

Schreck’s handling of the subject matter here is respectful without being reverent. The nearly-three-decades-long tale of Williams’ film is convoluted to say the least and Schreck has trouble with pacing in the beginning – the director’s handling of failures of the first version of Thief nearly brings Persistence to a standstill, but once Williams’ project snaps into focus, so does Schreck’s.

Williams’ gorgeous, hand-drawn animations are all beautiful and the footage from Thief is outrageously ambitious. That said, it’s a shame that a movie about beautiful pictures doesn’t labor over its own visuals more. Much of the found footage here looks like lo-fi YouTube downloads and some of Schreck’s own footage is pixelated and washed-out on the big screen. I haven’t found similar criticisms online and I suspect many critics have screened Persistence online or at least on small screens. It’s hard to blame projection problems as certain scenes were jarringly crisp and clear. I’m all for low-quality images in a context where they make sense aesthetically, but in a film about an artistic obsessive who handcrafts perfect pictures, they don’t.

Williams never does get his picture made. It’s eventually taken out of his hands, chopped to pieces and released in various versions under various titles including Arabian Knight and The Princess and the Cobbler. Schreck’s telling of the Thief story shows that the director knows a good subject when he sees one, and his poised, thoughtful Q & A session following the film’s first screening at the Nashville Film Festival found him to be a thoughtful, imaginative artist who already has a good handle on the kind of stories he wants to tell. The end credits of Persistence assure us that Williams is currently working on a new animation project that is “unlike anything anyone has done.” I’ll be looking forward to Schreck’s next film as well.

Here is the cult-tastic “Workprint” version of The Thief and the Cobbler which fills in the blanks in the animation with storyboard images. This is as close to Williams’ original vision as we are ever likely to get.

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