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.
(from top to bottom) Scenes from the pioneering 1922 horror film Häxan, Howard Bell’s Jookin, and Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb's Butterfly in the Sky.
These days, it seems that film discourse is dominated by discussions about the future. But while there are real issues facing the unique combination of art and commerce we call cinema, there’s more to movies than just the multiplex — and that’s what Indie Memphis has specialized in for the last 25 years.
“We are kind of in our own lane,” says Executive Director Kimel Fryer. “Indie Memphis is like no other film festival, because Memphis is like no other city.”
Indie Memphis was founded in 1998 by a group of University of Memphis film students led by Kelly Chandler. Known then as the Memphis Independent Film Festival, it attracted about 40 people to a Midtown coffee shop, where they watched student movies projected on a sheet hung on the wall. Nowadays, the annual festival boasts an attendance of more than 11,000, and the organization hosts programming and events year-round, such as the monthly Shoot & Splice programs, where filmmakers provide deep dives into their craft. The Indie Grants program was created in 2014 to help fund Memphis-made short films. The Black Creators Forum began in 2017 to help address the historic racial inequalities in filmmaking. During the pandemic, Eventive, a Memphis-based cinema services company that began as Indie Memphis’ online ticketing system, pioneered the virtual programming which is now an established feature of film festivals worldwide.
“It took 25 years for Indie Memphis to become an organization that reflects the city,” says Artistic Director Miriam Bale. “But each step along the way has added to what makes it special now.”
Memphis Grizzlies superstar Z-Bo in Michael Blevins’ 50 for Da City.Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová in Daisies.Tahar Rahim is a jilted lover in Don Juan.
A New Leader
Kimel Fryer took over as Indie Memphis’ new executive director only a few weeks ago. But she is no stranger to either Memphis or the world of independent film. She’s a West Tennessee native whose mother has taught at Oak Elementary since the mid-1990s. “My mom was always tough on me, and I’m grateful for it because I ended up kind of inheriting that from her,” she says. “In my mind, I’m supposed to reach for the stars. I’m supposed to overachieve.”
Fryer holds graduate degrees in law and business from the University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She has worked for companies as diverse as Lincoln Pacific and Pfizer, and left FedEx to take over the reins of Indie Memphis when Knox Shelton resigned after only a year on the job. The mother of two saw it as an opportunity to merge her professional life with her passion for film. “When I was working for Chrysler, I realized that I had this amazing job that I worked my butt off for,” she says. “It was a great company with great benefits. But I was depressed. If I wanna be completely honest, it was one of the saddest periods of my life.”
Growing up, Fryer had tried her hand at writing, and she had been involved with theater and band programs in high school and college. In Detroit, she found a new outlet for her creativity when she volunteered as casting director for filmmaker Robert Mychal Patrick Butler’s Life Ain’t Like the Movies. “The independent film world is very visible in Detroit,” she says.
When she landed Coming 2 America star Paul Bates for a role in the film, Butler promoted her to producer. “I said, ‘What is a producer?’ He said, ‘You’re kinda already doing it.’”
Fryer wrote and directed her own short film, “Something’s Off,” which will screen at Indie Memphis 2022. She says she got her acceptance email just a few weeks before she found out she was going to be the new executive director. “I’ve found this career where I could kind of wrap all my skills into one job,” she says. “I could actually be my full self all the time, which is really my dream.
“I’m very eager to learn and eager to meet other people, understand how they do things. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that I am coming back to Memphis, and we’ve always been a different city that has marched to the beat of our own drum. We’ve got to continue that as we continue to grow and strive for greatness in the film community. I’m really excited about what’s next. I believe in Indie Memphis. I believe in the staff. I believe we are headed towards a great film festival.”
The Picture Taker
From the 1950s to his death in 2007, it seemed that photographer Ernest Withers was everywhere. “We keep calling him a Zelig-like figure or like Forrest Gump,” says Phil Bertelsen, director of Indie Memphis 2022’s opening night film The Picture Taker. “He was at every flash point in Civil Rights history, and then some.”
Ernest Withers, courtesy of the Withers Family Trust.
Withers was a tireless documenter of Black life in the South. His work even appeared in publications like Jet and the Chicago Defender. “Some of my favorite photos of his are street portraits — the photos he took of everyday people just going about their daily business,” says Bertelsen.
“I think what made him almost like a father figure in Memphis was the fact that he recorded his community’s lives literally from birth to death,” says producer Lise Yasui. “He left behind an estimated 1.8 million photos. They are of every major event in every family’s life — as we say, it’s celebrations as well as sorrows. He locked that into their histories and made sure that they had these records of the lives they lived. Those photographs are really beautiful. They have an intimacy that can only come from someone inside the community.”
Three years after Withers’ 2007 death, Commercial Appeal reporter Marc Perrusquia revealed that the trusted photographer had been a paid informant for the FBI. The news came as a shock to many in the community, who saw it as a betrayal of the Civil Rights activists who had trusted Withers. “When you go behind the headlines and the surface of it all, you recognize that there’s a lot of nuance and complexity to that choice that he made at that time,” says the director. “What we attempted to do with the film is to try to understand that time, that choice, and the man who was at the center of it all.
“I think it could be said, without question, that Ernest was a patriot who believed in the hope and promise of this country,” continues Bertelsen. “Don’t forget he was a fourth-generation American war veteran.”
Withers was far from the only one talking to the FBI — their reports refer to him as source #338. “I had the privilege and the workload of reading as many of the FBI files as we could get our hands on,” says Yasui. “They tell a story that’s pretty intense and really detailed in terms of names, places, affiliations, and friendships — everything down to personal gossip. The other thing that you have to understand is they are FBI records written by FBI agents. So there’s not a single document in the 7,000+ pages that I’ve read that is a direct quote from Ernest himself. It’s always through the lens of his FBI handler. That’s not to say that what he wrote was not accurate, but it’s filtered through their agenda, which was to root out radicals who were allegedly inside the Civil Rights movement. …We heard testimony that he basically kept people from harm’s way because he knew what he knew. But at the same time, he damaged the reputations of people by informing on them. It was a double-edged sword that he was wielding.”
Ironically, it’s people like Coby Smith, a member of the Memphis-based Black Power group The Invaders, prime targets of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, who defend Withers in The Picture Taker. “He was a man of great reputation and appreciation,” says Bertelsen. “In fact, we were hard-pressed to find anyone who had anything negative to say about him, even after it was shown that he informed on them.”
For Bertelsen and Yasui, this is the end of a six-year journey. “We are so grateful to the many people of Memphis who helped us get this story, especially the family who really took a leap of faith by trusting us with his images,” says Bertelsen. “They’ve had to face some very painful revelations about their patriarch, and they’re still facing them. I think it shows a certain amount of grace and trust and understanding. There are a lot of ways you can interpret this story, and they haven’t shied away from the truth. They told us they learned things about their dad that they didn’t know before, through this film. That’s very gratifying to us.”
The Poor & Hungry
In 2021, Craig Brewer directed Coming 2 America. It was his second collaboration with comedy superstar Eddie Murphy, and the biggest hit in the history of Amazon Studios.
In 2000, the biggest job Brewer had ever held was a clerk at Barnes & Noble bookstore. That was the year his first feature film, The Poor & Hungry, premiered at Indie Memphis. “I still feel that it was the biggest premiere that I’ve ever been to, and the one with the highest stakes,” he says. “Winning Best Feature for 2000 is still the greatest award I can ever remember winning in my life. … The festival back then was a beacon. It was the North Star. We were all making something so we could showcase it at Indie Memphis. It’s something I hope is still happening with the younger filmmakers today. I had another short that year called ‘Cleanup In Booth B.’ It was a big, productive time for me. But it was also the first time ever to see my work being shown in front of people at a movie theater.”
Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, which premiered at Indie Memphis Festival in 2000, will return to the festival.
The Poor & Hungry is the story of Eli (Eric Tate), a Memphis car thief who accidentally falls in love with one of his victims, a cellist named Amanda (Lake Latimer). The characters’ lives revolve around the P&H Cafe, a legendary Midtown dive bar which was run by the flamboyant Wanda Wilson, who plays herself. To call the black-and-white feature, shot with a handheld digital camcorder, “gritty” is a massive understatement. But Brewer was able to wring some striking, noir-like images from his cheap equipment, and the film features a series of great performances, most notably Lindsey Roberts’ stunning turn as Harper, a lesbian street hustler.
“I think what I got right on it is something that I tried to carry over to Hustle & Flow, which was, how do you create characters that, if somebody were to just describe them to you, you would say, ‘I don’t think I would like them’? But then, when you start watching them in the story, you find that you not only love them, but you want them to succeed, and you feel for them when they’re in pain.”
Made for $20,000, which Brewer inherited when his father Walter died suddenly of a heart attack, The Poor & Hungry would go on to win Best Feature at the Hollywood Film Festival, defeating films which had cost millions to produce. It got his foot in the door in Hollywood and earned him the opportunity to direct his second feature film Hustle & Flow, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning one for Three 6 Mafia’s song “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp.”
The Poor & Hungry will return to the festival where it premiered as part of Indie Memphis’ 25th anniversary celebration. “When I look at it now, I view it as an artifact of a time in Memphis. There are so many places that aren’t there anymore. The P&H Cafe that it’s named after is no more, and Wanda has left this planet in bodily form but remains in spirit. I’m so glad that I captured all that. It’s good to see a Memphis that may not be there anymore. But most importantly, I hope people come see it because it’s the movie that I point people to when they say that they want to make a movie but they think it’s impossible. Well, I made this with just a small camcorder, a microphone, four clamp lights, and a lot of effort.”
Hometown Heroes
It’s a bumper crop year for the Hometowner categories, which showcase films made here in the Bluff City. In addition to anniversary celebrations of Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry and this columnist’s punk rock documentary Antenna, nine features from Memphis filmmakers are screening during the festival.
Jookin is Howard Bell IV’s story of an aspiring dancer caught up in Memphis street life. The ’Vous by Jack Porter Lofton and Jeff Dailey is a documentary about the world-famous Rendezvous restaurant. Ready! Fire! Aim! is Melissa Sweazy’s portrait of Memphis entrepreneur Kemmons Wilson, founder of Holiday Inn. Show Business Is My Life — But I Can’t Prove It by G.B. Shannon is a documentary about the 50-year career of comedian Gary Mule Deer. Michael Blevins’ 50 for Da City recounts Z-Bo’s legendary run as a Memphis Grizzly. Cxffeeblack to Africa by Andrew Puccio traces Bartholomew Jones’ pilgrimage to Ethiopia to discover the roots of the java trade. United Front: The People’s Convention 1991Memphis is Chuck O’Bannon’s historical documentary about the movement that produced Memphis’ first Black mayor. Daphene R. McFerren’s Facing Down Storms: Memphis and the Making of Ida B. Wells sheds light on the Black journalist’s early years in the Bluff City. The Recycle King is Julian Harper’s character sketch of fashion designer Paul Thomas.
Bartholomew Jones in Andrew Puccio’s documentary Cxffeeblack to AfricaJack Oblivian in the Memphis punk rock documentary Antenna
On opening night is the Hometowner Narrative Shorts Competition. In recent years, this has been the toughest category in the entire festival, where Memphis filmmakers stretch their talents to the limits for 10 minutes at a time.
Janay Kelley is one of eight filmmakers whose works were chosen to screen in the narrative shorts competition. A junior at Rhodes College, she’s a product of the Indie Memphis CrewUp mentorship program, and two-time Grand Prize winner at the Indie Memphis Youth Festival. “This is my first film festival as an adult,” she says.
Kelley’s film is “The River,” an experimental marriage of imagery and verse. “My grandmother told me once that the river that you got baptized in could be the same river that drowns you in the morning. I like that dichotomy of healing and of destroying, of accepting new people into your life and saying, ‘Will you help me or will you harm me?’”
Kelley provides her own narration for the film, which was based on a prose poem she wrote while still in high school. “I take a lot of inspiration from my Southern heritage, especially from the women in my family,” she says.
The visuals reference several Black artists of the 20th century, especially the painting Funeral Procession by Ellis Wilson, which was famously featured on The Cosby Show. Kelley treats the many women, young and old, who appear in the film with a portraitist’s touch.
“Before I started in films, I was really into photography, and you can see a lot of that still in my work,” she says. “I come from a very poor background. There is a specific picture of my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt, and they got it taken at the fair. Back in the day, they used to take people’s portraits there, so some families would get dressed up to go to the fair to get their portraits taken, because they couldn’t afford to get it done any way else. What you need to know about being poor and Black in the South is that a lot of us don’t live long. So some of the stories I’ve heard about my family members, I’ve heard after they have died, and I’ve had to kind of stare at their pictures. I think it comes out of a genuine love of the history of photography, and what it meant for people like me.”
Witchcraft Through the Ages
Indie Memphis’ October spot on the calendar means that it coincides with what Bale calls “the spooky season,” when many horror movie aficionados embark on a monthlong binge watch. For this year’s festival, Bale programed a pair of rarely seen horror classics that have significant anniversaries. The first is Ghostwatch, a British mockumentary which debuted 30 years ago.
In the tradition of Orson Welles’ infamous Halloween radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” Ghostwatch was presented as a Halloween special in which real-life BBC journalists Sarah Greene and Craig Charles would broadcast a live investigation of a supposedly haunted house. But their goofy Halloween jokes turn serious when the house’s real ghosts show up and start causing mayhem. When it was first broadcast on Halloween night in 1992, the BBC switchboard was jammed with more than 1 million calls from viewers concerned that their favorite newscasters were being slaughtered by ghosts on live television. “This is a staff favorite,” says Bale.
The second Halloween special is Häxan, which has its 100th anniversary this year. Indie Memphis commissioned a new score for the silent film from Alex Greene, who is also the music editor for the Memphis Flyer. For this performance, Greene’s jazz ensemble The Rolling Head Orchestra — Jim Spake, Tom Lonardo, Mark Franklin, Carl Caspersen, and Jim Duckworth — will be joined by theremin virtuoso Kate Taylor. “We’ve been wanting to work with Alex for a long time, and this was a great opportunity,” says Bale.
Indie Memphis honors the 100th anniversary of the pioneering 1922 horror film Häxan with a new live score from Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra.
Director Benjamin Christensen based Häxan on his study of the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), a guide for clergymen conducting witch hunts, published in 1486. Upon its premiere in 1922, Häxan was the most expensive silent film made in Europe. Christensen’s meticulous recreations of witches’ Sabbath celebrations, complete with flying broomsticks and an appearance by a mischievous Satan (played by the director himself), still look incredible. Its frank depictions of the Inquisition provide the horror. “I was shocked by how much of it is framed by the torture of the witches,” says Greene. “It implies that a lot of this crazy behavior they described was just victims trying to make up anything to stop the thumbscrews.”
Released a decade before Dracula ushered in the modern horror era, Häxan is a unique cinema experience. “I think of it as kind of like Shakespeare’s time, when the English language was not as settled in spellings and meanings of words. It was a fluid language,” says Greene. “This film came at a time when the language of cinema was very fluid and kind of up for grabs, which is why you could have this weird hybrid of documentary/reenactment/essay.”
“It’s within the Halloween realm, but not necessarily a horror movie,” says Bale. “That’s part of what’s so interesting about it. There are some silent films that just feel so fresh, they could have been made yesterday. Häxan is one of those.”
The 25th Indie Memphis Film Festival runs from October 19th to the 22nd at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre, Crosstown Theater, Black Lodge, Malco Studio on the Square, The Circuit Playhouse, Playhouse on the Square, and virtually on Eventive. Festival passes and individual film tickets can be purchased at indiememphis.org. The Memphis Flyer will feature continuing coverage of Indie Memphis 2022 on the web at memphisflyer.com.
Director Phil Bertelsen's documentary The Picture Taker reflects on the complicated legacy of Ernest Withers. (Photo courtesy Withers Family Trust)
The 25th edition of the Indie Memphis Film Festival will open at the Halloran Centre on October 19 with The Picture Taker, director Phil Bertelsen’s documentary about Memphis photographer Ernest Withers.
Withers was famous for his indelible images of Black life in Memphis and the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike. After his death, his role as a paid informant for the FBI was revealed, leaving many to question his legacy in the Civil Rights movement. Bertelsen’s film wrestles with Withers’ complex life and legacy.
Bertelsen’s most recent project, the six-part series Who Killed Malcom X?, prompted a re-investigation of the Civil Rights leader’s 1965 assassination that exonerated two men who had been wrongly convicted of participating in the crime.
“We’re thrilled and honored to be chosen as the Indie Memphis opening night film!” says Bertelsen. “The Picture Taker couldn’t have been made without the many Memphians who sat before and behind our cameras — opening their homes and hearts and lending their stories and creativity to this production. We look forward to bringing this story back home to the city that was Ernest Withers’ muse. Thank you, Memphis!”
This year’s film festival will run from October 19-24, both in-person at various venues in the Bluff City and in the online virtual format that emerged during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The full lineup will be revealed at a preview party at Black Lodge on Tuesday, September 13th at 6:30 p.m. You can RSVP to the preview part and purchase passes to the festival at the Indie Memphis website.
The seventh annual Indie Memphis Youth Fest returns this weekend.
From its inception 25 years ago as a forum for Memphis filmmakers to show their work, Indie Memphis has had artist development as a big part of its mission. The ultimate expression of that mandate is the Youth Film Fest. Now in its seventh year, the Youth Film Fest returns in-person this Saturday, August 27th, after two years of meeting virtually.
The one-day fest will be held Downtown at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre. This year’s keynote speaker will be Craig Brewer, director of Hustle & Flow and Coming 2 America. Brewer is a Memphis filmmaking pioneer who wrote, directed, and produced his first movie The Poor & Hungry here in 2000. He will be speaking on the subject of storytelling and the importance of understanding not only what techniques will move the audience, but also why and how each story is being told.
During the spring and summer, the Indie Memphis CrewUp program brings together groups of students between grades 7 and 12 to create a short film under the tutelage of a professional to screen at the Youth Film Fest. This year’s batch of nine films, all produced with budgets of $500, will screen at 12:15 p.m. A second batch of 11 short films created by Mid-South students will screen at 5 p.m. The audience will vote for their favorite film, which will win a $300 prize. The winner of the jury prize will receive $500.
A new production grant program modeled on the highly successful IndieGrants awards $5,000 to one youth filmmaker for a short-film proposal. The first Youth Grant winner in 2019 was Janay Kelley. Her film “The River” will make its world premiere at 2 p.m., accompanied by an informational session about the requirements of the grant program.
Workshops will be held throughout the afternoon, including makeup with Mandie J, production design and title graphics with Mica Jordan, stunt choreography with Jyo “Six” Carolino, directing actors with Princeton James, cinematography with Jason Thibodeaux, and the delightfully titled “Producing & Other Weird Jobs” with Sharrika Evans.
The day will end with a group dinner and trivia contest at 6:45 p.m., and the awards show at 7:30 p.m.
Registration begins at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 27th. Passes, which can be either in-person or, for those unable to attend, virtual, are available at the Indie Memphis website.
African hackers build a techno-utopia in Neptune Frost.
Neptune Frost is the only movie I watched twice during virtual Sundance last January.
Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s afro-futurist musical is bursting with energy and life. Filmed in Rwanda, it features an amazing cast of artists, many of whom are war refugees, and some of the most striking costumes and production design you’ll see anywhere.
Even though they were working with a vanishingly small budget, Uzeyman and Williams stage spectacular musical numbers filmed on location deep in the forest and in a working mine. The resourcefulness of the production is equaled by the sophistication of the ideas embedded in the afro beat soundtrack.
“The concept came first and once Anisa and I had the concept, the first thing I wanted to use towards world-building was the music,” says Williams.
Neptune Frost is a fantasy of revolution arising from the coltan mines of Africa. The mineral is used extensively in computers and consumer electronics, but the people condemned to extract it see none of the material wealth and comfort their labor enables. Near the mine is a vast landfill of e-waste, where scavengers search through mountains of discarded keyboards and monitors for a few grams of valuable metals. In between, a group of rebels carve out Digita, a would-be utopia led by a supernatural hacker named Neptune (Cheryl Isheja).
Cheryl Isheja in Neptune Frost.
“This film was born when Anisia and I discovered the phenomenon of e-waste camps, which are situated around the continent, usually very close to the mines where the materials that go into our technology are taken,” says Williams. “And so, around the same time, we discover that there’s these village sites and camps with mounds of motherboards and keyboards and towers and all these things.
“We were also tuning into a lot of the recycled art that was coming out of these situations — not just art, but science. We were learning about people in Togo, for example, who were taking e-waste and making 3D printers out of it. We learned about people in Sierra Leone who were taking e-waste and making robotic prosthetic limbs out of.
“So, there was a lot of stuff on our timeline that was very inspiring, that that made us envision this idea of a village made of recycled computer parts. The production designer and costume designer that we worked with is a Rwandan artist by the name of Cedric Mizero. When he heard the story, he was very shy. He listened, and then the next morning he showed up at our place in Rwanda with sandals made of motherboards. We were very clear on the fact that we had found the right person.”
During the month-long production, Uzeyman and Williams filmed in extreme circumstances far from the nearest town, sometimes while coordinating crews of more than 100 people.
“It was really intense,” says Uzeyman. “We traveled the country, which is said to be the land of a thousand hills.”
Williams says they were lucky to connect with an established group of artists in the Rwandan capital.
“The political unrest in Burundi in 2015 sent a lot of students, artists, and activists, over the border, into Kigali,” Williams said. “And so, that scene there is really reflective of amazing talent from Burundi and Rwanda; that’s what the film really reflects. All of the members of our cast are established musicians, poets, actors, choreographers, dancers, and drummers and they were already in the mode of performance. What carried us was their excitement about participating in this story.”
“It’s like a portrait of a generation,” says Uzeyman.
Designer Cedric Mizero created spectacular costumes and sets from e-waste.
At every turn in Neptune Frost, there is a sense of an old world dying, and a new one struggling to be born.
“It really reflect the fluidity of the youth in Rwanda, where we shot the film,” says Uzeyman. “On the continent, people speak like five languages correctly, regularly. And it’s something that we found very new and very beautiful to show because it’s not especially portrayed a lot — that fluidity that the migrations and all those movements inside of the continent produce.”
Williams says the free intermixing of language became a kind of metaphor for the new world of unlimited information.
“As an American sitting at a table, listening to a conversation, and realizing that people are choosing which expression from which language works best, it became super important for us platform that in the film,” Williams says.
Amidst all the beats and costumes and dancing, Williams says “we’re connecting dots between how the brain works and functions and the coding patterns of language, and what it means to break those codes. Those guys do it fluidly.”
Indie Memphis, in association with Tone, the Black Creator’s Forum, and Dedza, is sponsoring a free screening of Neptune Frost at Crosstown Arts on Wednesday, June 15th. It is a truly unique cinema experience that has been blowing minds all around the world.
“We are very happy with all that people see in the work,” says Williams. “We are very proud to have connected so strongly with the LGBTQ community, with indigenous community, and with the tech community. And we see that the people who now have a chance to see it…that it’s resonating with them.
“We’re just excited about people being able to explore this world and this universe. We obviously built something with a lot of space for questions, with a lot of space for the imagination. We wanted to invite the viewer in to, to participate in our creative process.”
Shery Bechara and Lilas Mayassi appear in Sirens by Rita Baghdadi, an official selection of the World CInema: Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Rita Baghdadi.
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Sundance, the largest and most prestigious film festival in the United States, was not immune to the effects of the Covid pandemic. Last year, the festival went to a hybrid model, which included both screenings online and adopting a number of satellite screening locations all over the country. Indie Memphis was one of the regional festivals that partnered with Sundance to bring the independent films produced outside of the Hollywood system, which the festival specializes in, to local audiences. The satellite screening partnerships were so successful that Sundance decided to make it a permanent part of their program, even before the Omicron variant put a damper on the usual festivities in Park City, Utah.
In a time when the film business is in a state of flux, and the fates of Sundance’s up-and-coming filmmakers looks more uncertain than ever, these partnerships represent a great opportunity for both the festivals and the audience. Indie Memphis will be one of only seven places in the United States where you can watch Sundance 2022 films in person. “We are honored to keep the theatrical element alive at Sundance this year with these Indie Memphis screenings at Crosstown, especially the screenings with Memphians involved and present,” says Indie Memphis Artistic Director Miriam Bale.
The weekend of film at Crosstown Theater kicks off on Friday, January 28th, at 6 p.m. with Sirens. In this documentary, director Rita Baghdadi profiles Slave to Sirens, the Middle East’s only all-female thrash-metal band. It is both a portrait of a pioneering cultural and musical force, and a personal, street-level look at the impact decades of political dysfunction and war have had on the once-vibrant city of Beirut.
On Saturday, January 29th, a full day of programming starts at 11 a.m. with two shorts and a feature. Every Day in Kaimuki is a product of the increasingly vibrant indie film scene in Hawaii. Director Alika Tengan tells the story of Naz, a native Hawaiian who has spent his life longing to leave for places with more opportunity. But once it looks like he’ll get his wish and move to New York with his girlfriend, he starts to feel some doubts.
One of the two shorts screening at 11 is “What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto” by director Hope Tucker. The experimental documentary travels to New Mexico, near where the first atomic bomb was tested, to get advice on making “the journey of the dead.” Tucker is a former Memphian who now teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She will be on hand for a Q&A after the film. “It’s particularly exciting to be able to have a specific local connection to these films, which will make these experiences more singular,” says Indie Memphis programmer Kayla Myers.
At 2 p.m. is Free Chol Soo Lee. The documentary is about a 20-year-old Korean immigrant who, in 1973, was wrongly accused of murder in San Francisco, and the investigative reporter who fought to clear his name. At 6 p.m. is La Guerra Civil, a documentary by actor-turned-director Eva Longoria Bastón, about the 1996 boxing match between Oscar De La Hoya and Julio César Chávez, which divided the Mexican community on both sides of the border. Then, at 9 p.m., is Emergency. The dramedy by director Carey Williams and screenwriter K.D. Dávila follows a pair of uptight Black college friends whose let-your-hair-down night of partying is thrown into crisis by the addition of an overdosed white girl, and they race to get her help while trying to avoid a confrontation with the cops.
Honk for Jesus
On Sunday, Marte Um(Mars One) begins the program at 1 p.m. A film from Brazilian collective Filmes de Plástico, it dives deep into the lives of a Brazilian family on the eve of the election of right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. At 5 p.m. is Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul, a mockumentary with some serious star power. Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star as pastors from an Atlanta megachurch who fell from grace following a scandal and try to return to their former glory, despite having only a handful of congregants left. The final film of the evening is Alice, a film by Krystin Ver Linden, in which an enslaved person escapes in the antebellum South, only to find that, in the world beyond the plantation, it’s actually 1973. Memphian Kenneth Farmer, who acts in the film, will provide an introduction.
You can purchase tickets for Sundance in Memphis at the Indie Memphis website. Admission is $12 per film, $10 for members, and there are discounted ticket packages available.
Just before Thanksgiving, the local arts scene was dealt a blow when Nan Nunes Hackman –– who documented Memphis music and contributed much to local film making –– passed away from Covid-19 on Sunday, November 21, after her immune system was compromised by lymphoma cancer and its treatments. She was 67.
Earlier this year, Memphis magazine’s profile of her life and work was a welcome corrective to her largely unsung efforts in the Memphis arts scene. Now, many are reflecting on just how much she brought to the city and its artists.
“It sucks to lose somebody so suddenly, without being able to say goodbye,” says guitarist and songwriter Robert Allen Parker, who collaborated with Hackman on the 2013 documentaryMeanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution. “I always talked to Nan weekly. All through the pandemic we’d do a video call, up until last week, even when she went in the ICU hospital bed. And she was still very much in high spirits. This whole time, the fact that she was at Vanderbilt getting the treatment was looking positive.”
Staying positive was a particular strength of Hackman’s. As a teacher in Shelby County Schools’ Creative Learning in a Unique Environment [CLUE] program for 20 years, Hackman developed an interest in video and film, and touched many lives as she did. “There’s one young man who I taught around the year 1980, and he was making an animated Super 8 movie with cardboard cutouts and stop motion animation,” she recalled when we spoke earlier this year. “And he was really into it. You would run into these kids who got excited about it and they wanted to go ahead and do additional projects. So this kid was motivated. He took the preliminary instruction and ran with it. And that’s what you want. Also, these movies were all silent, back then. So we would put appropriate music on a cassette and play it with the film, and hope that they were sort of in sync. And that’s what he did. His movie was The Attack of the Killer Ants. He’s well into his 50s now. He went to L.A. and decided to hang around the TV world there. The last I heard, he was working on How I Met Your Mother. So he parlayed this interest that started when he was a 7th grader into a career. That’s very rewarding!”
Her positive outlook led her to push herself to do more and more video and film work on her own, though she remained steadfastly homespun about it. “I’m not a professional. I don’t want to be. I want to do the projects that I want to do,” she told me. And yet she had a knack for creating quality work, as the response to Meanwhile in Memphis attested to. Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr called it “a sprawling, important document of the city’s modern musical underground,” and it won the Audience Award at the 2013 Indie Memphis Film Festival.
If that film revealed her skills as a producer and an editor, her years of documenting Rhodes College theater productions and performances by the New Ballet Ensemble had honed her instincts for capturing magic in the moment. And, well before camera phones were ubiquitous, she paid her dues to be able to do so. “I filmed the very first footage of Charles ‘Lil Buck’ Riley, the jooking dancer, in 2007, doing ‘The Dying Swan,’” she explained. “It was an improvisation, and the reason it exists is because I lugged a heavy camera to a school show in West Memphis in October of 2007 and filmed him, and then put it up on YouTube. Eventually it went viral, but it literally happened because I lugged a camera. That experience showed me the importance of capturing one incredible performance. It was the first time he had performed it. And it was an improvisation. As he was doing it, I was aware of the importance of capturing it. I will say, it was very satisfying to see that it yielded such great fruit.”
She continued to take on independent projects, including producing and shooting a series of music videos for Parker’s album, The River’s Invitation.
Through it all, Hackman always pointed out how important her husband, Dr. Béla Hackman, was to her work in the arts. “I couldn’t do any of this without Béla,” she explained. “He supports me financially, gives me moral support, and he keeps my computer running. And Béla is also the graphic designer for Rob’s albums. He’s self-taught and very good at it. He has some wicked Photoshop skills and has studied design principles. And he’s meticulous. So all the graphics are extremely clean and professional looking. Whereas, I have some rudimentary skills, and I am quick and dirty. You do not want me doing the final version of your graphics. I will slap something together quickly. But that makes for a good partnership, because I can get stuff done on a deadline, and he can do it correctly. We work well together.”
An obituary in TheCommercial Appeal quotes Dr. Hackman as saying that a memorial service for Nan Hackman will likely be held next spring. It also quotes his summation of what motivated her to do the work she excelled at: “All this stuff was going on that was not being documented and preserved. The idea is, she’s trying to perpetuate this stuff for future generations, for posterity. That’s really what drove her.”
The rules for Music Video Monday state that all the music videos we feature have to be from either a Memphis musical artist or a Memphis filmmaker — preferably both. But once a year, I bend the rules — which I can do, because I wrote the rules — to bring you the winners of the Indie Memphis Film Festival music video competition.
The Hometowner Audience Award went to “Buzzsaw Kick” by Idi x Tico,which was the subject of last week’s Music Video Monday.
The winner of the Audience Award for national music videos was “Fire” by Fimone. I can’t embed it here, but you can watch it on Fimone’s YouTube channel.
The winner of the jury award for National Music Video (which really should be called the International category) was “Hideaway” by the French artists NÎM. This spectacular visual was created by Studio V7, Gaïa Maniquant-Rogozyk & Pablo Chazel. You’ll believe that whales can fly!
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
It’s the closing day of Indie Memphis 2021. The annual film festival has been a whirlwind of images and moments tearing across theater screens and the TVs and laptops of the virtual festival.
Saturday night was the Hometowner Music Video Showcase at the Malco Summer Drive-In. Many of the videos in competition have been featured on Music Video Monday, but there was one great one we missed. Jordan Danelz and Sharrika Evans created an arresting, cinematic video for Idi x Tico’s “Buzzsaw Kick.” This one’s the total package. The song, by the group who used to be called Hippy Soul, is killer, and the visuals are inventive and extremely well executed. Beyond that, it’s pretty hard to describe, so just watch.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
There’s a lot going on at Indie Memphis on Sunday. There’s George Tiller’s documentary about Memphians who made it to the NFL, The Lucky Eleven; Tilda Swinton in the mesmerizing Memoria; a program of Hometowner narrative short films, the acclaimed animated documentary Flee, and Melvin Van Peebles’ groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
One of the most emotionally affecting offerings of the festival comes from an unexpected place: a punk rock documentary. Celeste Bell, who co-directed Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché with Paul Sng, knows her subject very well, because Marianne Joan Elliot-Said, aka punk goddess Poly Styrene, was her mother. “I think making the film and writing the book [Day Glo: The Poly Styrene Story] has definitely been cathartic. It’s kind of a form of therapy, in a sense.”
Poly Styrene was one of the “Bromley Contingent,” the original British punks who were galvanized by The Ramones’ visit to London’s Roundhouse on July 4, 1976, and the frontwoman for X-Ray Spex. She was a mixed-race teenager who didn’t feel accepted by either group, and only found solace in the new music. She was also, as Bell’s doc attests, one of the deepest thinkers and best writers of the first wave. “In terms of women in punk, she was doing something that very few women were doing, especially with her voice,” says Bell. “There weren’t really any women at the time using their voice in that way, singing in that kind of quite aggressive style. Then of course her lyrics really stood out from her contemporaries. The expectation has always been that women tend to write about romance and love and heartache and all of those things, which are great subjects for songs. But my mother actually made a conscious effort not to write about those on Germ Free Adolescents. There’s maybe one song, “Obsessed With You,” you could say is about relationships, but other than that, every song is about social issues. I think that really set her apart from not just other females in punk, but from most of the other punk bands.”
After The Sex Pistols flamed out, the UK anointed X-Ray Spex as the new voice of the nation’s youth. Poly Styrene became a fixture in the English media, and the band traveled to New York City, where their stand at CBGBs became the stuff of music legend. “In the 1970s, the UK was a very different place than the U.S.,” says Bell. “The UK was a fading empire in a deep depressive situation, economically. New York kind of was as well, but I think what my mum was faced with was the future: hyper-capitalism, hyper-consumerism, and hyper technological progress. These were things she was actually writing about, but it wasn’t until she was there, that she was actually like, ‘Oh my God, everything is so much more intense than I had imagined!’ And I think that was quite difficult for her, and overwhelming. But it was also a moment of awakening in terms of her music and her writings.”
In I Am A Cliché, the climax of X-Ray Spex career comes in front of 80,000 people at London’s Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park. In the middle of the X-Ray Spex set, Poly Styrene removed her headscarf to reveal she had shaved her head, a provocative gesture aimed at the Nazis who had appropriated the music and the look, and reclaiming it for the diverse working class audience. “The early skinheads were really influenced by Motown on one hand, and reggae and ska music, Jamaican music. So it was actually very influenced by black culture. And you had, you know, white, white skinheads and you had black skinheads and mixed race skinheads, like my mother.”
At the height of her fame, Poly Styrene was stricken with severe mental illness, and dropped out of the scene to join the Hare Krishnas. “I think maybe if she had a drug problem or an alcohol problem, that would have been more acceptable, because that’s rock and roll. What she had was a very severe form of bipolar disorder. When she was going through an episode, her behavior would be considered just totally insane — real insanity, you know, not rock and roll insanity.”
Bell’s film tells the parallel stories of Poly Styrene’s life and Bell’s struggles to understand and accept a mother who was not there for her growing up. “It’s not really a music documentary,” says Bell. “It is a documentary that has music in it, and it’s about a musician, but it’s more of a personal story, a relationship story, something that people can relate to who are not necessarily fans of the music.”
