"We want the whole city to really own the festival,” says Ryan Watt, executive director of the Indie Memphis Film Festival.
The festival was born in 1998, the same year the digital revolution started to take hold in filmmaking, creating new avenues for would-be directors to realize their vision. The “indie” in Indie Memphis is short for “independent,” as contrasted with “studio” or “Hollywood” movies.
Some of the filmmakers whose work has appeared at Indie Memphis, like Craig Brewer and Ira Sachs, have gone on to larger careers in the filmmaking world. What sets the programming at Indie Memphis apart from what you would see at the Malco multiplex any given weekend is the passion and the artistry. For the people who make the more than 100 feature-length and short films that will screen at Indie Memphis from November 1 to 7, it’s more than a job.
Expanding Footprint
This is Watt’s second year at the helm in Indie Memphis, and he is determined to bring the unique and incredible programming to more people in the Bluff City. “We’re in more locations,” he says. “We’re all over town.”
Last year, Indie Memphis expanded beyond Overton Square to make it the first big event held in the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre for the Performing Arts. “To have a Downtown Memphis location where everyone can walk to Earnestine & Hazel’s is just great,” Watt says, citing the overflow crowd at last year’s opening-night film, the made-in-Memphis zoo documentary The Keepers. “I don’t think there was anywhere else in town where we could have pulled that off.”
This year, the weeklong festival will again spend the weeknights at the 361-seat Halloran Centre and weekends at Overton Square’s Circuit Playhouse, Studio On the Square, and Hattiloo Theatre. But there will also be screenings of select festival films at Malco’s flagship Ridgeway Cinema Grill in East Memphis and the Collierville Towne Cinema. “I’m trying to expand the opportunities for people to see movies,” says Watt.
Expanding Influence
The biggest changes to Indie Memphis this year has been behind the scenes. Local financial firm Duncan Williams, whose sponsorship has sustained the festival for years, has been joined this year by Amazon Studios. The online retailing giant’s push into the streaming video business has been accompanied by a foray into the content creation business. “Practically overnight, Amazon Studios has become the biggest independent film producer and acquisition company in the world,” says Watt. “You wouldn’t think that Amazon as a brand would necessarily go along with art, but they are now the home of artists like Spike Lee, Woody Allen, and Whit Stillman, who was at Indie Memphis last year.”
Until now, Amazon has only lent support to top-line festivals like Sundance and Tribeca. “We’re the first regional festival that they have sponsored,” says Watt. “We’ve never been in that conversation before.”
Amazon will bring to the festival Manchester by the Sea, director Kenneth Lonergan’s beautifully photographed drama starring Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams; and Patterson, directed by indie legend Jim Jarmusch and starring Adam Driver.
Expanding Competition
Indie Memphis’ centerpiece is the competition, where judges and audiences select the best of the fest in categories such as documentary, narrative feature, and shorts. Indie Memphis is somewhat unusual, in that it has from the inception included a Homeowner category that has been the catalyst for the vibrant Memphis filmmaking scene.
A new category this year is called Sounds. Prizes will be awarded for best music-related narrative features, documentaries, and short films. 2016 will also mark the return of the Music Video Showcase, a competition for both nationally and locally produced music videos.
“If you’ve got a film that involves music, whether it be a documentary or fictional film, we want to make sure you’re sending it to Indie Memphis,” says Watt.
Favorite Son
Memphis-born director Ira Sachs recently had a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art titled Thank You For Being Honest. “The hard part is not being sentimental — one of the hard parts, anyway,” the director says. “Don’t value the mere fact that you’re confessing, but to do your own material in a way that’s rigorous and aesthetically refined, and a good story. Just because you lived it, doesn’t mean it’s interesting.”
Sachs currently resides in New York, but he says his heart is never far from the Bluff City, where he received his first creative spark at the Memphis Children’s Theatre. “It was an old Quonset hut, now gone, in the middle of the Fairgrounds,” he recalls. “It was a program run by the Parks Department that attracted kids from all over the city. We learned how to run a theater and put on plays. I kind of grew up there, starting in about sixth grade. I directed my first play, Our Town, there when I was in 11th grade. That for me was this community that is still a kind of a utopian concept for me, because it was extremely integrated across class, race, sexuality, and background. I’ve never had that replicated on the level that I did there in the Fairgrounds in Memphis.”
He left his hometown to attend Yale in 1983, but when it came time to direct his first film, The Delta, he returned, immersing himself in our subcultures. “I spent a lot of time there — about half a year, all together. Because you can’t fake intimacy with a place. In The Delta, I established strategies that I am still using today. I really try to observe and engage with a particular community in the narrative of my stories. For The Delta, that meant I spent a lot of time with teenagers at raves and in clubs. I spent a lot of time in the Vietnamese community, near bars and at people’s apartments. And all of that is kind of the texture of the world of the film.”
The Delta will have a twentieth anniversary screening at the Halloran Centre on Wednesday, November 2nd, followed the next night by the Memphis premiere of his latest work, Little Men, which the filmmaker says completes a sort of loose trilogy. The acclaimed Love Is Strange starred Alfred Molina and John Lithgow as a couple of aging gay men who find their lives upended when they are finally able to marry. “Before Love Is Strange, I had made Keep The Lights On, which was about two men in their twenties. When we finished both of those films, [writer] Mauricio Zacharias and I thought there was a third film, generationally, about young boys and their relationship — in this case, their friendship. It’s a film very much about friendship. And I have to say in a Memphis way, it was inspired by my friendship with Greg Isbell, who I went to Lausanne with. Greg’s father was Al Bell, who ran Stax Records. My friendship with Greg was the center of my elementary school experience. We were from very different parts of the city. Trying to think about how those differences can be played out in a movie was part of where Little Men came from.”
