Don’t call it a comeback! The 24th edition of the Indie Memphis Film Festival is returning to theaters October 20th-25th. Like all organizations trying to plan large events in 2021, the specter of Covid hung over the planning process. “I’ve gotten out of the business trying to predict the pandemic,” says Knox Shelton, who took over as Indie Memphis executive director earlier this year. “When we were having initial conversations at the beginning of summer, we were really optimistic about what the world would look like in the fall. And then, of course, toward the end of summer, we started to see our numbers creep back up. So, to use the most boring word used over the past year and a half, we had to pivot and keep trying to figure out how we were going to bring the community together for the festival in the safest and healthiest way possible.”
Last year’s festival took place mostly online, with virtual screenings hosted by the Memphis-based cinema services company Eventive, supplemented by socially distanced, in-person programs at the Malco Summer Drive-In and Shelby Farms. The virtual event succeeded beyond expectations, expanding the reach of the regional festival to international audiences. That success means that online offerings will continue to be a part of Indie Memphis. This year, you can buy a virtual pass and view dozens of feature-length and short narrative films and documentaries without setting foot in a theater.
With Covid case numbers on the decline after the cresting of the Delta wave, the decision to go ahead with a scaled-down, in-person festival, while requiring masks and proof of vaccination for attendees, looks sound. Screenings will take place at the Crosstown Theater, Playhouse on the Square, The Circuit Playhouse, and the Malco Summer Drive-In.
For Shelton and festival staff, online and in-person means running two film festivals at the same time. “It’s been challenging,” Shelton says. “I think putting on a festival of this size with the team we have is always going to be challenging, but it’s also the team that’s made it go really well. I think the wealth of experience we have with [artistic director] Miriam Bale, [director of artist development and youth film] Joseph Carr, and [director of marketing] Macon Wilson has been incredible and made my transition very smooth and easy.”
Art House Revival
Before Shelton was hired as Indie Memphis executive director, he was the head of the nonprofit Literacy Mid-South — and a big fan of the kind of independently produced, art house films that are the festival’s reason for being. “As somebody who’s just enjoyed Indie Memphis over the past few years, finally getting a little behind-the-scenes look at Miriam and her work has been just really fun for me,” he says. “I just have so much respect for what Miriam has brought to the organization over the years.”
Bale is responsible for putting together a sprawling program of narrative features, documentaries, and shorts from all over the world, most of which would not otherwise appear in theaters. Wednesday night’s opening feature is Red Rocket by six-time Independent Spirit award winner Sean Baker. The director’s debut feature, Tangerine, a film famously shot on an iPhone about Los Angeles transgender street life, opened Indie Memphis 2015. “We’re really thrilled that Sean Baker is coming for opening night,” says Bale. “He’s such a fan of art house cinema, festivals, and theatrical screenings in general. The film is so much fun, but it definitely has deeper elements.”
Simon Rex, an MTV VJ and former porn star who raps under the name Dirt Nasty, is the unlikely star of Red Rocket. “It’s about the worst person you’ve ever met, who’s also one of the most charming people you’ve ever met. Sean Baker is just brilliant at casting,” says Bale. The director found “theater and first-time actors and they all come together for this fresh energy.”
For the closing night film, Bale landed Spencer by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, whom she describes as one of her favorite filmmakers. Spencer deals with a critical few days in the life of Princess Diana as her marriage to Prince Charles was coming apart. Diana is played by Kristen Stewart, whose performance as the disenchanted princess is already garnering Oscar buzz.
Among the other buzzy showcase screenings at Indie Memphis is Drive My Car by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, the film tells the story of Watari (Toko Miura), a young woman hired to chauffeur Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), an actor and playwright who is trying to mount a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima while coming to terms with the death of his wife. “Drive My Car is just one of those films that you see, and it just lasts with you for so long,” Bale says. “It just sort of shifts something in you a little bit.”
Killer Memphis Movies
There are five made-in-Memphis feature films in the Hometowner competition this year: the documentaries, Reel Rock 15: Black Ice by Zachary Barr and Peter Mortimer, A Ballet Season by David Goodman and Steven J. Ross, and The Lucky 11 by George Tillman; and the narrative features, Life Ain’t Like the Movies by Robert Mychal Patrick Butler and Killer by A.D. Smith.
The horror-tinged Killer is a good fit for a festival that happens the week before Halloween. Smith says the movie was a product of the pandemic. “It’s a combination of being stuck in the house for days and wanting to do something creative.”
When Killer opens, Brandon (Larshay Watson), a med student, has invited his friend Sam (Aric Delashmit) to stay at his house during the pandemic lockdown, which they think will last about two weeks. But unbeknownst to Brandon, Sam has spread the word to their circle of college chums and stocked up for a party fortnight. Brandon becomes the reluctant host to 10 diverse friends, played by Memphis actors Madison Alexander, Shannon Walton, Terrence Brock, Divine Dent, Jeneka Jenae, Charisse Bland, and Blain Jewell.
At first, it’s fun, as the friends treat it like an unexpected spring break. But as the pandemic wears on, tensions rise. The party game they play, where one of the players is secretly a killer and the others have to guess which one is picking them off, becomes real when they are all drugged and wake up tied to chairs in a circle. Smith wrings tension out of the claustrophobic situation, as the party dwindles and bodies pile up. But there’s also an undercurrent of black humor, such as the moment one player who has been falsely accused uses their last words to say, “I told you it wasn’t me!”
Killer has the trappings of a slasher movie, but at its heart, it’s an old-fashioned, country house mystery like Murder on the Orient Express. “Some of my first memories are drinking coffee as a 5-year-old with my grandmother and watching Perry Mason,” says Smith. “I love whodunits like Scream. As a mystery buff, I’ve always wanted to make a mystery, but I never knew how I was going to be able to do that. I don’t have the budget to make a big production, so when the pandemic hit and we were forced to stay inside, it just took my mind to a different place. … I was a writer before I ever picked up a camera. I’ve been writing for at least 15 years, learning how to structure a story and create characters. Even though we were in one location, I wanted everything to be fresh, every time we went to a different room, every time we changed perspective.”
After writing the story in lockdown and leading his cast in extensive rehearsals over Zoom, Killer was shot in five days last fall. Smith credits assistant director Sarah Fleming with making sure the shoot was productive. “She taught me so much,” he says. “I don’t think I could have done it in five days without her. I knew what I wanted, but she knows so much more technical jargon than I did. She was able to very simply go back and forth with my DP. Sometimes when the cast was getting a little off track, she wouldn’t have any problem getting people back on. She was like, ‘I want to make sure you can just do your thing, and make sure everything looks good.’”
Bunker Mentality
“I have been interested in the Cold War and covert architecture for many years,” says director Jenny Perlin.
Perlin, who grew up in rural Ohio, recalls finding out that the farm where her family bought their Christmas trees was built on top of a secret nuclear facility. From 1948 to 1990, hundreds of such secret sites designed to withstand Soviet atomic bombs were constructed all over America. In the years that followed, many of the missile silos, munitions storage sites, and command bunkers were decommissioned. “I knew that some of these structures had been repurposed,” Perlin says. “I wanted to meet some of the people who were living inside them.”
Bunker is a series of portraits of men who have adopted this peculiar lifestyle. There’s a 40-something, three-time divorcé who sleeps on a bare mattress inside a bomb storage bunker; a 70-year-old counterculture fugitive who has made a castle out of a missile silo; and a real estate developer who is selling “survival condos” where the 1 percent can escape apocalypse with their wealth and privilege intact. “Everyone uses the term ‘threat scenario,’” says Perlin. Each one of the people in the film has a different threat scenario they are primarily concerned with in their lives, and it’s only through listening to them talk in the film that you kind of get a sense of which one they’re more partial to. So for some people it’s water, for other people it’s asteroids, and for other people it’s civil unrest.
“I think what’s fascinating to me is how bunker culture — safety, escape, prepper world, what-have-you — can be found in all parts of the political and social spectrum. Here in New York, you have a lot of young people moving upstate and starting off-grid solar and wind farms. So in many ways, when people come to these places, they’re looking for a story that will give some meaning to their lives.”
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
If you’ve heard the terms “creepypasta” — and are not “extremely online”— it was probably in connection with the Slender Man case. Two pre-teen girls from Wisconsin stabbed a classmate 19 times, claiming to be under the control of a malevolent supernatural entity they had read about online. Director Jane Schoenbrun says creepypasta (a portmanteau of “copy and paste”) is “a giant collective of amateur storytellers who essentially tell each other ghost stories, try to develop those ghost stories collaboratively, and try to convince each other that these ghost stories that they’re telling each other are true, that they’re really happening to them.”
In Schoenbrun’s debut feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a teenager named Casey (Anna Cobb) stumbles across a story similar to Candyman or Bloody Mary. If you repeat the title phrase, you will be transformed in some unknown, but probably horrible, way. When Casey tries the World’s Fair challenge, her sheltered life begins to unravel in ways that may or may not be in her head. Driven by Cobb’s nuanced performance, the film is both trancelike and deeply creepy.
“One of my goals with World’s Fair was to take this visual language of the internet and learn how to represent it in film,” says Schoenbrun. “I feel like it’s an ever-evolving conversation. As we all culturally become hyper familiar with conventions of a screen, the question for me as an artist isn’t ‘just point a camera at the computer screen, and that’s the movie,’ but how do you make art using that language? … I also wanted to be truthful to the way the internet has always felt to me, which is this strange combination between maximalism and minimalism — being shown everything at once and seeing nothing interesting.”
Schoenbrun’s film debuted virtually at Sundance during the height of the pandemic, where the story of an isolated young girl reaching out through the internet took on unexpected resonance. “It’s a lonely film about sitting inside, and I think people were really ready for it in January. The reception at Sundance was overwhelming,” Schoenbrun says. “I like to think of it as a film about the horror of being seen and seeing yourself. That’s a very core part of who the character is, seeking an understanding of how she sees herself, how she wants to be seen, and how others are seeing her.”
Afrobeat Goes On
Siji Awoyinka only briefly lived in Nigeria. His expat parents returned to the country when he was 5 years old. When he grew up, he traveled the world, eventually landing in Brooklyn. One day, he was hanging out with a friend, a crate-digger with a massive collection of rare records from the African nation, when they found themselves wondering what had happened to the people who made the music. Little did he know that would launch him on an 11-year journey of discovery that culminated in his first film, Elder’s Corner. “I’m a musician first and foremost,” he says. “Music came before filmmaking, and I see filmmaking as an extension of my storytelling capabilities as a musician.”
Elder’s Corner invites the audience along as Awoyinka travels to Lagos to track down the musicians who thrived in Nigeria’s prosperous 1950s and ’60s, then suffered through the civil wars and oil-fueled dictatorships that followed. Along the way, he traces the evolution of African popular music from the jazzy, cosmopolitan high life to the drum-focused primitivism of juju to the funk-inflected, revolutionary grooves of Afrobeat.
“We have a very strong oral history,” says Awoyinka. “That’s how we pass down information, especially that generation. They didn’t keep copies of their own recordings, they didn’t keep pictures, they didn’t keep anything. A lot of these artists, these elders, hadn’t heard any of those records for decades. So that was the icebreaker. When we turned up for the interviews, I brought up my laptop with a hard drive full of old classics and played their song. Their eyes would just light up, like, ‘Wow, where did you get this from? Who gave you this? I haven’t heard this in 20 years!’ When they discovered I was also a musician, it completely won them over, and they relaxed and opened up and told me all kinds of stories.”
Awoyinka brought along recording engineer Bill Lee to resurrect an abandoned Decca Records studio, which produced many of the classic songs. Watching the joy in the eyes of the musicians who are back in the studio for the first time in decades is one of the many pleasures of Elder’s Corner. “There were moments where I wanted to just jump into the pit with them,” says Awoyinka. “But I couldn’t ’cause I was behind the camera!”
Tickets passes, and the full schedule for Indie Memphis 2021 are available on the Indie Memphis website. The Memphis Flyer will feature daily updates on what to see and do at the festival on our website.
