Four years ago, the Oxford Film Festival was the canary in the coal mine. It was the first film festival to cancel because of the rapidly-spreading Covid-19 outbreak that would, before the month was out, become a full fledged pandemic.
The festival survived the uncertain plague years and is now back for 2024 with a huge lineup, beginning on Thursday, March 21st, with Adam the First at the University of Mississippi’s Gertrude Castellow Ford Center. Director Irving Franco filmed Adam the First in Mississippi, and he will be in attendance at the Oxford opening night festivities, which will also be the movie’s regional premiere. Oakes Fegley stars as Adam, a 14-year-old living deep in the country with his parents, James (David Duchovny) and Mary (Kim Jackson Davis). But one fateful day he finds out that James and Mary aren’t his real parents, but fugitives hiding in the woods from some mysterious bad guys who just found them. Adam flees, but not before his foster father tells him the name of his real father is Jacob Waterson. The boy looks up all the people he can find by that name and visits each of them, trying to discover who his real father is.
The screening at Oxford’s Ford Theater will be proceeded by a recording of Thacker Mountain Radio Hour, the syndicated radio show that has longtime ties with the festival. Thacker Mountain is broadcast in Memphis by WYXR on Fridays at 6 a.m. Original Brat Pack member Andrew McCarthy, star of Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero, who went on to direct 15 episodes of Orange Is the New Black, will be the guest of honor.
On Friday, the festivities move to the Malco Oxford Commons Studio Grille. Three Memphis-made feature films will be screening during the festival. The first is Juvenile: Five Stories (Friday, March 22nd, 4:45 p.m.), the documentary directed by Joann Self Selvidge and Sarah Fleming. The film traces the stories of Ariel, Michael, Romeo, Shimaine, and Ja’Vaune, who were all thrown into the juvenile justice system as children for a variety of reasons and are now helping others who are in the same place. The film is an examination of a deeply broken system by its own victims.
The Blues Society (Friday, March 22nd, 7:30 p.m.) by Augusta Palmer is a self-described “moving image mixtape” about the Country Blues Festival held at the Overton Park Shell in the mid-1960s. The director’s father Robert Palmer, music writer and author of the landmark cultural history Deep Blues, was one of the organizers of the festival, which proved to be crucial in reintroducing the blues artists of the Depression era to rock-and-roll obsessed hippies, and securing recognition of the music’s cultural value. But selling the blues to affluent white audiences entailed compromise and distortion which have shaped music ever since.
The third Memphis movie at the Oxford Film Festival is the most unlikely. Scent of Linden (Saturday, noon) is the only movie in the program with dialogue in Bulgarian. Producer/Director Sissy Denkova and writer Jordan Trippeer created story about the Bulgarian immigrant community in Memphis. Stefan (Ivan Barnev) comes to the States in search of a good paying job to support his ailing mother back home, and instantly falls in with a small but tight-knit group of eccentrics who are also chasing the elusive American dream. Scent of Linden recently completed successful theatrical runs in Bulgaria and Europe, and is now expanding to select screenings in the United States.
After the awards ceremony on Saturday night, March 23rd, the winners will have encore screenings on Sunday. For a full lineup, tickets, and more information on the weekend’s events, visit ox-film.com.