Images from previous Indie Memphis festivals (courtesy Indie Memphis).
After a pandemic year-plus of uncertainty that saw major changes in the film festival world, Indie Memphis will return to Overton Square for its 2021 edition, which will take place October 20th to 25th. After last year’s COVID hiatus, the outdoor block party will return, which takes place in a giant tent on Cooper Street between Union and Madison, hosting in-person events and musical performances.
The annual festival, which dates back to 1998, will kick off with the fourth installment of the Black Creator’s Forum. The program, which is free with required pre-registration, will consist of two days of online seminars and programs October 16th and 17th, and an in-person gathering on October 22nd. The main festival will begin with a premiere event on Wednesday, October 20th. In addition to in-person screenings at Overton Square venues, Indie Memphis films will also be returning to the Malco Summer Drive-In, which was employed in 2020 as a social distancing measure and ended up being popular with members. Also returning will be virtual screenings of Indie Memphis offerings through the Memphis-based Eventive cinema services platform.
Festival passes are now available at the early bird price of $85, which includes ten in-person film tickets and access to special events, both IRL and virtual. The early bird pricing will expire on August 23, when pass prices will rise to $100. VIP passes will include virtual screen tickets and other perks. For those whose health status or travel situations preclude in person attendance, full virtual passes will be available for $25. In-person screenings will be sold at limited capacity to allow for social distancing, and masks will be required for all screenings.
The first round of films will be announced at the preview party, which will take place in September.
Indie Memphis has tapped Knox Shelton as its next executive director.
The new leadership hire comes after the resignation of Ryan Watt, who led the arts organization through a period of unprecedented expansion, and the challenges of the COVID era.
Shelton comes to Indie Memphis after a stint as executive director of Literacy Mid-South.
“I am honored and thrilled with the opportunity to lead Indie Memphis. The organization has made tremendous strides over the past several years and has an incredibly optimistic future. I look forward to combining years of working alongside the Memphis community with my passion for film as we continue to anchor Memphis as a thriving artistic environment for film and production,” he says.
Board president Brett Robbs, who led the five-month search for a new director, praised Shelton’s experience in the Memphis nonprofit community.
“Thanks to his inclusive vision and values, Knox will help us continue to support a range of filmmakers and present an ever greater variety of films that reflect our own community’s many different stories, interests, and experiences.”
The organization now called Indie Memphis was founded in 1998 as a film festival to present Memphis filmmakers’ works to the world. It has grown over the last 23 years to include year-round programming, and before the pandemic was scheduled open its own cinema in partnership with Malco’s Studio on the Square.
Shelton will face the considerable challenge of leading the festival in the chaotic, post-pandemic film industry. In 2019, the festival attracted its largest audience yet, selling more than 12,000 tickets and passes. The 2020 festival adopted a pandemic-safe, online, and in-person model which attracted audiences from as far away as Brazil and Israel.
Artistic director Miriam Bale says she expects the festival’s push towards including more diverse voices in independent and art cinema to continue with Shelton at the helm.
“We are thrilled to be working with someone who feels as passionately as we do about the importance of storytelling and education,” said Bale. “With Knox, we’re confident there will be no lag, but a seamless continuation of the work we have done and exponential growth towards where we would like to be.”
It’s election day in America, so get out there and vote! While you’re waiting for those results, the Indie Memphis Film Festival has announced the results of their own polls for the best films of the 2020 festival. Everyone who purchased a pass or ticket for the online and outdoor screenings was given a ballot to rate the films on a scale of 1-5.
The big winners were director Emma Seligman’s comedy Shiva Baby, which took home the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature, and director Tali Yankelevich’s experimental film My Darling Supermarket, which took home the Audience Award for Best Departures Feature. Both Shiva Baby and My Darling Supermarket had previously won the Jury Awards in their respective categories at the awards ceremony last Wednesday night. Camrus Johnson and Pedro Piccinini’s animated short “Grab My Hand: A Letter To My Dad” also won both Jury and Audience awards in its category. Director Zaire Love scored a rare split two-fer by winning the Audience Award for Best Hometowner Documentary Short for “The Black Men I Know” after winning the Jury Award for Best Hometowner Short for her film “Road To Step.”
The Audience Award for Best Hometowner Feature went to Anwar Jamison’s bi-continental romantic comedy Coming to Africa. Jamison’s film prevailed despite having its original premiere screening, which was scheduled for the riverfront, postponed due to stormy weather.
The audience ballots chose What Do You Have To Lose? for Best Documentary Feature, directed by Dr. Trimiko Melancon. What Do You Have to Lose? is the Rhodes College professor’s first feature film.
The Audience Award for Best Hometowner Narrative Short went to the “The Little Death,” a personal drama about miscarriage written and directed by husband and wife team Justin and Ariel Harrison.
For the Best Sounds Feature, awarded for the always-crowded category of music films, the audience chose Andy Black’s documentary Shoe: A Memphis Musical Legacy.
The Audience Award for Best Documentary Short went to “Still Processing,” a moving experimental documentary by Sophy Romvari in which she filmed her real-time reaction to finding lost pictures of her two brothers, who had recently passed away. The voters awarded Best Departures Short to Amin Mahe’s “Letter To My Mother.”
For the music video categories, Lewis Del Mar’s song “The Ceiling,” directed by rubberband, won the National Audience award. The Hometowner Audience Award went to Louise Page’s “Paw In The Honey,” directed by Laura Jean Hocking.
The audience voters chose Hisonni Johnson’s “Take Out Girl” for Best Poster Design.
The winners were informed of their awards via a surprise Zoom call. You can watch their reactions, which range from the funny to the tearful, in this video.
Indie Memphis Announces 2020 Audience Award Winners
The Indie Memphis Film Festival returns tonight to the Levitt Shell and the Malco Summer Drive-In. At the Shell is the world premiere of What Do You Have To Lose?, directed by Dr. Trimiko Melancon, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Rhodes College. The feature documentary combines a history of race relations in America with a look at the contemporary politics of race, beginning with the backlash against the election of Barack Obama. The title is taken from a question Donald Trump asked of black voters during the 2016 presidential campaign. In light of the rise of the alt-right and increasingly brazen racism in the way Trump governs and in the actions of his supporters, the answer turned out to be, quite a lot.
What Do You Have To Lose? is competing in the documentary category. It begins at 6:30 PM at the Levitt Shell, and premieres online at the same time.
Jake Mahaffy filmed his feature Free In Deed in Memphis in 2014, and premiered it at the Venice Film Festival, one of the most prestigious stages in the film world, the next year. His new film Reunion was filmed in New Zealand, where he teaches film at the University of Auckland, but Reunion it still has a Memphis connection in the person of producer Adam Hohenberg.
Reunion is larger in scale and more ambitious than Free In Deed. Set in a dark, vaguely gothic house it stars Emma Draper as Ellie, a woman who returns to her grandparent’s home to complete a difficult pregnancy. Unexpectedly, her mother, played by Julia Ormond, is waiting for her. What follows is a tense spiral into anxiety and family secrets with a side order of body horror.
Mahaffy says he started writing Reunion while he was editing Free In Deed, and evolved considerably over the course of five major rewrites and a short version he shot in Colorado in 2016. “The characters and story considerably changed. It was originally written for a New England-type setting … It’s definitely got unsettling and sort of dreadful elements, and there’s horror elements to it, for sure. But it’s something that’s a bit hard for me to describe in general terms. It’s definitely a film with horror elements in it and psychological thriller momentum. But it’s got comedy, dark humor, too. Originally it started off with stories from people talking about their parents, mainly their mothers and sort of the crazy things they do — passive aggressive, manipulative type behaviors. Most of them are pretty bizarre and not kind, but also kind of funny, in a dark way.”
Filled with affecting performances, Reunion is all about the psychological made visceral. “There’s some people that have the benefits of some really great, well-adjusted, parents. Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone has the same start. I think that that dynamic, the difficulty of individuating, growing up, and becoming your own person, and then trying to return back to a relationship that doesn’t acknowledge that, which can’t encompass that personhood that you’ve developed as an individual. People end up falling back into those childish or childlike relational dynamics, and it is a problem. So people find different ways of dealing with it. I think it’s pretty common for a lot of people that recognize what it is, but some people don’t even recognize it. They just go along and are unaware. But I think even people who are aware, they find themselves falling into those sort of behaviors and modes of being that aren’t based on any sort of conscious awareness. They just ended up playing that role of the parent’s child, and it’s not necessarily healthy.”
Indie Memphis 2020: What Do You Have To Lose? and Reunion
Suhair Lauck at her post behind the cash register in the documentary The Little Tea Shop.
As director of operations for Indie Memphis, Brighid Wheeler has had a crazy year. She and her organization have been charged with trying to figure out how to throw a film festival amid a worldwide pandemic. “I think the biggest challenge — I don’t necessarily want to speak for the whole team, but I think it would resonate with each team member — has been reminding yourself that every situation needs to be rethought. The moment you find yourself approaching something in the same way you would have pre-pandemic, you need to start over.”
The 2020 festival, which began on Wednesday night, is taking place online and outdoors. Indie Memphis has already moved their weekly programming online with the help of Memphis-based cinema services company Eventive. The staff, who specialize in in-person events, have had to learn to become broadcasters on the fly. There’s been a lot of time spent teleconferencing, says Wheeler. “Suddenly, you become an expert in a very specific sense on Zoom, like for our Tuesday nights, when we’re doing our weekly screenings and, [artistic director] Miriam [Bale] was hosting various industry people and having conversations about films with a filmmaker or a critic.”
But the new challenges have brought new opportunities. Wheeler says this has been driven home for her as the team records filmmaker interviews for the festival. “I’m reminded sitting through these Q&As that this is such a unique opportunity. Of course, I would prefer to have these filmmakers physically in Memphis. We are Indie Memphis. That’s our brand. But I’m able to have the majority of the filmmakers for each short film block in attendance for the Q&As. That is just something that is not always afforded to us at the in-person festival.”
Wheeler is in charge of programming the short films for the festival. This year, there are almost 200 of them, organized in themed blocks, all of which are available online. “In my time programming Indie Memphis, I’ve never been as proud of a shorts program as I am about this one,” she says. “I think that speaks to a number of different things, but I want to highlight first and foremost Kayla Myers, who has been a great addition to our programming team.”
On Thursday night, Indie Memphis takes over all four screens at the Malco Summer Drive-In. The Hometowner Documentary Shorts program, which begins at 6:30 PM, features both Memphis filmmakers and newcomers. It begins with “American Dream Safari,” G.B. Shrewsbury’s portrait of Tad Pierson, the Bluff City tour guide operator whose expertise in local music sites is unrivaled. Zaire Love, a graduate of the Crosstown Arts residency program, takes audiences on the “Road to Step,” which examines Black fraternity culture’s step show competition at Ole Miss. Artistic polymath Donald Meyers’ “The Lonely” is an intimate portrait of elderly isolation, and a plea for compassion. Bailey Smith’s “Holding On” is a chronicle of Memphis musician Don Lifted’s first U.S. tour. Matthew Lee urges the audience with “Remembering Veteran’s Day.” Emily Burkhead gets experimental with the hybrid doc “She Is More,” featuring musician Jordan Occasionally. Tyler Pilkington’s “Teched Out” explores the frontier of transhumanism, where the line between human and machine is blurred. Kierra Turner chronicles NBA player Jonathan Stark’s recovery from a potentially career-ending injury in “Wake ‘Em Up.” Josh Cooper’s “Loose Leaves” brings the story of a group of Black women entrepreneurs in Orange Mound. And finally, Matteo Servante and Molly Wexler’s “Little Tea Shop” gives you the background on the famous Downtown restaurant where you can find power players seated next to a person experiencing homelessness, and the immigrant restauranteur Suhair Lauck who brings them together.
“It’s an introduction to Memphis,—a taste of different areas and people within our city,” says Wheeler. “We know how hardworking our filmmakers are, but to see, even through the pandemic, the resilience they continue to display as they make their work is nothing short of amazing.”
Indie Memphis 2020 continues through Thursday, October 29. You can buy online and in-person passes at indiememphis,org.
Ira Sachs, Sr. in Lynne Sachs’ documentary Film About A Father Who
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.
Director Anwar Jamison (far left) filming Coming To Africa in Ghana.
World premieres at Indie Memphis include Trimiko 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.
Ted Ross, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Nipsey Russell in The Wiz
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.
In an email to filmmakers, Indie Memphis indicated that their 2020 festival will consist of “a hybrid of online virtual events and limited, in-person outdoor screenings.”
With movie theaters closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic (with the notable exception of the Malco Summer Drive-In), and film festivals around the country facing the same set of difficult choices the Oxford Film Festival responded to in the spring, Indie Memphis staff has been engaged in contingency planning for months.
The annual film festival, which attracts more than 12,000 cinephiles to Memphis and hosts filmmakers from all over the world, is currently scheduled for October 21st-29th, 2020. The email to filmmakers said that, while the situation remained fluid, more dates may be added in October to maximize the online and in-person experience.
“When you created your film, and, perhaps, when you submitted it to Indie Memphis, the world was in a different place,” executive director Ryan Watt wrote in the email. “Cases continue to rise in our region. It is important to us that we balance concerns for safety along with providing filmmakers the best possible outlet to share their work with audiences during this unusual time.”
Parties and industry panels will be replaced by virtual events.
“Most in-person screenings will be hosted at outdoor venues with audience distancing to provide a safer environment, and scheduling may be adjusted due to weather or safety concerns. These events are intended for local audiences, and not all films will be exhibited in-person,” wrote Watt.
Indie Memphis will likely benefit from its relationship with Eventive, the Memphis company which began as the festival’s ticketing solution before expanding in recent years to become the industry standard. As the Memphis Flyer reported in April, Eventive has developed tools for film festivals to move online during the pandemic, and has been expanding their services both nationally and internationally this year.
The film selection process is still underway, and no filmmakers will be notified of their acceptance or rejection for several weeks. Watt said that there will likely be fewer films on offer this year in order to maximize online engagement, and to reflect a 26 percent drop in submissions. In a normal year, Indie Memphis receives thousands of film submissions for narrative and documentary features and short films, as well as music videos and experimental creations.
When reached for comment, Watt said that planning was ongoing, and that a formal announcement would be coming soon, hopefully by the end of the month. He urged patience as the festival staff continues to assess the possibilities. “Audience members may have a lot of questions that we can’t quite answer yet.”
Cynthia Ervino as Harriet Tubman in Harriet, the opening night film at Indie Memphis 2019
The Indie Memphis Film Festival has announced the lineup for the 22nd iteration of the home-grown cinephile celebration, which will run October 30-November 4, 2019. The opening night film will be Harriet, a biopic of abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman by director Kasi Lemmons.
(l to r) Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, and Adam Driver star in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.
Director Jim Jarmusch, who put Memphis on the arthouse map in 1989 with Mystery Train, will return for a 30th anniversary screening of the seminal independent film. Since the festival runs through Halloween this year, Jarmusch will also screen his latest film, zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die.
Producer/director Sara Driver, Jarmusch’s longtime partner and sometimes co-creator, will be the subject of a retrospective, and present the “spooky inspirations” for her work, which critic Johnathan Rosenbaum called “a conflation of fantasy with surrealism, science fiction, comics, horror, sword-and-sorcery, and the supernatural that stretches all the way from art cinema to exploitation by way of Hollywood.”
William Marshall wants to have a drink on you in Blacula.
On Halloween itself, there will be a special screening of the cult classic Blacula starring William Marshall as a vampire loose in ’70s Los Angeles.
Memphis director Ira Sachs returns from France with his latest picture Frankie, starring Isabella Huppert as an ailing movie star who summons her family and friends for one last gathering.
Harriet, Mystery Train, and Frankie Lead Indie Memphis 2019 Lineup
The Hometowner category, which spotlights films made by Memphis artists, boasts a healthy six features this year, including Cold Feet, a bachelor party horror comedy by Indie Memphis stalwarts Brad Ellis and Allen C. Gardner, which just won the writing award at the New Orleans Horror Film Festival. Musician and artist Lawerence Matthews makes his feature film debut at the festival with vérité documentary The Hub. Cinematographer and producer Jordan Danelz presents his first feature documentary In the Absence, which deals with blight and gentrification in Memphis. Jookin’ is the subject of Louis Wallecan’s Lil Buck: Real Swan. Jim Hanon profiles Memphis saxophonist Kirk Whalum in Humanite: The Beloved Community. Director Jessica Chaney makes her premiere with the girl power drama This Can’t Be Life.
Penny Hardaway (right) stars with Shaquille O’Neil (center), Matt Nover (left), and Nick Nolte (bottom) in William Friedkin’s Blue Chips.
The celebrated director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin will have a mini-retrospective with two films. The first is Blue Chips, a 1995 film set in the world of college basketball starring Shaquille O’Neil, Nick Nolte, and University of Memphis basketball coach Penny Hardaway. The second is Sorcerer, a film Friedkin called his masterpiece, but which had the misfortune to be released in 1977 on the week Star Wars went wide.
Another sure-to-be-anticipated screening will be Varda by Agnes, an autobiographical film by the late, revered filmmaker Agnes Varda, made when she was 90 years old.
The great director says goodbye in Varda by Agnes.
The Narrative Feature competition will feature five films from as far abroad as the Dominican Republic, four of which are by women directors. The documentary competition will be between four features, including Best Before Death, director Paul Duane’s portrait of artist Bill Drummond, which was filmed partially in Memphis.
The Memphis Flyer will have full coverage of the festival in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, you can find more information, festival passes, and tickets to individual screenings on the Indie Memphis website.
The fifth annual International Jewish Film Festival opens tonight, beginning a month of films highlighting the Jewish experience in both the the past and present.
“Thanks to Marcy Stagner’s direction, The Morris and Mollye Fogelman
International Jewish Film Festival has added a much-enjoyed aspect to the Memphis film scene. This festival stands out in its unique celebration of Jewish culture,” says Deputy Film Director Sharon Fox O’Guin.
This year’s festival will extend through the entire month of February, with nine films screening at the Malco Paradiso, the Memphis Jewish Community Center Belz Theater, and the Ridgeway Four. The opening night film at the Paradiso is Children of Chance, a film by French director Lugi Zampa about a young Jewish boy who is put into a hospital with a broken leg just as the Nazis are taking over France in 1940. As he is having a formative experience with other sick kids his age in the hospital, his family is detained by the fascists. A heroic doctor shields his charges as the world crumbles around them.
Morris and Mollye Fogelman International Jewish Film Festival Expands In Its Fifth Year
While the main festival doesn’t start until November 1, Indie Memphis is busy helping the next generation of Bluff City filmmakers get off the ground.
12-year-old Chris Stromopolos (left) starring in Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation
The Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival takes place this Saturday at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre. Indie Memphis Executive Director Ryan Watt says the festival has had a youth block for some time, but it was time to spin it off into its own event. “This is the first step towards what we hope will be a bigger and more active youth program.”
The response to the new program has been overwhelming. “I was blown away by how many submissions we got. This thing is going to be really cool. We’re going to be showing 27 short films at the Halloran Centre all day long. And it’s 100% free for K-12.”
The program will begin at noon on Saturday with a free lunch for attendees. In addition to the youth film competition, there will be a series of classes by Memphis area filmmakers. “You’ll hear from Craig Brewer on storytelling, Morgan Jon Fox on acting, and Jordan Danelz on cinematography,” among others, says Watt.
The festival will provide additional inspiration with the story of real-life kids who lived their filmmaking dreams. Tonight, the documentary Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made will screen at Studio on the Square. It tells the story of Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, two kids from Ocean Springs, Mississippi who decided to remake Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas’ classic Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot for shot, using only a VHS camera and whatever other materials they could get their hands on. Remarkably, after six years of work, they succeeded—almost. (How did they pull of the scenes in the submarine? They used an ACTUAL submarine!) The documentary’s frame is the tale of how the childhood friends came back together as adults to film the only scene they couldn’t get right the first time, the epic “Flying Wing” fight.
A screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark: An Adaptation will be the climax of the Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival
Then, on Saturday night, the Youth Film Festival attendees will be treated to the actual product of Stromopolios, Zala, and their friends’ labors. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation first premiered over a decade ago at the Oxford Film Festival, and it is a must-see for anyone who has ever wanted to make their own movies. It highlights both the determination and resourcefulness of the young cast and crew, and the enduring perfection of Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay, which continues to work just fine even when the visuals don’t measure up to Spielberg’s vision. Before the screening, the winners of the festival competition will be announced. The grand prize is a full day’s production services from Via Productions worth $4,000, plus $500 cash and an automatic entry into the main Indie Memphis competition for the winning film. There will also be an audience award worth $500, and a $250 award for the movie that best represents Memphis.
For more information, and to buy tickets to the events, go to Indiememphis.com
Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival Cultivates Next Crop Of Memphis Filmmakers
Courtesy of Last Bite Films. 
