Tag: Ryan Watt

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We Recommend We Saw You

WE SAW YOU: Zio Matto Gelato Now at Central Station

Matteo Servente and Ryan Watt (Photos: Michael Donahue)

Matteo Servente and Ryan Watt don’t care if their business takes a licking. In fact, that’s what they want.

Servente and Watt are owners of Zio Matto Gelato, which recently held its grand opening celebration at 545 South Main Street, Number 110, inside Central Station.

Julianne Watt
Grayson West and Santiago Arbelez
Armani Featherson
Felicia Willett-Schuchardt and Clay Schuchardt

“Gelato is the best Italian treat,” Servente says. “It’s like ice cream, but better. It’s got less fat. It’s got less sugar. And it’s creamier and packs more flavor.”

They offer 14 flavors at a time, but, he adds, “We have recipes for many, many more.”

Servente, who is from Turin, Italy, founded the business. “Matto” is what his niece called him when she was little. And “Zio” is “uncle” in Italian.

Jalyn Souchek and Keith Evanson
Will and Thomas McGown
Christine and Carroll Todd

“We love being on South Main because it’s a neighborhood similar to Italy,” says Watt, a filmmaker, adding, “You get the gelato and take it right outside and walk down the neighborhood.”

Also, he says, “Being near the [National] Civil Rights Museum and being here at Central Station, [there’s] a mixture of tourists and locals. It’s a perfect location.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis 2022 Wrap-Up

Percy Norris and “Big” Robert Stewart in The ’Vous


The 25th Indie Memphis Film Festival concluded last Monday with a film that made a case for the importance of the 1970 Blaxploitation wave, and a film that proved its point. Is That Black Enough For You? is the first movie by Elvis Mitchell, a former New York Times film critic and cinema scholar turned documentary director. Mitchell traced the history of Black representation in film from the era of silent “race” pictures and D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK, proto-blockbuster Birth of a Nation through the foreshortened careers of Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge to the wave of low-budget, Black-led gangster, adventure, and fantasy films which started in the late 1960s and crested with The Wiz. Films like Superfly and Coffy, Mitchell argues in his voluminous voice-over narration, presented the kinds of rousing heroes that attracted film-goers while the New Hollywood movement presented visions of angst-filled antiheroes.

Blaxploitation films also introduced a new kind of music to films and the concept of the soundtrack album, which was often released before the movie itself in order to drum up interest. The prime example was Shaft, which featured an Academy Award-winning soundtrack by Isaac Hayes. Mitchell introduced the classic with Willie Hall, the Memphis drummer who recorded the immortal hi-hat rhythm that kicks off Hayes’ theme song. Mitchell revealed in Is That Black Enough For You? that Hayes had been inspired by Sergio Leone’s score for Once Upon a Time in the West, and the score he penned for Shaft still holds up, providing much of the detective film’s throbbing propulsion.

The winners of the competitive portion of the 2022 film festival were announced at a hilariously irreverent awards ceremony Saturday evening at Playhouse on the Square. After a two-year hiatus, Savannah Bearden returned to produce the awards, which were “hosted” by Birdy, the tiny red metal mockingbird which has served as the film festival’s mascot for years. But amidst the nonstop jokes and spoof videos, there were genuinely touching moments, such as when Craig Brewer surprised art director and cameraperson Sallie Sabbatini with the Indie Award, which is given to outstanding Memphis film artisans, and when former Executive Director Ryan Watt was ambushed with the Vision Award.

The Best Narrative Feature award went to Our Father, the Devil, an African immigrant story directed by Ellie Foumbi. Kit Zauhar’s Actual People won the Duncan Williams Best Screenplay Award. The Documentary Feature award went to Reed Harkness for Sam Now, a portrait of the director’s brother that has been in production for the entire 25 years that Indie Memphis has been in existence.

The Best Hometowner Feature award, which honors films made in Memphis, went to Jack Lofton’s The ’Vous, a moving portrait of the people who make The Rendezvous a world-famous icon of Memphis barbecue. (“We voted with our stomachs,” said jury member Larry Karaszewski.) The Best Hometowner Narrative Short went to “Nordo” by Kyle Taubken, about a wife anxiously waiting for her husband to return from Afghanistan. Lauren Ready earned her second Indie Memphis Hometowner Documentary award for her short film “What We’ll Never Know.”

In the Departures category, which includes experimental, genre, and out-of-the-box creations, This House by Miryam Charles won Best Feature. (This House also won the poster design contest.) “Maya at 24” by legendary Memphis doc director Lynne Sachs won the Shorts competition, and “Civic” by Dwayne LeBlanc took home the first trophy in a new Mid-Length subcategory.

Sounds, the festival’s long-running music film series, awarded Best Feature to Kumina Queen by Nyasha Laing. The music video awards were won by the stop-motion animated “Vacant Spaces” by Joe Baughman; “Don’t Come Home” by Emily Rooker triumphed in the crowded Hometowner category.

Best Narrative Short went to “Sugar Glass Bottle” by Neo Sora, and Best Documentary Short went to “The Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms” by Eloise Sherrid and Lauryn Welch.

Some of the Special Awards date back to the origin of the festival in 1998, such as the Soul of Southern Film Award, which was taken by Ira McKinley and Bhawin Suchak’s documentary Outta The Muck. The Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award went to Me Little Me by Elizabeth Ayiku. The Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award went to Eric Younger’s Very Rare.

The IndieGrants program, which awards $15,000 in cash and donations to create short films, picked Anna Cai’s “Bluff City Chinese” and A.D. Smith’s “R.E.G.G.I.N.” out of 46 proposals submitted by Memphis filmmakers.

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Food & Drink Food Reviews

Zio Matto: “Here Comes the Gelato Man!”

Matteo Servente on the Zio Matto Gelato bike

Matteo Servente and Ryan Watt are peddling their gelato. Literally.

The Zio Matto Gelato owners recently bought a bicycle with an attached cart/cooler to help them sell their five-ounce gelato containers, which are already in area restaurants and markets.

“We had this idea of ‘How do we bring it to people as much as possible,’” says Servente. “The cart is such a visually iconic image in people’s minds.”

And, he says, “We could really use it to bring gelato to people for weddings, corporate events, whatever people might be interested in. It’s a great way to bring the gelato experience to your backyard or wherever you want it.”

Servente, who is from Torino, Italy, founded the business. “The name comes from my niece. When she was very little she couldn’t pronounce my name right. ‘Matteo’ was ‘Matto,’ which is ‘crazy,’ and ‘Zio’ is ‘uncle’ in Italian.”

Servente, a filmmaker and former Crosstown Arts resident artist, says Zio Matto is his main focus. “For many years I had been toying with the possibility of bringing some of these Italian treats to Memphis that I’m used to from growing up. Gelato became the obvious choice.”

He learned “the secret” to making gelato in Italy, and it seemed like the right treat to bring to “a place where the options of real, authentic gelato are not too many.”

Enter Watt, former Indie Memphis executive director. “Ryan and I have worked before in film and have known each other for years. We always had a good friendship and working relationship,” Servente says.

Before Indie Memphis, Watt owned a technology company at Emerge Memphis. “The challenge and excitement of growing something new is really what I get excited about,” he says.

“Gelato is not ice cream,” Servente explains. “It’s a part of the same family, but it’s a less fat version of ice cream. The texture is much silkier in ours and a little bit denser as opposed to the cold, almost icy, texture of ice cream. So, it kind of packs more flavor.

“As far as the ingredients go, there’s nothing really revolutionary in the way we make it. It’s more like the process of making it that makes us stand out. We don’t use the gelato machines that mass produce gelato. We just use kitchen mixers and our hands to make it and mix all the ingredients together. ‘Less is more’ is really what applies perfectly to the food-making process in Italy.”

Tamboli’s Pasta & Pizza was the first restaurant to carry their gelato. “When the pandemic hit and they had to sort of readjust a little bit of their model, our pre-packaged containers were perfect.”

They’re now up to 15 locations, including High Point Grocery, Cordelia’s Market, Lucchesi’s Ravioli & Pasta Company, Ciao Bella Italian Grill, and David Grisanti’s Italian Restaurant. It’s available on Saturdays at the Downtown and Cooper-Young farmers markets.

Zio Matto’s six flavors include stracciatella. “A very popular flavor for gelato. The way we do it is Italian sweet cream with chocolate chips in it.”

The new bicycle/cart is ready to roll. “It’s not the easiest thing to ride,” Watt admits. “It’s nice to roll up and maybe park and serve gelato.”

But, he says, “Right now, we’re a pretty small team. Our plan is to use [the bicycle] for bookings. You may see it out and about so we can get the word out. Maybe it will become a league of bikes, and we’ll have to hire riders, people that can run the carts for us.”

And, like any “Good Humor Man” vehicle, Zio Matto’s bicycle comes with the proper accessory: “It does have a little bell,” Servente says.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis 2020: Q&A With Executive Director Ryan Watt

Ryan Watt, Executive Director of Indie Memphis

Tonight at Indie Memphis, Coming to Africa, the feature film by Anwar Jamison, which was rained out last Friday night, will screen at the Malco Summer Drive-In, along with the Hometowner Music Video Showcase, rain or shine. You can read about Jamison’s bi-continental production in my Indie Memphis cover story.

Last month, Ryan Watt, Indie Memphis’ executive director, announced he was leaving his post at the end of the year, setting off a national search for his replacement. Watt has presided over a major expansion of Indie Memphis from a cozy, fall festival into a national example for regional film organizations. While preparing my cover story about Indie Memphis 2020, I spoke at length with Watt, but I didn’t have room in that story to fit everything in. What follows is a Q&A with him taken from that interview, in which we spoke about the past, present, and future of the arts organization. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What can you say about your time at Indie Memphis?

I’ve loved working for a nonprofit. It’s not something I ever expected I would do. It just kind of happened. I joined the board of Indie Memphis in 2014, and then in 2015, we were looking for a new exec director, and I was asked to become the interim. I just kind of fell in love with the job during that time period. And so, over the last six years, I’ve just tried to keep building the organization one step at a time and grow new programs. Now, after six years, I feel like we’re in a really good place, and I think it’s time to find the next leader to take us forward.

What have you learned during the last five years?

I’ve learned there’s a huge amount of amazing creativity in Memphis and throughout the country. Our submissions and the work just keeps growing in number and quality every year. From my perspective, it’s no question that the Memphis film community, over the last six years that I’ve been watching every hometowner film, the quality just continues to get better. I feel really good about the work we’ve put in through our artist development programs, Indie Grants, and the youth program. Now a lot of these students are in college, and pretty soon some of the students who started in the youth program will be out of college. And so it’d be exciting to see what they create.

Why do you think artist development is an important part of Indie Memphis’ mission?

Perhaps in like a New York or Chicago or somewhere else, a film festival might be able to say that there’s plenty of other resources for filmmakers. In Memphis and other cities our size, I think there’s very few resources. That’s why we felt it was important to be proactive about finding support for filmmakers. We just keep growing it every year, but then you always feel like we wish we could do more. We always wish we could do more, or we wish we had more cash to give out as grants, and we had larger programs.

Especially when everyone’s been stuck in their homes, I think it’s clear that the arts are super important to our lives and well-being, and the enjoyment of our city and surroundings, and as communal experiences. But beyond that, if you want to look at it just from sort of an economic development perspective, you learn all these skills through filmmaking. It’s the most collaborative art there is. It involves a lot of teamwork, collaboration, and communication skills and meeting deadlines, and all of these things that translate into so many other jobs, whether you’re going into communications, to work for FedEx, or you’re working in media or all sorts of things.

One of the big accomplishments of your tenure has been a major push to diversify the festival, in terms of audience, filmmakers, and staff. How, and why, did you go about spearheading that? What have you learned from that experience?

I learned a lot. I can remember a few specific moments. I think it was the very first year when we did the narrative shorts screening, and I think there was only one Black filmmaker. A Black attendee raised his hand during the Q&A and asked, “Why is this mostly white filmmakers?” And my answer, which was technically true, was that these are the films that were submitted, you know? We were just picking the best of the films that were submitted. But what I learned over the years that I did not realize at all going into the job was that, even though I think Indie Memphis is very much like many other film festivals across the country that might try to put a spotlight on Black stories, Black communities, and Black artists, the audience and filmmakers in the city still saw essentially a white organization. There were filmmakers who didn’t even bother to submit because they didn’t think Indie Memphis was for them.

So that led to the hiring of Brandon Harris. who had a really strong programming vision to bring to the festival. That was how we wound up with The Invaders premiere and some other films my second year. But I continued to learn a lot, I’d say, over the years by having very blunt, frank conversations with Black artists in Memphis. There was one conversation in particular with The Collective when we reached out to partner with them. They really challenged me. They’ve spoken about this many times, that they had felt with some other white-led organizations that, especially during Black History Month and when MLK50 was going on, that they’re being asked to come in to fulfill this sudden need to make sure organizations are highlighting Black artists. Then they’re not feeling the partnership feels with these organizations at other times of the year.

And so, when I reached out to them, they thought of us in that same bucket. My immediate reaction was to be defensive. But I learned just so much from, I’ll just mention again, Victoria Jones and The Collective, and other people about what experiences they’ve had that they bring with them.

So, having said all of that, I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is just to put your defenses down and be willing to just sit back and listen and understand the needs of Black artists and the Black community. And then, bringing on Miriam Bale as artistic director and watching the Black Creators Forum get off the ground, I tried to just step away and allow other people to lead those initiatives. It’s been something I’m really glad we were able to put in place, and I think it has huge potential to keep growing in the future.

You’ve been in the unenviable position of trying to put together a film festival during a pandemic. How did that go?

We were lucky we were a fall festival. For the spring festivals like Oxford, I mean, the train had already left the station! The whole event was planned, and then they can’t do it. They had to, within weeks, throw together a virtual festival with no time to plan it. So we’re very lucky that was not the case. We had sort of the opposite, where we had all year to think about ideas. You can get to the point where there’s so many ideas that it’s hard to make the final decisions and narrow down what the event should be. Eventually, we keep saying online and outdoors. It’s just kind of the right balance of just enough stuff for Memphians to do, to get out of the house, to be outdoors in the hopefully nice October weather. Then also being online for anyone who understandably wants to stay at home. Also, there’s a huge opportunity now for people all over the country and all over the world to log in and be part of the festival.

Do you think these online innovations will last after the pandemic is over and we can have in-person festivals again?

I think there’s a great way those things can work together. It doesn’t have to be all one or the other. Clearly, the whole industry is going to shift a few steps in this direction, because now everyone’s had to put this whole format together. So I don’t think it all just gets thrown away and disappears overnight. Some of these virtual elements are going to remain even when the more traditional, in-person structure of the festival comes back.

What do you see as the future for Indie Memphis?

The important part is finding a new leader who also has a vision for what the future is, and that doesn’t need to be my vision. I feel like my vision has been for getting us to this point. And so now, I think finding the right leader who sees the path forward is what needs to happen.

What comes next for you?

In the near future, I’ll be announcing a business venture I’m going to be getting into. As I had mentioned in my announcement, I’m just returning to my entrepreneurial roots.

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Cover Feature News

2020 Vision: Indie Memphis Film Festival Moves Outdoors and Online

The 23rd edition of the Indie Memphis Film Festival will be like no other. Like most activities that rely on bringing groups of people together, theatrical film screenings were brought to a screeching halt in mid-March by the coronavirus pandemic. The shutdown came at a particularly bad time for Indie Memphis. In recent years, the nonprofit has expanded from throwing an annual celebration of the art of cinema to offering year-round programming. That led to a deal with Malco Theatres to take over a screen at Studio on the Square, where Indie Memphis could showcase the eclectic collection of independent, art house, international, and just plain weird films they have been bringing to the Bluff City since 1998.

“We were set for an April opening,” says Indie Memphis executive director Ryan Watt. “Malco had just put in the new seats a week before everything started shutting down.”

Mississippi’s Oxford Film Festival was one of the first of the thousands of festivals worldwide that had to unexpectedly figure out how to carry on in the new environment. Eventive, a Memphis-based cinema services company, stepped into the breach. Eventive, which was originally founded to overhaul Indie Memphis’ ticketing system, developed a new system that allowed festivals to present their programming online, and Oxford became the test case.

Watt and Indie Memphis artistic director Miriam Bale were watching closely. “I have so much sympathy for people like Melanie [Addington] at Oxford, who were out front. We did have the advantage of learning from them. But the other thing that was always a challenge was planning things out in advance. You’re thinking not ‘What do people need right now?’ but ‘What are people going to need and want in October?’ This has been both the longest and the shortest seven months ever. There’s new crises every week, every month. I think it’s been really hard mentally on everyone and really hard economically.”

Failure was not an option. “We made the decision early on: We’re not going to cancel,” says Bale. “We saw a lot of film festivals canceled. We were just gonna exist in whatever form we could.”

But would there even be films to show? Indie Memphis typically gets thousands of entries every year, but the pandemic hit just as many filmmakers would be finishing up their projects. Watt says submissions were down, but ultimately, the creative community came through. “I was very pleasantly surprised, considering there was basically no production from March on — aside from some intimate projects that people could do at their house.”

The plan that took shape over the long, chaotic summer was to mount what Watt calls an “online and outdoor” festival. During the festival, which runs October 21-29, all of the narrative features, documentaries, shorts, experimental films, and music videos will be available online through Eventive. Memphis audiences are invited to outdoor, socially distanced screenings at venues such as the Malco Summer Drive-In, the Levitt Shell, and The Grove at Germantown Performing Arts Center, as well as pop-up screenings at Shelby Farms, the riverfront, and the Stax Museum.

As things were coming together, the Indie Memphis crew got another shock. Watt, who took over as executive director in 2015, announced his intention to resign at the end of the year.

“It’s really bittersweet,” says Brighid Wheeler, senior programmer and director of operations. “There was a point a few years ago when it was just me and Ryan sitting in the office, scrambling to put a program together, not knowing the future of Indie Memphis. In the following years, what he has done — between the amazing team he’s assembled, incredible board of directors, etc. — is nothing short of incredible, and a true testament to what leadership looks like. His leadership has given Memphis and our filmmaking community what it has always needed and deserves: a place to grow, thrive, and create in the city we love so dearly.”

Under Watt’s leadership, Indie Memphis has grown from a cozy local festival to an industry leader. In 2019, the festival attracted more than 12,000 ticket buyers, and the organization’s revenue topped $800,000. He oversaw the expansion of artist development programs, including the Youth Film Festival and the Indie Grants program. Under his watch, Indie Memphis mounted a major push to increase diversity among both the filmmakers and the audience, with programs such as the Black Creator’s Forum. In a film industry historically dominated by white men, Indie Memphis 2020 stands out with 43 percent of features directed by women and 50 percent directed by people of color.

“Ryan is such a good executive director because he approaches it like a creative producer,” Bale says. “He knows what needs to be done. But even more than that, he loves recognizing the vision of people, whether it’s local filmmakers or all of his staff. He is so good at letting us all shine. … He’s so empathetic, and sees who people are and how they can best shine. And it’s really incredibly rare in this business.”

Watt says his decision was not taken lightly. “I will always call this a dream job. That’s why it’s really hard to walk away from it. It’s meant everything to me. This is a kind of job that just kind of becomes your identity. But at the same time, as I told the staff, everything I’ve done up till now has been five- or six-year stints, where I kind of dove into something that I had very little experience in, because of the challenge and the excitement. So I think it’s just sort of the right time to hand things off. But it’s been awesome — something I will always treasure.”

Highlights from the Indie Memphis 2020 Lineup.

Film About a Father Who

Many directors describe their works as labors of love, but few earn that title as thoroughly as Indie Memphis’ opening night feature, Film About a Father Who.

Lynne Sachs says she decided to make a movie about her father, Ira Sachs Sr., in 1991. “The first material I shot, which was with my dad on this trip in Bali, where I talk about my sister and me getting angry at him and running away, was shot on VHS,” she says. “The earliest footage is from 1965. I did not shoot that, but you can see Ira [Sachs Jr.] as a baby. He was just a few months old. My mom must’ve shot it. I can tell you — because I’ve mined every bit of it — that we have 12 minutes of footage of my whole childhood.”

Film About a Father Who

Ira Sachs Sr. had a legendary career as a real estate developer and entrepreneur. He developed one of the first hotels in the ski resort town of Park City, Utah — ironically, now one of the centers of the film universe, as home to the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals. An early adopter of mobile phone technology, Sachs is seen early in the film wheeling and dealing while skiing down immaculate powder slopes.

But he was also an unreconstructed member of Memphis’ legendary counterculture. He smoked marijuana religiously and took pride in never venturing out to the square world beyond East Parkway. In the 1970s, he bought a crumbling Victorian home on Adams Avenue in Downtown Memphis for $14,000 and renovated it, at least enough to live in. It’s now the site of Mollie Fontaine Lounge restaurant.

“When my dad lived on Adams [Avenue], he never locked his doors,” says Lynne Sachs. “So when I look back on that, I can say, ‘Whoa, I had this kind of hippie life for part of the week, and isn’t that interesting? And isn’t that different from all the other middle-class kids’ parents?’ But on the other hand, you had no idea who was going to walk in. There was always this ambiguity between being very much a free spirit and being vulnerable and awkward and open to something that you don’t want. … It wasn’t easy to be growing older, but my dad’s girlfriends were always staying the same age.”

In this confessional documentary, Lynne Sachs creates a warts-and-all portrait of a mercurial and ultimately fascinating man. “I would have long periods of time, like a year at a time, where I was scared to make it, or I’d say I’ve had enough, this is exhausting. I had to reckon with that space between rage — which I had plenty of times — and forgiveness, which was part of almost every interaction that my dad and I had. I would go from one extreme to the other. A good photograph has a pure black and a pure white — and then it also has all of those grays in between.”

…

Coming to Africa

Anwar Jamison’s third film bops along to the buoyant groove of high life, the music of contemporary Ghana. Coming to Africa is the result of the Memphis director’s long-standing fascination. He says that all too often Americans see Africa as a place of poverty and war. But the reality is much more complicated.

“It felt silly, how much we buy into the one image of it that we generally see,” he says. “I saw the reactions just from still pictures I would show people. Like, ‘Would you believe this Apple Store is in a mall in Africa?’ People really were surprised like, ‘Oh, I just, I didn’t consider that.’ And that crosses all boundaries of race class. In America, we’ve always been less knowledgeable about foreign countries than they are about us. There’s a certain comfort level we have. We’re Americans. Everybody follows our trends. That makes us lazy when it comes to really understanding other people’s cultures. So I just knew it would be great subject matter for a movie.”

Coming to Africa

Jamison plays Adrian, an ambitious executive climbing the corporate ladder while flitting freely from one girlfriend to another. But when he is passed over for a promotion in favor of a less-qualified white colleague, he quits his high-powered job and joins his brother Adonis, played by poet Powwah Uhuru, on a vacation to Accra, the prosperous capital city of Ghana. There he meets and falls in love with Akosua, played by Nana Ama McBrown, and finds a life richer than mere ambition.

It took Jamison years to put together the bi-continental production, which saw him casting in Memphis and Accra simultaneously. His co-star, McBrown, is “literally the biggest star in Ghana,” he says. “It was amazing, being around her and seeing people’s reactions and how she carries herself. She’s really a superstar. You drive around the city, and every five minutes, she’s going to be on some other billboard.”

Jamison didn’t plan to be McBrown’s co-star. He originally cast a Memphis actor as his lead so he could concentrate on directing and “show up to the set in sweatpants.” But when the crew was already in Ghana, disaster struck. “The lead actor that I had secured for the movie, this guy doesn’t get on the plane two days before we’re shooting! We’re supposed to start shooting on Monday. He’s flying out Saturday morning and he’s given me these fake excuses. Then he sent me a text that said, ‘You’ve been really cool about everything, man. But I think maybe Africa was just too much at this time.’ And that’s when it clicked for me. He’s just scared to come over here. At the last minute he got cold feet. I turned to my producer and said, ‘See? That’s why we’re doing this movie. So people don’t have to feel like that.'”

…

We Can’t Wait

Director Lauren Ready has two Indie Memphis Audience Awards on her shelf: One for 2017’s documentary short “Bike Lee,” and the other for 2018’s “You Must Believe.” She was watching Street Fight, the Academy Award-nominated documentary about now-Senator Cory Booker’s run for mayor of Newark, New Jersey, when she had the idea for her first feature. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve got to capture what’s happening in Memphis!”

Tami Sawyer, the hero of the Take ‘Em Down 901 movement that sparked the removal of Confederate monuments from Memphis public spaces, was running for mayor against popular incumbent Jim Strickland and Willie Herenton, the city’s first Black chief executive. “History is unfolding,” Ready recalled. “Regardless of the outcome of the election, the fact that there’s a Black millennial female running for mayor who just became a County Commissioner a year ago — there’s a story here.”

We Can’t Wait

Ready met with Sawyer to negotiate a deal to create We Can’t Wait. “I basically said, ‘In order to capture this, I have to be fair. So I want to make sure that you will give us access to the good, the bad, and the ugly. I can’t just tell this beautiful story, because that’s not how it’s going to go. I had my hopes about how it would come out, from a story perspective. I was hoping that history would unfold in such a way that it’d be like, ‘Wow, we just documented the first Black female mayor!’ But I also knew that that might not be the case.”

Sawyer did not win, but that just might have made We Can’t Wait a richer story. Ready’s cameras offer a fly-on-the-wall view of an insurgent candidate learning hard lessons in real time. Sawyer’s charisma and the depth of her commitment shines through as she battles through a dramatic campaign. “It was a roller coaster,” says Ready. “In the documentary, there’s so much foreshadowing. We didn’t realize as we were capturing it.”

We Can’t Wait is part of a tradition of political cinema vérité that goes back to the 1960 film Primary, capturing John F. Kennedy’s campaign against Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic presidential nomination. Ready credits Sawyer’s bravery for allowing her access. “I’m really grateful that she trusted me and my team to do this, because there were many times where she could have said, ‘Okay, we’re done. Leave. I don’t want this. Turn the camera off.’ She never did any of that.”

Sawyer declined to participate in the editing process, allowing Ready freedom to tell the story as honestly as possible. “It’s a moment in time,” says the director. “It’s what our cameras captured in that moment, as opposed to this very specifically, carefully crafted piece that makes her look a certain way. No, this is what we got. You get to see what we got, and nothing about it is doctored in a way that makes it seem like anything other than what we saw.”

…

I Blame Society

When Gillian Horvat’s 2015 short film “Kiss Kiss Fingerbang” won the Jury Award at South by Southwest, she thought her dream of directing Hollywood feature films was in reach. Winning at a prestigious film festival was sure to open doors. But it didn’t work out that way. She found work creating documentaries on film history, but the real breakthrough eluded her. “I was talking with my producers on another movie, and we were having trouble beating that stigma of being a first-time director, which is much, much stronger for a woman than for a male director.”

Horvat mentioned an old documentary project she had abandoned years before. “I would go around and interview all my friends in very ominous locations, like an empty parking lot or the middle of the forest. I asked them whether they think I would make a good murderer, and they were like, ‘No, that sounds crazy!'”

I Blame Society

When she showed them the film, the producers loved it, and I Blame Society was born. The film deftly twists fiction and reality. It’s not quite a mockumentary: funny, but not a full comedy; tense, but not a traditional thriller. Horvat, who wrote, produced, and directed, stars as a stylized version of herself, a struggling filmmaker in Hollywood. Her manic pixie demeanor is a front she developed from being told repeatedly that her female protagonists are “not likable.” Desperate to succeed, she sets out to make a film unlike anything seen before. She self-consciously starts down the path toward homicide, filming her every move with GoPros and iPhones. Her first crime is shoplifting, but once she films herself succeeding at the crime, she returns the items to the store. Then she proceeds to breaking and entering. Once she gets her first taste of murder, she wants more, and her nice-girl routine starts to look more and more like a sociopath’s front. “That’s definitely drawing from life,” Horvat says. “I’m super polite, but I’m full of rage.”

I Blame Society is a masterful black comedy in the tradition of Heathers or Man Bites Dog, drawing laughter and blood in equal measures. There’s also an unmistakable political subtext. “This film is an early, post-#MeToo film. Female filmmakers are now being told that the problem has been fixed. They have a seat at the table, and everybody cares. But in my opinion, very little has changed. Maybe a few toxic people have lost their jobs, but they’ve been replaced by other men who just can watch what they say better and maybe aren’t so handsy.”

Instead of dictating stories with “strong female leads,” Horvat says producers need to empower women to tell their own stories. “I think seeing women on screen who are messier and complicated and make mistakes is going to be a lot more validating, and also is going to make it easier for men and women to work together, because it’s going to turn around these mistaken perceptions.”

…

The Memphis Masters

“It almost feels like a responsibility,” says director Andrew Trent Fleming. “If you can tell stories about your hometown, you kind of have to, because no one else is gonna do it.”

Fleming got his chance to explore a significant chunk of music history when Brandon Seavers, CEO of Memphis Record Pressing, contacted him to produce a series of short documentaries to accompany reissues of Stax classics. The Memphis Masters gets the original players back together to discuss the creation of records such as the Bar-Kays’ Gotta Groove, the Staple Singers’ “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me),” and Melting Pot by Booker T. & the M.G.’s.

The Memphis Masters

“The project itself is like a dream for a filmmaker like me,” Fleming says. “I’m a huge music fan, and I just love telling music stories. These Memphis artists are heroes of mine. I’ve been hearing about Booker T. since I was a kid. Just getting to sit down with Steve Cropper — I feel really lucky that I even get to do that! I never take it for granted.”

To provide context, Fleming also got some contemporary artists to talk about the impact Stax music had on their lives. “We had Robert Trujillo from Metallica talking about how the Bar-Kays were one of his favorite bands, and why he got into playing music in the first place. He’s a bass player inspired by James Alexander, and that’s just crazy to me! Would you ever think Metallica would be talking about the Bar-Kays? We talked to Mike Mills from R.E.M., who absolutely loves Big Star. We got Walshy Fire from Major Lazer, who talked about Johnnie Taylor’s ‘Who’s Making Love.'”

Shot in a creamy black-and-white, Fleming gives his subjects the respectful treatment they deserve. “I don’t feel like a filmmaker. I feel like a huge fan who gets to sit in the room with the camera. I think the best way to make a documentary is just to try to learn about something.”

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Indie Memphis Executive Director Ryan Watt Stepping Down After Six Years

Ryan Watt, Executive Director of Indie Memphis

Ryan Watt, the executive director of Indie Memphis, has announced his intent to resign after the 2020 edition of the film festival.

“I look forward to new personal challenges and opportunities as I return to my roots and as entrepreneur,” Watt said in a statement released on Twitter. “Indie Memphis is in a great position to bring in an executive director to lead the next phase of growth for the festival. We have an incredible staff, amazing film community, solid financials, growing audience, ad a devoted board of directors.”

Watt’s introduction into the world of independent film came as a producer for Daylight Fades, the 2010 vampire horror film directed by Memphian Brad Ellis and written by Allen C. Gardner.

“A few months prior to producing my first independent film, my journey with Indie Memphis began in 2008, when I bought a pass to the festival,” Watt said. “It was a total discovery. I couldn’t believe what a gem we had in our backyard, and I wanted more people to experience why it was so special.”

Since Watt took over from former director Erik Jambor in 2015, he has overseen a major expansion of the organization. Last year, the annual film festival, which was founded in 1998, attracted more than 12,000 attendees from all over the world.

Watt has emphasized the organization’s commitment to artist development, especially expanding access to the tools of filmmaking to people of color. According to Indie Memphis’ annual report, 114 Memphis filmmakers completed projects last year, 45 percent of whom were people of color.

Last weekend was the annual Indie Memphis Youth Festival, which began on his watch in 2016 and has grown significantly every year.

“My vision was to build the Indie Memphis profile, expand the scope of our programs, grow the pipeline between Memphis and the industry, develop filmmakers starting with youth, offer Memphis year-round arthouse cinema, and seek inclusion of the whole city in our mission,” Watt said.

A dedicated Indie Memphis cinema was scheduled to open in March at Malco’s Studio on the Square, but the debut has been delayed due to COVID-19. Because of the pandemic, this year’s festival is expected to be a hybrid virtual affair, combining limited in-person screenings with extensive online offerings in partnership with the Memphis-based cinema services company Eventive.

“A leader of Ryan’s effectiveness and vision will be deeply missed,” said Brett Robbs, president of the Indie Memphis board of directors. “But thanks to all he has helped us accomplish, Indie Memphis is well positioned to continue to grow and serve the needs of our entire community.”

Robbs will lead a national search for Watt’s replacement. Watt says he will stay on to ease the transition to new leadership. The 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival is scheduled for October 21st-26th. 

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Indie Memphis Wraps 20th Anniversary Film Festival With Record Attendance

In Thom Pain, the film which opened the 2017 Indie Memphis Film Festival last Wednesday, Rainn Wilson repeatedly teases the audience with the prospect of a raffle for valuable prizes, but never delivers. On Monday, after more than 200 film screenings at the Halloran Centre, Studio on the Square, Hattiloo Theater, Circuit Playhouse, Playhouse on the Square, and the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill, the closing night Memphis Grizzlies Grizz Grant screening finally delivered on the promise of a raffle.

Indie Memphis’ Executive Director Ryan Watt says that the twentieth anniversary festival set a record for attendance by attracting more than 12,000 filmgoers during the past week. A program of encore screenings, technically still part of the festival, at the Malco Collierville Towne Cinema this weekend will push that number even higher.

Good Grief directors Melissa Anderson Sweazy (left) and Laura Jean Hocking (right) pose on the red carpet with Indie Memphis Film Festival Executive Director Ryan Watt.

At the Audience Awards, presented at the closing night reception, the Memphis-made documentary Good Grief completed a rare sweep of Hometowner feature awards. The film, directed by Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking, was previously awarded Best Hometowner Feature on Saturday night at a raucous awards ceremony at Circuit Playhouse, as well as the Audience Choice for the Poster Contest. Previous films that have won both audience and jury awards include Phoebe Driscoll’s Pharaohs Of Memphis in 2014 and G.B. Shannon’s “Fresh Skweezed” in 2011. The record for most prizes won at Indie Memphis by a single film belongs to Morgan Jon Fox’s OMG/HAHAHA, which won five trophies in 2009.

The other big winner to emerge from this year’s festival is Matteo Servente. The Memphis director won two short film prizes for two different short films: “An Accidental Drowning” won the MLK 50 prize for Civil Rights-related films, and “We Go On” won the Hometowner Short Film competition. “We Go On”, with a screenplay by Memphis writer and Burke’s Books owner Corey Mesler, had previously won top honors at the Memphis Film Prize. Servente who came to Memphis from Italy ten years ago, dedicated his wins to the cause of immigrant’s rights, saying “This is what happens when you don’t build that wall!” 

Hometowner Narrative Short Audience Award Winner Nathan Ross Murphy receives his trophy from Indie Memphis’ Ryan Watt.

The Narrative Feature award went to Cold November by Karl Jacob, and directors Landen Van Soest and Jeremy Levine took home the Documentary Feature award with For Akheem. The Hometowner Documentary Short award was won by “Blackout Day” by director Graham Uhelski.

Audience Award for Narrative Feature went to Mark Webber’s Flesh and Blood, while the audience chose Sideman by Scott Rosenbaum for Documentary Feature. The audience’s favorite Hometowner Narrative Feature was Nathan Ross Murphy’s “Muddy Water” and Lauren Squires Ready won the Documentary Short audience nod with “Bike Lee. Katori Hall’s “Arkabutla” was the audience choice among the MLK 50 films.

Good Grief and the award-winning short films will be on the program this Saturday at the Malco Collierville Towne Cinema. For more information visit the Indie Memphis website.

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Indie Memphis Announces Opening Night Film, Special MLK50 Programming For 2017 Festival

The Indie Memphis Film Festival will take place November 1-6, 2017. This will be the twentieth year the festival has brought films produced independently of the Hollywood studio system to the Mid-South, and organizers say they intend to pull out all the stops.

The opening night film will be Thom Pain, the film adaptation of a 2004, one-man play called Thom Paine (based on nothing) by English playwright Will Eno that won the first ever Fringe Award at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival. The star of—and presumably only actor in—the film, Rainn Wilson, will be on hand for the gala screening, which will be the film’s world premiere. Wilson made his film debut in 1999’s Galaxy Quest, appeared for five seasons on HBO’s Six Feet Under, and achieved international notoriety with his portrayal of Dwight on the American version of The Office.

The festival is partnering with the National Civil Rights Museum for a series of films to commemorate April’s 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. These will include Up Tight, a rarely seen, 1968 independent film by Jules Dassin starring Ruby Dee that includes footage taken at King’s funeral, and the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Legacy From Montgomery To Memphis by Sidney Lumet.

The work of American indie auteur Abel Ferrera will be celebrated with two screenings: Bad Lieutenant, a 1992 film starring Harvey Keitel as a corrupt cop who cracks up while investigating the rape and murder of a nun, and The Blackout, a 1997 comedy starring Dennis Hopper and Matthew Modine as a director and movie star who get themselves into trouble while drinking in Miami Beach. Ferrera will appear at both screenings, along with his cinematographer Ken Kelsch and editor Anthony Redman.

For its twentieth anniversary, the festival will have a three day block party in Overton Square that will block off Cooper between Union and Monroe. The party will feature the Memphis premiere of Thank You Friends: Big Star Live…and More, a concert film of Big Star’s Third album performed live by an all star band that includes members of R.E.M. and Wilco, and Robyn Hitchcock, among others, with the sole surviving original Big Star member Jody Stephens on drums. “The Indie Memphis team went all out this year to celebrate our 20th anniversary,” says Indie Memphis Executive Director Ryan Watt. “The addition of the block party and more venues will make this our largest and most eclectic festival to date. I’m most excited to see our audience and filmmakers, local and traveling, come together as a community to discuss what they’ve seen after each credits roll.”

The festival’s competition lineup will be revealed at a party at the Rec Room on September 26. Organizers have had a record number of entries this year and expect to screen at least 200 documentary, narrative, experimental, and animated features and shorts during the festival’s weeklong run. Festival passes are on sale now at the Indie Memphis website.

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Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival Cultivates Next Crop Of Memphis Filmmakers

While the main festival doesn’t start until November 1, Indie Memphis is busy helping the next generation of Bluff City filmmakers get off the ground.

12-year-old Chris Stromopolos (left) starring in Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

The Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival takes place this Saturday at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre. Indie Memphis Executive Director Ryan Watt says the festival has had a youth block for some time, but it was time to spin it off into its own event. “This is the first step towards what we hope will be a bigger and more active youth program.”

The response to the new program has been overwhelming. “I was blown away by how many submissions we got. This thing is going to be really cool. We’re going to be showing 27 short films at the Halloran Centre all day long. And it’s 100% free for K-12.”

The program will begin at noon on Saturday with a free lunch for attendees. In addition to the youth film competition, there will be a series of classes by Memphis area filmmakers. “You’ll hear from Craig Brewer on storytelling, Morgan Jon Fox on acting, and Jordan Danelz on cinematography,” among others, says Watt.
The festival will provide additional inspiration with the story of real-life kids who lived their filmmaking dreams. Tonight, the documentary Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made will screen at Studio on the Square. It tells the story of Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, two kids from Ocean Springs, Mississippi who decided to remake Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas’ classic Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot for shot, using only a VHS camera and whatever other materials they could get their hands on. Remarkably, after six years of work, they succeeded—almost. (How did they pull of the scenes in the submarine? They used an ACTUAL submarine!) The documentary’s frame is the tale of how the childhood friends came back together as adults to film the only scene they couldn’t get right the first time, the epic “Flying Wing” fight.

A screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark: An Adaptation will be the climax of the Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival

Then, on Saturday night, the Youth Film Festival attendees will be treated to the actual product of Stromopolios, Zala, and their friends’ labors. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation first premiered over a decade ago at the Oxford Film Festival, and it is a must-see for anyone who has ever wanted to make their own movies. It highlights both the determination and resourcefulness of the young cast and crew, and the enduring perfection of Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay, which continues to work just fine even when the visuals don’t measure up to Spielberg’s vision. Before the screening, the winners of the festival competition will be announced. The grand prize is a full day’s production services from Via Productions worth $4,000, plus $500 cash and an automatic entry into the main Indie Memphis competition for the winning film. There will also be an audience award worth $500, and a $250 award for the movie that best represents Memphis.

For more information, and to buy tickets to the events, go to Indiememphis.com

Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival Cultivates Next Crop Of Memphis Filmmakers

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Indie Memphis 2015: The Directors

“We serve two complementary groups of people in Memphis,” says Ryan Watt, executive director of Indie Memphis. “We serve the filmmakers and artists, to help their work get seen, and help with things like grants and workshops and panels and networking opportunities. We help artists from Memphis and beyond get their movies seen. On the other hand, we serve the audiences who are dying to see something different. I like superhero movies, too, but there’s only so much of that we can see.”

For 18 years, Indie Memphis has pursued those twin missions. What began with movies projected on a sheet in a downtown bar has evolved into one of the city’s premier cultural events. This year brings big changes to the festival, beginning with Watt, who took over as director earlier this year after the departure of Erik Jambor. Watt, a producer with seven features under his belt, was an Indie Memphis board member who volunteered to be the interim director after the January resignation of Jambor. In September, what was originally a temporary position became permanent. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I thought that would be it. But we started the search for executive director, and I got about a month into it, and I thought, ‘I’m really enjoying this.'”

This year’s festival expands to eight days, from November 3rd-10th, to allow audiences more opportunities to see movies that might have gotten lost in the shuffle in the former four-day format. “We kept the weekend, which is the anchor of the festival, and we added screenings before and after it,” Watt says. Friday through Sunday screenings, panels, parties, and events will take place at Circuit Playhouse and Studio on the Square in Overton square, while the rest of the festival will take place downtown in the Orpheum Theatre’s new Halloran Centre.

The festival takes place late in the film calendar, which means Indie Memphis can get unique films. “The Sundance and South by Southwest films have made the rounds and already have distribution. But we’re a month before the big Oscar push, so we get movies like Carol and Anomalisa and Brooklyn. Other festivals don’t get those,” Watt says.

One of the most buzzed-about films at the festival is Tangerine, director Sean Baker’s comedy that was shot entirely on an iPhone. “I think about that movie on a daily basis,” Watt says. “You think about the movies that change independent film, like Clerks or Pulp Fiction. Tangerine will be on that list.”

Director Whit Stillman

In addition to bringing the cutting edge of film to Memphis, the festival also celebrates classic cinema. The groundbreaking indie Metropolitan will get a 25th-anniversary screening, with director Whit Stillman on hand to answer audience questions and, on Saturday, conduct a screenwriting panel. For the centennial of Orson Welles’ birth, the festival is partnering with Rhodes College to screen his 1965 Shakespeare adaptation Chimes at Midnight, which the director considered to be his best film. “This is a big deal,” Watt says. “We’re showing a 35-mm print. Only a handful of copies exist in the world.”

With a new online ticketing system and a plan for expanded year-round programming, Watt wants to make sure Indie Memphis rounds out its second decade bringing even more big-deal events to the city.

Andrea Morales

Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson worked for four years on The Keepers

The Keepers

This year’s crop of local films is the strongest in recent memory. The festival opens with The Keepers, a documentary by Memphis directors Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson. The pair met at a dinner party hosted by photographer William Eggleston in 2011.

Larson is a survivor of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “One of my first films I was recognized for was, I did a super-D.I.Y. film where I videotaped everything while I was going through chemotherapy in the early 2000s.”

Andrea Morales

The idea for The Keepers came from Larson’s daily walk through Overton Park. “I was obsessed with the Zoo,” she says. “I wanted to go behind the scenes. I’d always wanted to make a real documentary. Joann said, ‘I do too!’ And that’s how it happened.”

Self Selvidge has produced and directed documentaries for 11 years. Her most recent work, The Art Academy, detailed the history of the Memphis College of Art. Her close collaboration with Larson was a first for her. “We’re both used to doing everything ourselves,” Self Selvidge says. “She and I actually think a lot alike. We have way more similarities than differences. We had lots of friction in certain areas and a lot of opinions. And it made the film stronger. I’ve always worked with really strong people and a strong crew. I didn’t go to film school. I’ve learned by doing it, and I learned from other people.”

Jamie Harmon

Carolyn Horton and Kofi the giraffe

Jamie Harmon

Fred Wagner, the big cat keeper

The pair shot more than 300 hours of footage during the four-year production. “The biggest thing we want Memphis to know about this movie is that they’re going to get unprecedented access behind the scenes at the Zoo. The whole point of making this movie was to answer documentaries that rely on sensationalism. It doesn’t matter if zoos are good or bad. What about the people who work there? What is their experience? Connecting to zoos through the eyes of the worker, it’s going to give you a perspective that you have never seen before,” Self Selvidge says.

Larson says the finished product ended up being far different from the film the directors thought they would be making. “When we went into it, we thought, ‘This is going to be such an interesting story, because we’re going to film people that love animals, but yet they have to take care of them in captivity. They’re going to be so conflicted. This will be a great story.’ But guess what? They’re not conflicted. They’re fine with it. And they should be. They’re totally zen.”

But for the Grace

But for the Grace

Emmanuel A. Amido came to Memphis at age 12 as a refugee from war-torn South Sudan. “The first four or five years are kind of a blur, because I didn’t know the language or understand the culture,” he says.

His interest in filmmaking began when his mother bought a digital camcorder. “During birthday parties and events, I always wanted to be the one holding the camera. During my junior year of high school, I took a media class. Our final project was to produce a little newspiece. I loved it. That was the first time I got to edit. That’s when I decided I was going to do this for a living.”

Amido’s films are shaped by his immigrant experiences in Memphis. “I’m very fascinated by American society. In such a short period of time, so much has happened. When you look at the world timeline, when America came into the world, it’s like nothing. But in that short period of time, it was established, developed, and surpassed nations that had been around since Moses. That’s fascinating to me, the idea of democracy, and rights, and privilege.”

His first film Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community won the Soul of Southern Film award at 2013’s Indie Memphis. “It was going to be about the violence of Orange Mound, but when I started making it, it became something else,” he says. “I wanted to make something that the people of Orange Mound could celebrate. A lot of people I met were beat up and worn down from the struggle and the poverty. So I wanted to make something to lift them up.”

In But for the Grace, Amido explores questions of faith and race in contemporary America. “I started with Martin Luther King’s quote that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. I went in to look at some of the issues that keep churchgoing Americans segregated. I wanted to move along both socioeconomic and racial lines. But as the movie progressed, I discovered that race is still a very touchy subject for people to talk about in the church, on both the white side and the black side. So I focused more on the racial side.”

Amido’s unique perspective allows him to conduct frank discussions on race relations with people on both sides of the Sunday-morning divide. “America is not a perfect society, not by a long shot. But what I like about being here is that even though it’s imperfect, even though there’s a lot of inequality, somebody like me, who’s not even from here, can make a documentary calling people out on these issues. I’m not saying that after this movie comes out, blacks and whites are going to hug each other. But I’m able to do that, and there are people who will see it, and will think about it, who don’t think they have to defend a certain point of view. The majority of the world doesn’t have that, and Americans take it for granted.”

Girl in Woods

Girl in Woods

“We sort of made the movie twice,” says Memphis native Jeremy Benson about his psychological horror movie Girl in Woods.

After completing and selling his 2008 film Live Animals, he and his producing partner Mark Williams were trying to sell investors on a vampire film. “We were in a pitch meeting, and the investor said he liked the business plan, but he didn’t want to be attached to that kind of story,” he recalls. “I blurted out that I was working on a short story about a girl with some mental problems who gets lost in the Smoky Mountains. From that statement to about two months later, we had the money, but we didn’t have the script.”

Over the course of an 18-day shoot in East Tennessee, the crew, which included ace Memphis cinematographer Ryan Earl Parker, battled the elements. “We underestimated how hard it would be to shoot in the mountains. Out of the 18 days we were there, it rained nine of them. It looks great in the movie, but it really slows you down.”

Juliet Reeves London, who plays the lead character Grace, turned in a nuanced performance despite the harsh conditions.”Juliet was a trooper, having to shoot around snakes. She’s in 90 percent of the movie. She does a great job.”

But when Benson got the hard-won footage back to the editing room, he and editor Brian Elkins discovered their problems were only beginning. “We cut it, but there were big sections of the story that were not coming across like they should.”

So the crew convinced their investors to finance a series of reshoots that would add a backstory in flashbacks that was previously told in dialogue. “We went back and shot half the movie again,” Benson says. “Honestly, I’m glad we did it. I’m 10 times more proud of this cut than I was two years ago. It forced us to go from the in-town, D.I.Y.- style to getting a casting director, go through the unions, and get a breakdown, and do it the way we’re supposed to do it.”

The reshoots added Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Charisma Carpenter and Party of Five‘s Jeremy London to the cast. Girl in Woods is also the last film role by the late Memphis actor John Still, who was a fixture in Craig Brewer’s films. The finished film is dense and twisty, not relying on gore and jump-scares to build tension. “It’s a horror film, but it’s definitely pushing the genre in all sorts of different directions.”

Benson says the movie is a tribute to the power of persistence. He recalls asking experienced filmmakers for advice on how to improve after his first film. “And they always said ‘Just do it.’ We thought they were being sarcastic. But after doing it, we realized they were telling the truth. You just do it.”

Wind Blows

Syl Johnson: Any Way the Wind Blows

“Syl’s story really found me,” says director Rob Hatch-Miller. The New Yorker met the soul singer in 2009 while filming for a radio station’s website. “I didn’t know a lot of his music at the time. I knew his name, and I knew he had a reputation for being sampled a lot in the hip-hop world. But I didn’t know much beyond that. Seeing him interviewed that day, it was clear that he had a fascinating story about his career in music and that he was a fascinating character. He’s a super interesting guy: funny, quirky, great personality. The character is the most important part of deciding to do a documentary.”

Johnson is not as well known as Al Green or Marvin Gaye, but he had an astonishingly prolific career that spanned three decades. “He’s not someone who made one album and disappeared. The boxed set of his album that was nominated for a Grammy while we were filming is six LPs, and that doesn’t even cover half of his career. He did everything, from early 1960s, heavily blues-influenced R&B music, to super funky James Brown-style hard funk, to Hi Records-Memphis-style, to even doing some great disco-y stuff towards the end of his main recording career. His music went on to influence hip-hop in a major way, as much as James Brown or Al Green influenced hip-hop. Syl’s song ‘Different Strokes’ from 1967, recorded in Chicago for an independent record label, is one of the most sampled songs of all time.”

Johnson is a native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, and the film brought him back to the Memphis area. “We were going to these places in Memphis with Syl that he hadn’t been for years, seeing people whom he hadn’t seen in years,” Hatch-Miller says. “Hearing these stories that we had only had glimpses of previously, it was a really exciting time filming, and probably the most fun we had shooting. You can see it in the scene when he shows up at Hi Records where all of the stuff was recorded with Willie Mitchell and Al Green and Syl and Otis Clay and O.V. Wright. It was a wonderful day. The audience walks in the door with him and meets the family of Willie Mitchell, and you really feel like you’re being taken back in time. It’s one of my favorite parts of the film.”

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King

Twelve years ago, English director Jeanie Finlay was at a car boot sale — “You would call it a yard sale” — when she found an old vinyl record called Orion Reborn. “On the cover there was a man with a mask, his hands on his hips, and big hair. For a pound, you can’t go wrong! So I took it home and played it. It was confusing. It sounded like Elvis, but it was after Elvis died. It was on Sun Records. What’s going on here?”

She went on to forge a career as a documentary filmmaker, but she never forgot about the mystery of Orion. She struggled for years to get funding for Orion: The Man Who Would Be King and traveled to the States to shoot whenever she could. “I never gave up. I feel like filmmaking sometimes is a test of your own resilience,” she says.

She gathered together 80 hours, 5,000 images, countless hours of archival material, and 337 crowd-funders before winning backing from Creative England, Ffilm Cymru Wales, BBC Storyville and Broadway. “Once I had gotten all of those things in place, everyone else came on board. There’s no magic bullet when it comes to making films. I felt possessed by Orion’s story, and I knew that one day, in some way or another, I was going to make it into a film.”

Orion’s Elvis-esqe appearance and singing style was cooked up by Sun Records, at that time owned by Shelby Singleton, and was the origin of the persistent myth that Elvis faked his death. “People just want it to be true. Every time there’s something people want to be true, those are the stories that go viral.”

Finlay says Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, which closes Indie Memphis, is, like all her films, “about what music means to people. It’s a different take on the things that were going on in the wake of Elvis’ death. Elvis is not actually in the film, but he casts sort of a long shadow over it. It’s funny, it’s moving, and it’s surprising.”