Lara Johnson – Memphis Flyer

Gregory Kallenberg wanted to create a different sort of film festival when he founded the Louisiana Film Prize in 2012. After filming in Shreveport, he fell in love with the town and relocated from Austin, Texas, and brought a more competitive model to the festival world — along with a $50,000 prize.

After three successful years, the prize is branching out to create a feeder system of regional competitions, and Memphis was at the top of the list. They partnered with On Location: Memphis, and this weekend, the top 10 films from more than 50 local entries will screen at Studio on the Square. The winning film will receive $10,000 and a chance at the $50,000 Louisiana prize in September. I spoke with three of the nominated directors.

Ricky D. Smith in director Kevin Brooks’ street drama “Marcus”

“Marcus”

Dir. Kevin Brooks

Last year, the young filmmaker’s short, “Heat Vision,” earned him a slot in the Sundance Ignite program and a trip to Park City, where he was mentored by Nate Parker, director of the Grand Jury and Audience Award-winning Birth of a Nation. “I came back with a huge burst of energy!” he says. “I made ‘Marcus’ especially for the Film Prize.”

The film stars Ricky D. Smith, whom Brooks met while they attended University of Memphis together. “The movie tells the story of a young man who is struggling with the consequences of karma,” Brooks says. “It’s derived from the decisions he made to survive. I wanted to make it really realistic, and I wanted to talk to the issues that people of color face in these urban settings.”

Brooks’ goal, he says, is to return to the big leagues in Park City with a film of his own. “I have to stay focused and keep moving forward, because I want to be there someday.”

“Calls From the Unknown”

Dir. Edward Valibus

Edward Valibus, noted for his gonzo comedies with Corduroy Wednesday, wanted to tackle something a little more serious with “Calls From the Unknown.” “Our main character is a young woman. She’s a film student doing the usual documentary 101: interviewing her dad and hearing stories she’s never heard before,” he says.

His inspiration came from his experiences with his own father’s terminal illness. “I’ve been doing absurdist humor for so long, people who watch it have been calling it a dark comedy. People laugh, then they gasp, then they cry.”

Lead actress Lara Johnson directed the documentary “Geekland,” but Valibus says her comedic student films convinced him she could excel in the role. “A big philosophy behind doing this film was giving people chances to do something new.”

Jordan Danelz, normally a gaffer, was the cinematographer, and musician Michael Jasud, of Dead Soldiers, makes his acting debut. “All my gambles really paid off,” Valibus says.

The one sure thing was Mark Pergolizzi as Johnson’s father. “He’s my favorite actor to work with,” Valibus says. “I went through the entire thing with Mark, what I wanted out of her and what I wanted out of him. Then I sent them off together to work it out. I was trying to create a father-daughter bond. It worked out amazingly well; I just let the camera roll.”

“Teeth”

Dir. Melissa Anderson Sweazy

“Like a lot of my ideas, it came about through casual conversation with my daughter,” director Melissa Anderson Sweazy says. “She heard about the tooth fairy, and she was like, ‘Why? There’s a person coming to my house to get my teeth? Who is this person, and what are they doing with all those teeth?'”

Sweazy, whose previous works include the Indie Memphis-winning “John’s Farm” and “The Department of Signs and Magical Interventions” loves to work in fantastic realms. “I’m definitely drawn to stories about magic, either about the absence of magic in the world or the proof that it is there in reality. I like the world to look normal, except for a magical element at play.”

“Teeth” stars newcomer Gabriella Goble as the young child who wants to investigate the tooth fairy’s motives. Her father, Ryan, was the director of photography. “It was kind of a miraculous find. My day job is at a production company, so my entire crew was made up of co-workers who donated their time.”

Lindsey Roberts portrays the tooth fairy. “It’s going to be a take on the tooth fairy that you have never considered.”

Since a few dozen proto-geeks gathered for the first WorldCon in 1939, sci fi, fantasy, and anime fan conventions have grown into a huge phenomenon. Dozens of regional and speciality cons have sprung up all over the world, with 150,000 people gathering for Comic Con in San Diego and Dragon Con in Atlanta every year. Now in its 5th year, the Memphis Comic and Fantasy Convention has not yet achieved that level of success, but founder Joe Thordarson likes to think big: “I still have big plans for this. We want to grow every year.”

This weekend, the Hilton Memphis will play host to a few thousand people of all ages browsing through the wares of dozens of comics and collectables vendors, meeting some of their heroes, playing games, and generally letting their geek flags fly. “Even though the convention is basically a three-day geek celebration, when you walk through it, you can’t help but be struck by all of the talented artists, writers, and filmmakers,” Thordarson says.

“My goal from the beginning was to make it more than just a once-a-year event,” he says. “I wanted to make it a year-round thing and use the talented artists and filmmakers we deal with as a way to promote art in schools. Throughout the year, we host workshops and filmmaking camps and animation camps and things like that.”

One of the ongoing student projects is Live Cartoon.”We take a character created by one of the students, and then we write a script around it.” Students collaborate to create storyboards for the script, which are then projected behind voice actors who read the script live to a con audience. This year, Live Cartoon will be hosted by voice actor and host of That Anime Show J Michael Tatum. “It’s a neat thing for the kids,” Thordarson says. “It teaches them about what a real production is, it teaches them about deadlines. It hopefully gets them excited enough to go out and do it themselves.” The same program will include a sneak peek of Department of ReQuests, a pilot produced for the Cartoon Network by animators Travis Fowler and Krickett King, alums of both Memphis College of Art and previous Live Cartoon projects.

A series of Memphis-rooted films will screen at the con this year. Timid Monster will premiere their new short film After Light, a Kickstarter-funded science-fiction film that began life as a book trailer for Cameo Renae’s zombie apocalypse novel ARV-3 before growing into a fully realized short. “After Light takes a chapter out of the ARV-3 book,” says director Dan Baker. “A group of survivors who have weathered the apocalypse underground are trying to navigate their way through the city. They get lost and confused. Their map says they’re in the right place, but there have been barricades thrown up, which confuses them. So the young girl, the hero of the story, volunteers to climb to the top of a nearby building so she can get a bird’s eye view and scout ahead. So she and the male lead embark on a trip to the top of the building where they get ambushed by these zombie creatures called ARVs.”

The project had its genesis at Nashville’s Utopia Con, but Baker says he is looking forward to his hometown premiere. “Memphis Comic and Fantasy Contention is the con that we kind of cut our teeth on. We’ve been going there since 2011,” he says.

Geekland, director Lara Johnson’s documentary, was funded by the Rhodes College Institute for Regional Studies. “I grew up in Nashville, so I saw there was a conflict between traditional Southern culture and conservatism and geek culture,” Johnson says. “I had a friend in high school who is interviewed in the film whose father was a Southern Baptist pastor. She wasn’t allowed to read Harry Potter until she rebelled when she was 16. So I was going to see what that looked like in Memphis. But once I started getting into it, I found that it didn’t really exist in Memphis. People here are really cool about that kind of stuff, and there’s not really any conflict that you find in a lot of other places in the South. Memphis is unique in that way. So the film kind of turned into a showcase of all of the different, cool, geek things that are happening here.”

Johnson says making Geekland has introduced her to a new community: “The Memphis Comic and Fantasy Convention, along with a lot of other geeky people in Memphis, have totally embraced me.”

The evening will close with a screening of Mike McCarthy’s 2009 sci-fi film Cigarette Girl. Set in a dystopian future Memphis where tobacco is contraband, the Cigarette Girl, played by Cori Dials, must live by her wits and a handy .45.

“You combine Sexual Persona with Elvis Presley, and you get a great deal of my work,” McCarthy says of his art-house-meets-grind-house aesthetic. He calls Dials his “Gothic Brigitte Bardot.” “If you don’t quite have a million bucks, but you have somebody who looks like a million bucks, then you have a million bucks,”