BATESVILLE - The Independence County seat is a primarily white, conservative community of 10,000, ringed by hills and sustained by food processing - not the type of place a movie buff would expect to catch a slew of documentaries and micro-budget narratives on topics such as genocide, immigration, Arab-Americans and slavery.
But all of that is on the menu for the 13th Ozark Foothills Film-Fest, running Wednesday through April 6. Judy and Bob Pest have been putting the festival together ever since a local bank president deemed it a good investment.
“Seventy percent of our students come from Independence County …. I always tell our faculty, ‘they don’t know what they don’t know,’ so when we can expose them to something a little unique, that grows their perspective,” says Debbie Frazier, chancellor of University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville.
Jane Parker, a California transplant who taught anthropology at the college for nearly two decades, is more straightforward: “The community is provincial … I purposely showed a film about Hispanics. It actually came out of the film festival, a film about immigrant workers, how hard they work and how poorly they’re treated. Because I would have all these comments about, ‘why don’t they go back home?’”
This is the kind of place where a cheap Confederate flag hangs limply alongside the highway just before the “Welcome to Batesville” sign, and taxpayers debate homeless shelters and liquor licenses with matched ardor. But it’s also the kind of place where locals grin at strangers and drivers patiently wave jaywalkers along.
“It’s a hometown,” Frazier says. “There is this synergy that you have, county government works with city government, Lyon College works with UACCB. It’s very unselfish.”
Main Street has a plethora of flea markets, two restaurants, two historic theaters, a bookstore, a Mexican store and several churches. But most folks congregate a mile away, at a park beside the White River. Kids crawl over playground equipment, men fish near the dam and teens play basketball on a concrete court.
The river distinguishes Batesville from many places its size, as do a few other qualities: The colleges bring in cultural events, a smell slightly akin to rancid chicken nuggets wafts downriver from Ozark Mountain Poultry and a thriving health-care industry draws employees from surrounding areas. It’s among the oldest municipalities in the state, and there is a group of locals singularly devoted to enriching the community, no matter how under-appreciated its endeavors.
ELBOW GREASE AND LOOSE CHANGE
That’s where Dale Cole and the Pests come in.
A Texas native, Cole has been in Batesville 26 years. He raised his family here and founded a bank, First Community, which has branches in 11 cities and has been the Ozark Foothills FilmFest’s most faithful financial supporter. But the way Cole sees it, films are part of a bigger picture.
In 2008, he hired Bob Pest to work with Memphis architects on creating a waterfront plan that would render Riverside Park a shrunken version of San Antonio’s River Walk. In his office, he spreads a glossy packet across a desk and points out a Ferris wheel, a footbridge and a hotel. He has already bought the Mary Woods II, a steamboat he hopes will one day house a museum.
“We had asked the film festival of Hot Springs to come here and do a program,” Cole says. “And after that, I went to Bob Pest and I asked, could we have a film festival here in Batesville?”
Bob, 63, and Judy Pest, 60, are transplants who met at the University of Pittsburgh when Bob taught Judy freshman English. They operated an art-house cinema in Missouri before moving to Memphis, Jonesboro and finally Batesville to work with various nonprofits.
First Community gave the festival $10,000 in startup funds, but beyond continued financial and in-kind support, Ozark Foothills has lasted because the Pests are talented grant-seekers. They’ve persuaded the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arkansas Arts Council, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give money to the festival.
With that money, they transport and lodge filmmakers, run a youth-targeted movie camp, award $1,000 a year to the winner of a screenplay contest and, a few years ago, awarded three Arkansas filmmakers $30,000 each in production grants. This year, thanks to an Arkansas Humanities Council grant, the panel and movies on Saturday, will be free to the public.
Judy Pest is Ozark Foothills’ only paid employee. She maintains the website and mans social media from a loft over the living room of the Locust Grove cabin she and Bob share with three rescued dogs. She’s grateful that the festival is finally able to pay her a livable salary.
When she and Bob ran the City Movie Center in Kansas City - a bohemian outfit carved from an abandoned retail space, with salvaged seats and a 16mm projector - they kept full-time jobs, despite screening films six nights a week.
“The first two or three years, not only did no one get paid, we all made monthly contributions to keep it going,” she says. “I started out with a very low salary here as well, but gradually I was able to build that up where it’s almost sort of on par with at least smaller communities nationally. To us, that’s a big accomplishment.”
WORD ON THE STREET
There are those in Batesville, though, who don’t seem overly interested in its homegrown film festival. A cashier at Main Street’s Old Town Mall says she might have seen increased business during last year’s festival.
The co-owners of Big’s, a new downtown restaurant, say Ozark Foothills is virtually ignored by young people. Mandy Lewis, 23, attended one year because she was taking a film class from Bob Pest at Lyon. “It’s not something that our generation is that into,” she says. “When I went, it was old people.”
“It seems to be a bigger deal to the people who come to town,” says Anthony Babbini, 25. “I’ve seen a couple of the films [though not at the festival]. They’re definitely different. It’s not mainstream.”
They say they won’t make it to the festival this year, either, because they’ll be working. But they hope it boosts business.
At the sleepy, pine-covered Lyon campus, senior Patrick Houston, 22, of Las Vegas says he went to the festival one year. “The films were good. It wasn’t Hollywood, but they had good effects.”
Cheyenne Diaz, 22, an art major from Calico Rock, says he’ll attend this year for the first time. “My brother graduated from Lyon back in 2010; he went to Arizona State and got his master’s in film studies. So he talked me into it.”
According to Judy Pest, attendance averages around a thousand, nearly double what it was the first year of the festival.
“The one jump that you’ve got to make with people that just go to the movies as escapism and just go to blockbusters, they don’t understand that there’s this whole other body of work. They don’t understand the concept of indie film, the tone and pacing,” she says.
The festival struggles with numbers “because of the American tendency to measure everything by numbers. You see an article in the paper … and it starts with ‘oh, this is bigger and better than ever’ and it’s just not the only measure of success. If you’re working in a market like we are … sustaining something … and providing programming that is, in terms of its artistic value, on par with what people can get in bigger markets, that’s really important.”
Parker marvels at the Pests.
“Everybody on the board has been so amazed with Bob and Judy,” she says. “They’ll have 10 people in this big auditorium, and they’ll be like, ‘oh that’s great, we got 10 people here.’ If they lose heart, they keep it to themselves.”
But the festival does have some local support.
The colleges, the Old Independence Regional Museum and Fellowship Bible Church, which owns the Landers Theater, donate venues. Radio and print media offer free advertising. Hotels offer discounts and restaurants offer food. George’s Liquor, in a neighboring county, provides libations. More than 40 commercial partnerships are acknowledged on the Ozark Foothills website.
Wes Obrigewitsch, who owns Morningside Coffee House, says the festival is catching on. “The last probably two or three years, you’re getting the crowds you’ve expected.”
The festival sustains transplants like Obrigewitsch and Parker, from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and Los Angeles, respectively - people who came to Batesville for jobs but crave the stimulation of more cosmopolitan locales.
“They bring in the filmmakers and, because of Facebook, you can stay in contact. There was an Israeli filmmaker [Pola Zen], and she actually spoke Spanish, Hebrew and English. We had a really good rapport … just dynamic personalities coming to town, makes life a little more interesting,” Obrigewitsch says.
Ozark Foothills also makes life interesting for local youths, through several weeks of programs known as T Tauri Movie Camp (named for an astronomy term, “new star”). The three-day workshops cost $60-$100; participants can make a music video, learn stop-motion animation, shoot a narrative short or create a video self-portrait.
Instructors are pulled from Arkansas and beyond (sometimes Obrigewitsch teaches animation), and the finished films are screened for the public at UACCB. According to Bob Pest, T Tauri kids come back year after year, and a few have gone on to study filmmaking in college.
IT’S ABOUT COMMUNITY
Ozark Foothills FilmFest isn’t competitive. Most of the features are solicited because “we didn’t feel like we were getting the caliber of entries that we wanted. So now we do the research, go to other festivals and just invite filmmakers to screen. I’ve never had anyone turn us down,” Judy Pest says.
It’s really about offering the community exposure to new ideas as well as to new career possibilities.
“When we got here, one of the things we noticed was that we weren’t getting many films from people around here or young people generally, so we decided to grow our own filmmakers,” Bob Pest says, explaining the germ of T Tauri.
“They’re very cognizant of the types of films they bring in,” Frazier says. “One of my favorite films Bob and Judy showed was a Palestinian filmmaker, who came in and showed the Jewish/Palestine conflict from his vantage point, which was very eye-opening to many of our students.”
And her granddaughter loved the fact that last year’s 45RPM, a road trip movie about a search for a record, was made by Juli Jackson - a young Arkansan and the recipient of one of those $30,000 production grants.
There have been no outside studies, but the Pests estimate that over the festival’s lifetime, it has infused about half a million into the state, through grant monies spent and tourism revenue.
In a few years, the Pests plan to retire to North Carolina, to a Great Smoky Mountains town about the size of Batesville. They’re already working with the festival board to identify successors, so that the films and T Tauri will live on, their lasting gift to an adopted community.
“A lot of rural communities can do something if they happen to be in a particularly beautiful part of the country, like Telluride, where part of the attraction can just be coming to the area,” Judy Pest says. “We’re in a pretty normal, no great-shakes kind of spot here. It requires perseverance.”
Ozark Foothills FilmFest Wednesday-April 6 , various locations, Batesville Schedule, prices and film descriptions at ozarkfoothillsfilmfest.org Info: (870) 251-1189
Style, Pages 49 on 03/30/2014