Tag: Indie Memphis

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest

CrewUp Youth Mentorship film Fight 4 Your Love

Indie Memphis began in 1998 when University of Memphis film student Kelly Chandler wanted to create a space where her fellow students could showcase their work. As the festival grew into a major Memphis cultural event, artist development remained a major part of the mission. In 2016, the Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest was launched to help give middle- and high-schoolers a taste of the highs and lows of filmmaking.

“We’re giving these students an opportunity to really explore it before they say, ‘This is definitely what I wanna do,’” says Joseph Carr, Indie Memphis’ managing director.

Students in the CrewUp program are partnered with adult mentors, experienced filmmakers who will guide them through the process of writing, planning, and producing a short film. Carr says that even those who discover filmmaking is not for them get valuable experience in creative collaboration. “It can apply to every part of your life. If you can’t collaborate, you’re not gonna be successful in any field you work in.”

Memphis Youth Showcase feature Blood and Roots

One Youth Film Fest participant who did decide it was for her is Vivian Gray, who won awards at the 2017 and 2018 festival. Gray says she entered her work “on a whim,” but found “it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It shaped so much of my future, just by being able to participate, period. I met other peers who made films, I met the folks at Indie Memphis who are so supportive, and just to show my work for the first time publicly was really special, and I’m very grateful for it.”

Carr acted as her mentor when she won a production grant as a prize in 2017. (The grant program is now awarded by application, separate from the main student competition.) “When you’re young, you don’t have any concept of how much work it’s going to be,” says Carr. “You just have great ideas and you want your ideas to come to life. Vivian was just so game to jump in and just run with her idea. You could tell very early just how comfortable she was on set, and just how comfortable she was in her voice. When you’re in the presence of a true artist, you can tell very quickly that they have a lot to say.”

Gray went on to earn a degree from the acclaimed University of Southern California film program. Her short film, “Tape 23,” debuted at Indie Memphis ’22 and has spent the last year on the festival circuit with “Providence,” a television pilot she directed. She will return to Youth Fest as a juror this year. “I feel like it’s grown even more, and continues to do what it did for me and so many other young filmmakers and artists. It is near and dear to my heart.”

Another artist coming full circle this year is Vivie Myrick. The actor made her screen debut at the Youth Festival and recently appeared on the Showtime TV series, George & Tammy. “She directed a film last year as her last output for her age group in the Youth Film Fest,” says Carr. “Now she’s now back to host an acting workshop.”

The festival will kick off on Saturday, August 26th, with a keynote address by screenwriter Hennah Sekander. The recent Memphis transplant has written for the Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! and the Amazon Prime Video Chris Pratt vehicle The Terminal List. “I’m gonna talk about ‘The Slingshot Effect,’ which is something that I coined under pressure on a phone call with Joseph Carr because he said we needed a title, and it just felt like the most potent symbol for how you marry character and plot to tell a good story.”

When Craig Brewer introduced Sekander to Carr, she immediately asked how to get involved with Indie Memphis’ youth program. “I think a big reason why this writer strike is happening right now is there’s this feeling of resistance from the studio side to invest in new talent and kind of support younger voices as they try to make their way up the ladder,” Sekander says. “So I think that means it’s all the more important for writers to do that work that probably wasn’t done for them.”

The festival is free for students who sign up for passes and pay-what-you-can for adults. The short films which premiere this Saturday at the Halloran Centre will represent the culmination of a year of work by the young filmmakers. “I’m always just beside-myself thrilled when these students finish their movies,” says Carr. “Some teams will drop out, or something will come up, and they can’t finish. But seeing these completed films on the big screen, all the problems we have leading up to it are just melted away.”

The 2023 Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest is Saturday, August 26th, at the Halloran Centre. For the schedule, visit indiememphis.org.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Robots and Boogeymen

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Optimus Prime (voiced by 81-year-old legend of the VO game Peter Cullen) is back for yet another sequel of questionable necessity, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. This one has O.P. leading his robots in disguise in defense of the Maxmials, who are robots disguised as animals, against the Terrorcons, who are also robots in disguise, only bad. Good news: Michael Bay isn’t directing! 

 Adapted from one of the early 1970s Stephen King short stories that earned him the reputation as a master of horror, The Boogeyman stars Sophie Thatcher (of Yellowjackets fame) as a teenager whose home is invaded by a creature who hides under the bed, comes out at night, and feeds on fear. If you’re afraid of the dark, this is not the film for you. If you’re into classic horror, turn me on! 

If you’re looking for an escape from summer blockbusters, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ new comedy with director Nicole Holofcener You Hurt My Feelings is here for you. Beth’s (Louis-Dreyfus) husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is a therapist, so you’d think he would know better than to admit he doesn’t like the new book she’s been writing. Guess not. Surely, that one little slip up can’t have life-altering consequences? Oops again! 

John Waters’ transgressive, but radically inclusive, cinema increasingly looks ahead of its time. With 1988’s Hairspray, he came the closest to the mainstream he ever would. Future talk show host Ricki Lake stars as Tracy Turnblad, a typical ’50s teenager who loves to dance. She wants to be a regular on local a local TV teen show, but first she must overcome her arch rival, Amber (Colleen Ann Fitzpatrick), and the close-minded, racist establishment. Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, Jerry Stiller, and of course, drag legend Divine round out the cast of this fever dream of rock and roll and racial integration. On Sunday, June 11, it’s coming back for a 35th anniversary screening at several Malco theaters.

On Tuesaday at Crosstown Theater, Indie Memphis’ Microcinema series presents A Tribute to Barbara Hammer. The avant-garde filmmaker who died in 2019 was a pioneer of queer cinema, creating more than 80 films in the course of her career. The 1982 short film “Audience” shows the dynamic interaction between the artist and the viewer that was at the core of her cinema. Nitrate Kisses from 1992 was her first feature-length work, a experimental documentary about the lives of queer people living on the margins of social acceptability. Microcinema begins at 7:00 p.m.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV Uncategorized

Now Playing In Memphis: Fear The Evil Dead

Lilly Sullivan cuts to the chase in Evil Dead Rise.

I know I say this a lot, but this time I really mean it: It’s a big weekend at the movies. While The Super Mario Bros. Movie continues to stack coins, there’s a whole slew of new releases, and a bunch of them look good.

First up is Evil Dead Rise. Sam Raimi’s 1983 horror film The Evil Dead slowly revolutionized the genre as its cult spread via VHS. In the 2000’s, the director would revolutionize the superhero genre with his still-undefeated Spider-Man trilogy. Now, Raimi has passed the reins to Irish director Lee Cronin for Evil Dead Rise, which has caught a lot of buzz in horror circles. In true Evil Dead fashion, it’s cheap ($15 million) and nasty. This is the Flyer, so I’m linking to the Red Band trailer.

Coming off an Indie Memphis preview screening, How To Blow Up A Pipeline is only playing on one screen in Cordova, but it may be the most consequential movie of the year. Director Daniel Goldhaber and actor Ariela Barer adapted author Andreas Malm’s 2021 nonfiction book about radical eco-activists. A diverse group of people, radicalized by different things, band together to destroy an oil pipeline in West Texas.

Ari Aster is nothing if not divisive, and his latest is no different. Hereditary was a startling adrenaline rush with an all-time great performance from Toni Collette. Midsomer was a super creepy folk horror riff that helped make Florence Pugh an A-list actor. With Beau Is Afraid, Aster is again teaming up with an actor willing to do anything: Joaquin Phoenix plays Beau, who exists in a constant state of low- to medium-level panic attack. Co-starring as people causing Beau discomfort are Patti Lupone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, and Parker Posey.

Chevalier de Saint-Georges was a French musician widely regarded as the first African-descended person to achieve musical success in Europe. He fought racism in the aristocratic circles where he played, then put down his violin and picked up a sword to fight in the French Revolution. Kevin Harrison, Jr. stars as Chevalier and Lucy Boynton as Marie Antoinette.

On Wednesday, April 26th, at Studio on the Square, Indie Memphis is throwing a benefit for OUTMemphis. Dressed In Blue is a groundbreaking 1983 film from Spain about six trans women who were feeling out the new world after the country had just emerged from decades of fascism under Franco. Vestida de Azul, as it is known in Spain, was directed by Antonio Giménez-Rico, and was unseen in the English speaking world for decades.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Invaders

The Invaders gained prominence during the 1968 sanitation workers strike

In the summer of 2020, as protests against police violence spread in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many Americans got a glimpse of what it was like during the height of the Civil Rights era. There was righteous anger, a sense of purpose, and a shared commitment to justice — but there were also bitter disagreements over which tactics were most effective, and a tug-of-war between those who believed state violence must be met with citizen violence, and those who believed nonviolent resistance was the only way. The newfound camaraderie of the street protests came with a frisson of suspicion — is one of us a Fed, reporting our plans and movements to the same law enforcement agencies whose methods and priorities we’re protesting?

All of this will sound familiar to anyone who saw The Invaders when it debuted at Indie Memphis in 2016. The film that director Prichard Smith and writer/producer JB Horrell made, tells the inside story of the Bluff City’s own homegrown Black Power group. Vietnam veteran John B. Smith founded The Invaders when he left the army after his tours of duty. The group aligned themselves with the militant rhetoric of groups like the Black Panthers. The Invaders first gained prominence during the sanitation workers strike of 1968, and then infamy when they were blamed for the riot which overtook Dr. Martin Luther King’s final march in Memphis. Later, the group’s claims that they had been the targets of a spying and smear campaign by the FBI’s COINTELPRO unit were confirmed.

Juanita Thornton

(In the spirit of full disclosure, this columnist worked briefly as a writing consultant on the film, but has no financial stake in the project’s success.)

“I don’t think there are enough stories looking at some of the inner pockets of the Civil Rights movement,” says Smith. “There are the main stories that you hear about the ministers and Dr. King and whatnot. But I would venture to guess that there are many, many more stories like The Invaders that should be told just to give a wider understanding of the whole situation. I think it will continue to be relevant. I think you could argue that if it came out in the middle of the George Floyd protests, that would have been the most relevant time it could have come out. But that’s not how it panned out.”

During the film’s 2016 festival run, which featured a stop at Doc NYC, The Invaders producers, including Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer, made a deal with a distribution company to help get the film out. But later, Smith says, they asked, “When you say ‘Help,’ does that mean you’ll help us pay for these licenses for all the different archival stuff that we had to license?’ And they basically came back and said, ‘No, we can’t help you with that.’ So from there we were kind of treading water, spinning our wheels.”

With The Invaders in limbo, Smith got a job with New York filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, whose documentary Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues played at Indie Memphis 2022. “I happened to be on the subway train with him, on our ways away from work, and he was like, ‘Hey what’s up with that Invaders thing?’”

Jenkins showed the film to rapper Nas, who signed on to do a new voice-over for the film. “He actually showed up in my office and was like, ‘I’ve never heard of this story! It’s so great! I can’t wait to get this out!’” recalls Smith. “He actually said — and this just threw me — ‘I was having dinner with Colin Kaepernick last night and all I could talk about was The Invaders.’”

Memphis hip-hop superstar Yo Gotti came on board as executive producer to help get the project over the finish line. Now, The Invaders is set for release via video on demand (VOD), which means you can buy or rent it on streaming services or storefronts such as Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video. Smith says a wider release may be in the offing next year. For Smith, the release is the final milestone on a long journey. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he says. “I guess it teaches you patience. There’s the things that you can control, and the things you can’t. Try not to sweat too hard the things you can’t because they will eat you up.”

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis Announces 2022 Audience Awards

Sam Now won the Audience Award for Best Poster at the 2022 Indie Memphis Film Festival.

The 25th annual Indie Memphis Film Festival wrapped on Monday night with Shaft. The juries’ decisions were announced at a raucous awards ceremony on Saturday night, but it’s taken until now to tabulate the results for the Audience Awards, which are determined by votes from ticket buyers, who are asked to assign each film a letter grade of A through F.

Audience and jury opinions lined up this year for three films which swept both awards. Our Father, The Devil by director Ellie Fombi won both of the Narrative Feature awards, and currently holds the coveted 100 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s a sample:

Kumina Queen by director Nyasha Laing similarly repeated its jury win in the Sounds category.

In the Hometowner categories, director Lauren Ready repeated in Documentary Shorts with “What We Will Never Know.” This is Ready’s fourth Indie Memphis trophy for documentaries, making her one of the most decorated filmmakers in the festival’s 25-year history.

The National Documentary Feature Audience Award went to Butterfly In The Sky, the story of the beloved PBS show Reading Rainbow by directors Brett Whitcomb and Bradford Thomason.

From the exceptionally crowded nine-film field of Hometowner features, audiences voted for Show Business is My Life — But I Can’t Prove It, director G.B. Shannon’s biography of legendary comedian Gary Mule Deer. The crowd-pleasing film about the crowd-pleasing funny man features appearances from comedy luminaries such as David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and Steve Martin, and dramatic recreations of some of Gary Mule Deer’s jokes and stories starring a who’s who of Memphis-based actors.

The audience’s favorite Hometowner Music Video of 2022 was “Imagine That” by Tailbah Safiyah, directed by Zaire Love. Check it out:

The Departures Audience Award, which includes experimental and generally “out there” works honored Maria Judice’s Elephant.

“Stress Dreams” by Greensky Bluegrass, directed by Grant Knolton, won the National Music Video Audience Award.

In the Short film categories, “F*** ‘Em R!ght B@cK” by Harris Doran won the National Narrative category, and “Call Me Anytime, I’m Not Leaving The House” by Sanjna Selva won the National Documentary category. Caleb Suggs’ “Homeboys Haunted 2” took home audience gold in the Hometowner Narrative Shorts. Audiences also chose Reed Harkness’ Sam Now, which won the jury award for Best Documentary, in the poster category.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis 2022 Wrap-Up

Percy Norris and “Big” Robert Stewart in The ’Vous


The 25th Indie Memphis Film Festival concluded last Monday with a film that made a case for the importance of the 1970 Blaxploitation wave, and a film that proved its point. Is That Black Enough For You? is the first movie by Elvis Mitchell, a former New York Times film critic and cinema scholar turned documentary director. Mitchell traced the history of Black representation in film from the era of silent “race” pictures and D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK, proto-blockbuster Birth of a Nation through the foreshortened careers of Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge to the wave of low-budget, Black-led gangster, adventure, and fantasy films which started in the late 1960s and crested with The Wiz. Films like Superfly and Coffy, Mitchell argues in his voluminous voice-over narration, presented the kinds of rousing heroes that attracted film-goers while the New Hollywood movement presented visions of angst-filled antiheroes.

Blaxploitation films also introduced a new kind of music to films and the concept of the soundtrack album, which was often released before the movie itself in order to drum up interest. The prime example was Shaft, which featured an Academy Award-winning soundtrack by Isaac Hayes. Mitchell introduced the classic with Willie Hall, the Memphis drummer who recorded the immortal hi-hat rhythm that kicks off Hayes’ theme song. Mitchell revealed in Is That Black Enough For You? that Hayes had been inspired by Sergio Leone’s score for Once Upon a Time in the West, and the score he penned for Shaft still holds up, providing much of the detective film’s throbbing propulsion.

The winners of the competitive portion of the 2022 film festival were announced at a hilariously irreverent awards ceremony Saturday evening at Playhouse on the Square. After a two-year hiatus, Savannah Bearden returned to produce the awards, which were “hosted” by Birdy, the tiny red metal mockingbird which has served as the film festival’s mascot for years. But amidst the nonstop jokes and spoof videos, there were genuinely touching moments, such as when Craig Brewer surprised art director and cameraperson Sallie Sabbatini with the Indie Award, which is given to outstanding Memphis film artisans, and when former Executive Director Ryan Watt was ambushed with the Vision Award.

The Best Narrative Feature award went to Our Father, the Devil, an African immigrant story directed by Ellie Foumbi. Kit Zauhar’s Actual People won the Duncan Williams Best Screenplay Award. The Documentary Feature award went to Reed Harkness for Sam Now, a portrait of the director’s brother that has been in production for the entire 25 years that Indie Memphis has been in existence.

The Best Hometowner Feature award, which honors films made in Memphis, went to Jack Lofton’s The ’Vous, a moving portrait of the people who make The Rendezvous a world-famous icon of Memphis barbecue. (“We voted with our stomachs,” said jury member Larry Karaszewski.) The Best Hometowner Narrative Short went to “Nordo” by Kyle Taubken, about a wife anxiously waiting for her husband to return from Afghanistan. Lauren Ready earned her second Indie Memphis Hometowner Documentary award for her short film “What We’ll Never Know.”

In the Departures category, which includes experimental, genre, and out-of-the-box creations, This House by Miryam Charles won Best Feature. (This House also won the poster design contest.) “Maya at 24” by legendary Memphis doc director Lynne Sachs won the Shorts competition, and “Civic” by Dwayne LeBlanc took home the first trophy in a new Mid-Length subcategory.

Sounds, the festival’s long-running music film series, awarded Best Feature to Kumina Queen by Nyasha Laing. The music video awards were won by the stop-motion animated “Vacant Spaces” by Joe Baughman; “Don’t Come Home” by Emily Rooker triumphed in the crowded Hometowner category.

Best Narrative Short went to “Sugar Glass Bottle” by Neo Sora, and Best Documentary Short went to “The Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms” by Eloise Sherrid and Lauryn Welch.

Some of the Special Awards date back to the origin of the festival in 1998, such as the Soul of Southern Film Award, which was taken by Ira McKinley and Bhawin Suchak’s documentary Outta The Muck. The Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award went to Me Little Me by Elizabeth Ayiku. The Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award went to Eric Younger’s Very Rare.

The IndieGrants program, which awards $15,000 in cash and donations to create short films, picked Anna Cai’s “Bluff City Chinese” and A.D. Smith’s “R.E.G.G.I.N.” out of 46 proposals submitted by Memphis filmmakers.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: Indie Memphis 2022 Winners

Today on Music Video Monday, we’re celebrating the winners of the music video competitions at the 25th annual Indie Memphis Film Festival. Two music video blocs screened during the six-day festival: The National competition, which actually included videos from all over the world, and the Hometowner competition for made-in-Memphis music videos.

The winner of the National award for Best Music Video was “Vacant Spaces” by Joe Baughman and the Righteous Few. Baughman is an Indiana-based singer songwriter who also directed the visually stunning stop-motion video. “Vacant Spaces” isn’t available on YouTube or Vimeo yet, but you can see it with an Indie Memphis virtual pass.

[Update: “Vacant Spaces” just went public on YouTube! Aaron Charles of The Righteous Few says “Joe worked for 3 years on this video, and it is so exciting to see that work rewarded.”]

The Best Hometowner Music Video was awarded to Emily Rooker’s “Don’t Come Home,” co-directed by Rooker and Mitchell Carter. As seen previously on Music Video Monday, “Don’t Come Home” was filmed at the Bartlett Performing Arts Center, and features the singer and some friends celebrating themselves after a bad breakup. Check it out!

The Indie Memphis Film Festival concludes tonight at Crosstown Theater.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis 2022 Sunday: Revolution, Anarchy, and Comedy

Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová in Daisies.

Indie Memphis Sunday is full of local treasures, fascinating new movies, and some stone cold classics. 

James Gray, director of The Lost City of Z and Ad Astra, is back with an autobiographical film about growing up on the cusp of the Reagan era. Armageddon Time (named for a classic reggae track by Willie Williams) stars Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway, and Jeremy Strong as a Jewish family struggling against prejudice in Queens, New York. 

Melissa Sweazy, a Memphis director whose 2017 documentary Good Grief swept the Indie Memphis awards, returns with Ready! Fire! Aim! The new doc is a biography of Kemmons Wilson, the Memphis entrepreneur who founded Holiday Inn, and changed the way the world travels. 

Director Bart Shannon is another Indie Memphis veteran. His new film Show Business Is My Life—But I Can’t Prove It is the story of Gary Mule Deer, a comedian whose 50 year career has touched the lives of millions. Among the friends of the comedian who appear in the film are David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Steve Martin, and Alice Cooper. The film also features recreations of incidents from Gary’s life starring a host of Memphis actors. 

Director Chuck O’Bannon is a Memphis video production legend. You might not have heard his name, but if you’re of a certain age, you’ve seen the commercial he produced for Brother James Salton’s Up From The World ministries hundreds of times. You know the one.

O’Bannon’s latest film is United Front—The People’s Convention 1991 Memphis. “I got a phone call from Annie Robinson,” he says, “who was one of the original community activist people involved with creating the People’s Convention back in 1991. They were getting ready to do their 30th anniversary, and she realized that the story had never been documented. When I read the script she sent to me, I was really excited about the idea of documenting one of the most historical events in Memphis history.” 

The 1991 People’s Convention brought together the fractured Black community in Memphis to choose a consensus candidate for mayor. Their choice was Dr. Willie Herenton, a former school superintendent who would go on to become the first Black mayor in Memphis history. “Getting everybody to agree on one of anything in Memphis is always the problem,” says O’Bannon. “This is the one time that the community came together on one accord and promoted one candidate—and it was successful! From that position, you were able to create other consensus candidates, consensus movements throughout Memphis, that allowed for what was at that time, the minority numbers to have a chance. And to show that, yes, this can be done. There were other communities in other cities that saw what Memphis had done and decided, if they can do it, we can do it too. So it’s sort of set a precedent around the idea of consensus-ism in political elections and probably in other parts of life as well.” 

At 6 p.m. is one of this year’s best revival screenings. Daisies was banned in Czechoslovakia upon its 1966 release for being too subversive. Věra Chytilová’s feminist classic takes on authority of all kinds, with a cinematic freedom rarely seen today. Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová as Marie I and Marie II provided the template for anarchist flamethrowers like Pussy Riot, who are still fighting authoritarianism in Eurasia today. 

For full information about everything playing today at Indie Memphis, check the festival website. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis 2022 Saturday: A Full Plate of Films

LeVar Burton stars in the Reading Rainbow documentary Butterfly in the Sky.

The 20222 Indie Memphis Film Festival is in full effect on Saturday, with a crowded lineup of films from all over the world. 

French director Alice Diop has gained acclaim for her documentaries. Her latest film Saint Omer is her first narrative feature. It tells the story of a young journalist covering the trial of a horrific crime who is forced to come to terms with her own traumatic past. 

Directors Jack Porter Lofton and Jeff Dailey dig into the past and present of a Memphis institution. The ’Vous is a documentary about Memphis’ most famous barbecue restaurant, The Rendezvous, which has been a hub for culture and tourism Downtown for 70 years. The 2:50 p.m. screening will be preceded by a reception at Playhouse on the Square. 

If you’re looking for some snack-sized docs, there’s the Hometowner Documentary Shorts Competition bloc at 3 p.m. at Circuit Playhouse. Five Memphis directors bring stories of courage and shine lights on injustice with these moving and challenging films. 

If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, odds are you remember Reading Rainbow. In Butterfly in the Sky, directors Brett Whitcomb and Bradford Thomason put the spotlight on LeVar Burton, the beloved host who taught millions of kids to love books. Oh, and did you know he was also in Star Trek: The Next Generation? 

Eighty-four-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski has had a rich and varied career as a writer, actor, and director. His latest film has an unlikely star: a donkey. EO is a reimagining of Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, which tells the tale of a lowly farm animal’s travails as he is passed from one owner to another. This one’s a real heartstring-tugger. 

For something completely different, Indie Memphis has a new program. A subcategory of Departures, which houses the more experimental short subjects, Travels showcases the mid-length films that often get left out of shorts programs. The four films include “Nosferasta: First Bite,” Bayley Sweitzer and Adam Khalil’s story of Oba, a 400-year-old Rastafarian vampire. 

The Art of Eating: The Life and Appetites of M. F. K. Fisher is a biography of the legendary travel and food writer who was once called “the best prose writer in America.” 

And finally, if your rock doc appetites were not satisfied by Antenna on Friday night, there’s Meet Me In The Bathroom, the documentary about the 2000’s indie rock scene in Brooklyn which produced The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, and Interpol, among others. This is an exciting and well-made doc with some incredible performance footage and a soul-bearing interview with rock goddess Karen O. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis 2022 Friday: Antenna

Jack Oblivian on stage at the Antenna club circa 1993.

One of my first questions for director Chris McCoy after watching Antenna was what punk rock means to him today. To this, he responded, “I don’t know. What do you think punk rock means today?” Being born in the 2000s, I don’t think I have ever really listened to punk. Not being born in Memphis, I had never even heard of the legends from the Antenna club, until I watched McCoy’s documentary.  

The story of the Antenna is told through the many faces of punk rock, including writer and stealth narrator Ross Johnson, director Chris McCoy (who is also the film and TV editor for the Memphis Flyer), editor/producer Laura Jean Hocking, Antenna club owner Steve McGehee, and former Flyer music writer John Floyd. All together, this team took three years to create the documentary. Hocking details the beginning stages of the film where they started “with more than a hundred hours of archival footage. We had 1,100 still images and 88 interviews, some of which were three and four hours long.” Hocking describes her editing process as “a big project that at the time, when I was making it, I had a lot of nervous breakdowns.” 

The inspiration behind Antenna was McCoy’s desire to tell “a story about Memphis that needed to be told, that had not yet been told.” This was the story of the Antenna, a punk rock club that stood on Madison Avenue from 1981 to 1995, a forgotten era of Memphis music — specifically Memphis punk rock music. McCoy calls it a “weird mutant strain of music that grabs little bits from a whole bunch of different kinds of music.” 

Jimmy Barker at the first Antenna party, 1980. 

As such, the Antenna club was “a place where you could be weird,” Hocking says. The club was not your usual Beale Street bar but an eclectic refuge where outsiders, weirdos, gays, and anyone without prejudice could be their authentic selves. Especially in its early days, Antenna’s punk rock spirit made it a place for experimentation, dedicated to the fight against conformity. A specific example McCoy uses is “one of my favorite shots in the movie is the video we found of that dude heckling The Replacements, saying, ‘We don’t care how famous you are!’ That’s the essence of the entire club right there in one moment.” 

Between the crime, the poverty, and the political turmoil, Memphis can sometimes seem cursed and hopeless. This is even mentioned with Johnson’s opening line of the film: “Memphis is cursed.” McCoy comments on this idea saying, “I always call Memphis your drunk uncle. I can complain about him and what a deadbeat he is, but nobody else can say something about it.” This spirit is encapsulated in the Antenna’s story, in “the story of those musicians who are still here and who didn’t get the recognition that they deserved,” McCoy says. Indeed, the Antenna club hosted various artists like R.E.M., Big Ass Truck, The Panther Burns, and The Modifiers, but these are just some of the artists that defined the era of punk rock and the resistance against conformity. 

Outcasts like Milford Thompson, Melody Danielsen, Alex Chilton, and The Klitz were able to express their true selves to the world. When daytime talk show host Marge Thrasher told The Panther Burns they were “the worst thing that ever came out on television,” bandleader Tav Falco just smiled. The Modifiers took pride in being “the most hated band in Memphis.” They were simply just, being themselves, and any hate or fear simply fell at their feet as they performed. “The attitude was, we dare you to like this music,” says McCoy. 

Tav Falco and the Panther Burns on Marge Thrasher’s talk show. 

This film is truly a labor of love and takes the audience back to the time where music not only united a community but also created a place to escape from the prejudices of society. McCoy remembers “hanging out at the Antenna from ’89 to ’95, when it closed.” Watching the film, I understood what it might feel like to be transported back to the ’80s, with a front row seat at the Antenna. Hocking says this was intentional. “We wanted you to feel like you’re at the club or hanging out with these people or in a round table discussion with them.” 

Framing the film this way makes for a very intimate connection with something that to me, previously seemed foreign. Throughout the film, I found myself identifying with the Antenna crowd and their love for a place that shielded them from the rest of  society. Seeing the many faces of punk rock and former Antenna attendees profess their love for the Antenna club, made me wonder if there was anything similar to the Antenna club today. When the film ended, I felt like I had just been to my first and favorite rock concert in my life. 

Lisa Alridge singing with The Klitz.

Antenna speaks for itself with its continued and growing popularity even after its premiere 10 years ago in 2012 at the Indie Memphis Film Festival. The film has been awarded the Audience Award, Special Jury Prize, and other various awards at the Oxford Film Festival, and it is recognized as one of the most popular films in the 25 year history of the Indie Memphis Film Festival. Although the film has an immense love among its audience, it cannot currently be released commercially because of issues with obtaining music rights for the 50 different songs present in the film. McCoy and the film’s producers have spent the last 10 years trying to raise money to pay the artists for their songs and give them the recognition they deserve. Despite several investors’ and distributors’ interest in the film, fundraising efforts have always come to a halt and been unsuccessful. Thus, the film can only be caught at film festivals and on rare occasions. 

The next screening of this film will be on Friday, October 21st, 8:45 p.m., at Playhouse on the Square during the Indie Memphis Film Festival to celebrate the film’s 10-year anniversary. Tickets ($12/individual screening) can be purchased online or at the door if not sold out already.