The virtual portion of the 2021 Oxford Film Festival comes to a close today amid news of big changes for the organization. The Audience Awards were chosen by polling the patrons at the in-person festival at the end of March and those watching the virtual festival at home. The winner of the Overall Best Feature, which includes Best Mississippi Film and Best Documentary, is Look Away, by director Patrick O’Conner. The film, which deals with the five-year fight to remove Confederate symbols from the Mississippi state flag, earlier won an Honorable Mention from the jury for “adept handing of a complicated topic.” Director Olivia Peace won the audiences’ hearts for Best Narrative Feature for her film Tahara. Amy French’s “Swim to Steven,” which shared a bill with Tahara, was chosen as Best Short Film.
The audience’s pick for Best Music Documentary is Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story by director Posy Dixon. Eric Pumpfrey’s short “Luv U Cuz” was the audience favorite in the animation category. Ronzo winner “Touch Tone Telephone” repeated as Best Music Video for director Chris Spargo, as did Dramarama, which swept the LBGTQIA+ category for director Jonathan Wysocki. The screenplay competition, which includes a $1,000 prize and mentorship by producer John Norris, was won by Beanie Barns for “Nascent State.”
Longtime Oxford Film Festival director Melanie Addington recently announced she was leaving Mississippi to accept a position as executive director for the Tallgrass Film Festival in Wichita, Kansas. Her replacement will be Jim Brunzell, who was named interim executive director. Brunzell is the former director of the Sound Unseen festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Festival in Austin, Texas. Another new addition to the Oxford festival staff is Justina Walford, founder of the Women Texas Film Festival, who will take over programming duties.
And finally, The Oxford Film Festival, along with Indie Memphis, was just named to Moviemaker Magazine’s coveted 50 Film Festivals Worth The Entry Fee list, capping an eventful and successful year.
Women Is Losers won Best Narrative Feature at the 2021 Oxford Film Festival.
For 17 years, the Oxford Film Festival awarded the Hoka, which was named for the cotton warehouse turned art house cinema run by “Oxford’s cultural ambassador,” Ron “Ronzo” Shapiro. This year, the name of the award was changed to the Ronzo, in honor of the longtime OFF supporter who passed away in April, 2019.
Oxford Film Festival 2021 announced its slate of winners on Sunday night, after a long weekend of outdoor film screenings, interrupted occasionally by the severe weather that blew through the Mid South. The first ever Best Narrative Feature Ronzo went to Women Is Losers, the feminist coming-of-age story by first-time writer-director Lissette Feliciano. Best Documentary Feature went to In A Different Key, directors Caren Zucker and John Donovan’s adaptation of the bestselling book on autism. Best Mississippi Feature went to Bastard’s Crossing, director Travis Mills’ Western produced during COVID lockdown.
Bastard’s Crossing won the Best Mississippi Feature Ronzo.
The winner in the LBGTIA category was Dramarama, a ’90s teen coming-out comedy by director Jonathan Wysocki. The Best Music Documentary Ronzo went to Bleeding Audio by director Chelsea Christer.
Bleeding Audio won Best Music Documentary at Oxford Film Fest 2021.
In the shorts, “The Recess,” directed by Navid Nikkhah Azad, a story of a young girl in a conservative Muslim society who dresses as a boy to attend a soccer game, won Best Narrative. “Snowy,” co-directors Alex Wolf Lewis and Kaitlyn Schwalje’s quest to bring happiness to a neglected pet turtle, brought home the Best Documentary Short Ronzo. Manual Marmier’s “Kiko’s Saints” was named Best LBGTIA short. In the music videos, Lemon Demon’s “Touch Tone Telephone” won Best overall, and the Mississippi award went to The Vacant’s “American Automatic.”
Lemon Demon’s Best Music Video Ronzo winner
The Oxford Film Festival continues virtually through the month of April, with all of the winners, along with more than 100 other films, streaming online. The virtual portion of the fest will kick off on Friday, April 2nd, with the 35th anniversary screening of Labyrinth, the epic fairy tale by Mississippi native and Muppet creator Jim Henson, starring David Bowie. You can find tickets to the screening and information about online passes at the Oxford Film Festival website, ox-film.com.
Bleeding Audio won Best Music Documentary at Oxford Film Fest 2021.
For a music fan, there’s nothing more special than the one band they know and love, but that never quite made it big. For many people over the years, that band was Memphis’ Big Star. For many people who came of age in the ’00s, such as director Chelsea Christer, that band is The Matches.
Christer saw the band play an opening slot at a show in her native Colorado in 2005. “I was blown away by their performance and became an instant fan,” she recalls. “Then, when I moved to San Francisco for film school, I had a documentary project I had to do. They’re a Bay Area band, so I decided to shoot my shot and see if they’d let me do a little mini doc about them for my class project. I’ve been friends with them ever since. So when they let me know that they were going to reunite, I was already a member of the inside circle. So I was just like, ‘Hey, let me, let me help document this for you guys.’ And it just kind of snowballed from there.”
Her documentary Bleeding Audio had its world premiere at Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival in San Jose, California on March 7, 2020. “We had a little secret show afterwards, and it was the last live event that I’ve been to. It was amazing, but they announced they’re shutting down the festival the same day.”
A little more than a year later, Bleeding Audio will screen at the Oxford Film Festival’s in-person program on Saturday, March 27th, and on the festival’s virtual program throughout the month of April. Christer says the film is about more than The Matches. “I wanted to give fans the story that they didn’t know, and make a film that fans would love and appreciate. But to me, it’s always been very important to focus on a general audience and make sure that the narrative was constructed in a way that you could watch this film and whether you like The Matches, or you had no idea who they were. You could at least walk away feeling like you had enjoyed a really great story.”
The pop punk band released four albums from 1997 to 2009, and amassed a cult following with their relentless touring before succumbing to burnout. “I wanted to use their story almost like a case study to represent most artists who came up during that time,” says Christer.
During that period, digital music distribution overtook physical CD and album sales, disrupting the business model for musical acts, and tanking careers that would have been viable in the 1990s. “The Matches’ major career milestones line up, tragically, and beautifully, with how the digital age of music has played out. I found that while yes, they’re unique and they’re wonderful characters, they weren’t the only band that went through this. In our structuring and telling of the story, we wanted to make that abundantly clear that while The Matches coulda, woulda, shoulda, there were so many other bands out there that might not have the same kind of redemption story The Matches do.”
The tragedy of coulda, woulda, shouda is balanced by the punk ethos that helped the band thrive when they staged a comeback. “They always have this central focus on the community of their fans. It wasn’t rockstar-to-fan, it was always peer-to-peer. I feel like that that’s like a power that we have now, thanks to this digital leveling of the playing field. You can actually reach out to your fans and have this one-on-one relationship with them. The Matches were able to come back so strongly not just because the music stood the test of time, and they were talented, but also because they truly cared about their fan base in a way that helps emphasize the power of the community of music. You can become disconnected from that the more you grow in your career. The Matches just never had that ego.
“If there’s anything my own film taught me, and this experience taught the matches, it is that being an arena band and a household name is great and fun and a cool goal, but those benchmarks for success are not realistic for everybody. And while it’s fun to dream about that, I think we should all look internally and redefine what success means to us. If you can make a modest, sustainable living off of your art, that’s really exciting and, and should be celebrated. If that expands further, that’s great, but if you just have a group of people who are supporting you, that’s success, you know?”
Tickets and passes to the Oxford Film Festival are available from the festival website.
Cassie Hay and Amy Winston’s Queens of Painfollows the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league.
A year ago, Melanie Addington, executive director of the Oxford Film Festival (OFF), was faced with a terrible choice: cancel the annual festival, throwing away months of planning and jeopardizing the survival of the 17-year-old Mississippi cultural institution, or go ahead with the event as planned, which would pack people from all over the country into movie theaters and risk spreading a deadly disease about which very little was known. Thanks to the timing of the spring festival, Addington was among the first people in America faced with that decision, but she wouldn’t be the last. Days after she announced Oxford’s postponement, the gargantuan South by Southwest festival followed suit.
OFF would go on to become one of the pioneers of the virtual festival, teaming up with the Memphis cinema services company Eventive to stream the films online for a quarantined audience later in the spring. Hundreds of other festivals followed, to varying degrees of success, including Indie Memphis and Sundance.
Now, a year later, with the pandemic still dangerous but the vaccine campaign going full steam, OFF is back in hybrid form for its 18th year. Films will screen in three outdoor locations on March 24th-28th. “We want to be very clear about the aggressive steps we are taking in order to make our film festival safe so our patrons can begin to get back to enjoying the movie-going experience in the company of other people again,” Addington says. “Therefore, we are being very careful with a measured approach utilizing the open-air theater we have designed specifically for this purpose, with safety always first, so we all can enjoy one of the best groups of films we have ever had this year.”
In Jake Mahaffy’s Reunion, a pregnant woman returns to her recently deceased grandparents’ family home.
Opening night films will screen at the Oxford Commons lawn tent, located across the parking lot from the Malco Oxford Commons Cinema Grill. The Passing On is a documentary by director Nathan Clarke about the tradition of Black funeral homes in San Antonio, Texas, and the conflict that breaks out when embalmer James Bryant taps a gay man, Clarence Pierre, to take over his business.
A short drive away, the Oxford High School will host a pop-up drive-in theater in the east parking lot. There, the festival opener will be Drought, directed by Megan Petersen and Hannah Black. Set in 1993, Drought tells the story of Carl (Own Scheid, who is on the spectrum in real life) who, during the historic North Carolina drought of 1993, discovers his uncanny ability to predict the weather. The third screen, located at the Oxford Conference Center, will open with Murder Bury Win. Writer/director/producer Michael Lovin’s film takes place in the world of board games, where three young men have created a game whose object is to get rid of a body. Then, when they are suddenly involved in a freak accident, they try to apply the corpse disposal methods they learned while researching their game.
“The events of the past year have required that filmmakers and festivals alike find creative and innovative avenues for storytelling,” says OFF programmer Greta Hagen-Richardson. “With a narrative feature lineup composed almost exclusively of filmmaker submissions, we spent the year truly embracing our role as a discovery festival. Our filmmakers have taken limited resources and made exciting, fresh, and compelling work for our audience. The unique perspectives presented speak to who we are as a community in a time when circumstances have forced us to exist separately.”
Among the documentaries that will screen throughout the weekend are Queens of Pain by Cassie Hay and Amy Winston, which follows the women of the Gotham Roller Derby league through a season of wheeled combat, and Bleeding Audio, director Chelsea Christer’s portrait of pop-punk band The Matches, who achieved cult success in the ’00s, only to get lost in the transition between the CD era and streaming music.
On the more experimental side, Oxford’s Powerhouse venue will play host throughout the weekend to a series of video projection installations. The program includes 5000 Space Aliens by animator Scott Bateman, a feature-length experimental film that promises some eye-popping visuals that will have its world premiere at the festival on Friday night.
After the in-person weekend, the festival will continue online for the entire month of April, with films streaming on the Eventive platform. The kickoff party for the virtual festival will be held on Friday, April 2nd, with a pop-up drive-in at Cannon Motors with Labyrinth, the fantasy film starring David Bowie considered by many to be Muppet creator (and Mississippian) Jim Henson’s masterpiece.
Check memphisflyer.com for ongoing coverage of OFF throughout the in-person weekend and continuing through the month of April. Tickets and passes are available at oxfordfilmfest.com.
