The Return of Indie Memphis

The arts nonprofit is set to revive their annual film festival in November.

by

Culture

On a humid evening in May, a crowd packed into Studio on the Square for a preview screening of Obsession, courtesy of the arts nonprofit Indie Memphis. The film, written and directed by Curry Barker, is a horror story loosely based on the classic short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” The guest of honor at the screening was Memphian Vivian Gray. As Obsession’s production designer, she was responsible for the look of the film. 

At the Q&A afterwards, she told the audience how she created the “One Wish Willow,” the dime-store novelty of mysterious origin which grants the wish of Bear (played by Michael Johnson) that his unrequited crush, Nikki (memorably portrayed by Inde Navarette), would love him more than anything in the world. After the applause died down, Gray told the audience that she owed her career to the Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival, where she learned the basics of filmmaking by directing her first short film, which was sponsored by one of Indie Memphis’ grant programs. 

“This is why those festivals are so important,” says Joseph Carr, Indie Memphis’ co-executive director. “We have so many kids in college right now who attribute the Indie Memphis youth program to their success and getting into college and working on film sets. It’s a launch pad for amazing things to happen, and I don’t know that the general public realizes how much of a ripple effect that it has.”

Barker, a 25-year-old native of Mobile, Alabama, made Obsession independently, without the support of a studio, on a budget of $750,000. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, where it was bought by national distributor Focus Features for $14 million. No one in the Indie Memphis screening’s audience that night could have suspected that it would go on to make more than $400 million at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing independent film ever bought at a film festival market, and the highest-grossing film that cost less than $1 million to produce — a record which Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon had held for 53 years. 

During the 2010s, Hollywood was riding a wave of blockbuster hits, led by James Cameron’s Avatar, the renewed Star Wars franchise, and a series of comic book superhero movies from Disney’s Marvel Studios and Warner Bros.’ DC Studios. 2019 was one of the biggest years in box office history. Then, the Covid pandemic hit in March 2020, closing movie theaters for more than a year. Soon after they reopened, twin strikes by the Writer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild shut down the Hollywood production pipeline for  months. 

Even once the labor issues were resolved, audiences did not flock back in pre-pandemic numbers. For a nonprofit film festival like Indie Memphis, which specializes in undiscovered talent and artsier cinema experiences, times were tough. “It has been a difficult time for exhibition generally, and certainly for regional festivals specifically,” says Brandon Harris, artistic director for Indie Memphis. 

But 2026 has brought signs of fresh growth. Theater attendance nationwide is trending towards 2019 numbers, led not by the titanic legacy franchises, but instead by smaller, original films. Obsession outgrossed both the latest Star Wars film, The Mandalorian and Grogu, and the latest comic-book film, Supergirl. 

“Something is happening, and I think there’s a bunch of cultural factors,” says Harris. “I don’t think it’s just the meme-ability of the thing, as in the case of Backrooms, and the way in which these guys [like Obsession’s Barker] had YouTube followings. I think it’s also that young people have been pushed to be alone, to be tied to their phones. There’s been this thinking in the culture industry at large that’s the only way they were going to be willing to consume media, and the pleasures of gathering with people in a dark space, and experiencing something communally, was something that Gen Zers and those even younger than them just fundamentally weren’t interested in doing. Now, I think there’s something almost countercultural for a lot of these kids about going to the movies.” 

The revival in interest of original movies couldn’t come at a better time for Indie Memphis. In the 2010s, the annual fall film festival was selling 12,000 tickets per year. During the pandemic, a partnership with the Sundance Film Festival, which conducted screenings at the now-defunct Malco Summer Drive-In, helped keep the festival in the public eye. But after pandemic-era stimulus funds were exhausted, grant funding got more difficult, and the festival scaled down significantly for its 2024 edition. 

“The organization was no longer sustainable,” says Carr. “We were doing way too much, and there were not enough sustainable practices in place to continue the programming that was happening. The Black Creators Forum was free. The youth program was free. And that was wonderful, but in the post-Covid fundraising world, it became impossible to continue to fundraise for all of these endless programs.”

In 2025, as government budget cuts devastated the world of arts nonprofits, Indie Memphis announced a pause. The annual fall film festival, which had been held every year since 1998, was canceled. The nonprofit’s full-time staff, including Carr and executive director Kimel Fryer, lost their jobs. Many feared it was the end of the line for the festival.

“I’m really focusing on arts and culture. Both the city and the county have an arts and culture office. Film plays such a huge role in every major city, and I think that in Memphis, we need to do a better job of putting more focus on that.” — Alicia George

“When I saw that it took a pause, and then realized nothing was happening after several months, the thought that we could not have a film festival in a city this size with as many creatives that were here, it really hurt,” says Alicia George, Indie Memphis’ other co-executive director.      

George has deep ties to the independent film industry in Memphis. In 1982, her uncle, Marius Penczner, directed I Was A Zombie for the FBI, arguably the first independent film produced in Memphis. George has worked in the hair and makeup department on dozens of productions, and was an associate producer on Morgan Jon Fox’s acclaimed 2011 documentary This Is What Love in Action Looks Like. “I feel like Indie Memphis launched my career, and most of the people that I’m around feel that way, too. Even Craig Brewer recently wrote a letter and made a donation. He said to his people, ‘Indie Memphis launched my career,’ and I think most Memphis filmmakers feel that way.”

George says news of the festival’s impending demise hit her hard. “You think it’s always going to be there. It is what it is, and you expect it every year. But there was this moment where I thought, it may not survive, because I had been working in nonprofits with the Metal Museum, raising money for the new building on the capital campaign for the move to Overton Park. And I could just kind of see the writing on the wall, and it was making me really nervous. 

“When you work in the nonprofit world in Memphis,” she continues, “you hear a lot of things, and it was not sounding good to me. So I reached out to Joseph and said, ‘I think we need to start a new film festival. Do you want to be involved?’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you just try to help save Indie Memphis?’” 

George asked her friends and colleagues in the nonprofit world for advice. Should she start a new organization or save Indie Memphis? “Every single person, 100 percent, said I should save Indie Memphis. It still has a great reputation. It’s been around a long time. Most people don’t know about the struggles, but some do, so you are going to have some uphill battles with that. But the paperwork’s already been done, which is very complicated, and you already feel so passionately about Indie Memphis, and you have such a connection to it. When Joseph said that he would help, I was like, okay, yeah. I can’t do without him.” 

Carr, who previously served as the festival’s operations manager, knew all the ins and outs of putting on an annual festival where dozens of films screen across multiple venues. With a new board in place, George and Carr asked Brandon Harris, a director and producer who had served as Indie Memphis’ programmer in 2016-2017, to return as artistic director. Harris, whose first exposure to the Bluff City was when the festival programmed his film Red Legs in 2012, says he was thrilled to say yes. “I think Memphis is magical and fascinating, a beautiful and tragic place, all rolled into one,” he says. “I’ve been embraced by so many people in this city in my 15 years of coming there.” 

When Harris suggested that the festival consider moving from Midtown to downtown, Carr and George knew there was already a plan for that. In 2021, the Sundance Film Festival announced that it had outgrown Park City, Utah, and was looking for a new home. George helped work on a proposal to hold the massive festival in the area surrounding South Main. The prospectus got attention, and Memphis advanced to the final round of consideration before Sundance ultimately decided to relocate to Boulder, Colorado. So George dusted off the plans created for Sundance and scaled it down a little bit. “That’s how that whole thing came about to where we could really focus on keeping it real tight in one area that feels very communal and very walkable,” says Carr. 

Indie Memphis 2026 will take place at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Center and the Malco Powerhouse Theater November 5-8. Festival panels and parties will take place in various venues within walking distance of the two theaters. Encore screenings will move to Midtown’s Studio on the Square on November 9-10. The organizers expect to screen more than 50 feature films during the long weekend. 

“One of my priorities this year is programming a festival that feels like there’s work that speaks to every conceivable audience,” says Harris. “My real focus in the programming is kind of getting back to the festival’s American independent roots. That’ll be reflected in the program we reveal in September.” 

George says saving Indie Memphis is about more than just gathering in a darkened theater with friends to watch films you probably won’t see anywhere else. Film festivals help put their host cities on the cultural map. After all, would anyone have heard of Park City, Utah, if Sundance hadn’t been founded there? It’s a way to introduce the city’s creatives to outsiders, and to bring in influential people who might have never ventured here otherwise. And there’s no denying the positive economic impact of filmmaking. 

“I’m really focusing on arts and culture,” says George. “Both the city and the county have an arts and culture office. Film plays such a huge role in every major city, and I think that in Memphis, we need to do a better job of putting more focus on that.”

As George and Carr have made their case to potential donors, sponsors, and city officials, they are able to cite economic impact studies which reveal the art of filmmaking’s deep reach. “It’s crazy,” says George. “Filmmaking and film festivals come in number one every time.”