Oxford Mississippi – Memphis Flyer

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.

I love the scenery in Oxford this time of year, although I’m not sure that they like the look of Memphis at the moment. Which is the thing about the kickoff of the football season — every year we all brim with the optimism of any new venture that we haven’t yet managed to screw up entirely. For half the football fans out there, however, that lofty confidence will crash and burn by the end of opening day. It’s enough to drive you to drink.

Still, as they say at Ole Miss, “We may lose the game, but we never lose the party.” Yeah, it’s kind of stupid, but they (we) have a point. Really, is it any worse than the University of Memphis’ unofficial war cry: “Actshulllly, we beat UT that time. Remember? Really. Google it.”

It was in this air of fashionable defeat that I found myself in Ajax’s Diner on Oxford’s idyllic square, ordering what promised to be a great morning-after beer for the team whose unsullied optimism of opening week had just been, well, sullied. It was Southern Prohibition’s Devil’s Harvest Breakfast IPA. It’s the “breakfast” part that made me think of someone suffering through the hangover of something untoward: a night that really went your way — or a gameday that really didn’t.

In my experience, Southern Prohibition Brewing out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, knows what it’s doing: They retired their Jack the Sipper ESB, one of the few really good ESBs I’ve had on this side of the Atlantic. It’s a great warm-weather drinker. High Cotton makes a pretty good one as well.

Devil’s Harvest Breakfast IPA is a clean and refreshing ale. I’ve been all over the beer map this summer, and I’d forgotten how much I like IPAs, although this version isn’t entirely true to the traditional style. Here, the hops have more of a grapefruit zig than a heady floral pop. For all that, Devil’s Harvest has a great IPA aroma to it, and they’ve cut down on the bitterness. I’m assuming here that the “breakfast” part has more to do with the relatively light 4.9 percent ABV rather than the tart grapefruit finish. This is not the ale for drowning your sorrows the morning after. Although I can definitely see settling down after finals to show a couple of pints who’s boss, it would be a mistake to call this the mimosa of beer.

The end result is an IPA that stands up on its own for a pint or two and pairs well with big flavors of heavier fare. I hadn’t planned on getting the red beans and rice at Ajax, but it’s hard to resist. It’s fantastic and comes with a wedge of cornbread, too, so if you find yourself facing a sudden and unplanned carbo-load, this IPA is a pretty good choice. The pour is cloudy, and it has a good collar on it, but the truth is that Devil’s Harvest is light on the palate. I’ll leave it to you to make the call on breakfast.

Something vexed me though. Crossing the square, I noted a dozen or so young men in blaze-orange jumpsuits and shackles. I realize that quick defeat makes a team rethink its season strategy, but kidnapping the UT football team and chaining them up didn’t seem entirely sporting. Sort of like a late hit — except with multiple felony counts.

But I digress.

I was having lunch with a friend who has a real job, so he was drinking water. Devil’s Harvest was a hell of a lot more interesting than that, although he pointed out that the big building in the center of the square was the courthouse and those handcuffed fellas were prisoners, not the UT line after all.

I suppose it really is important to be a good sport.