Film festival, director's cut

Talk to almost anyone who works for the Little Rock Film Festival, and he or she will use the same word to describe what sets this event apart from so many others around the country: hospitality.

The festival will open at 7:30 p.m. Monday with King Jack, a coming-of-age drama that recently won the Audience Award at New York's Tribeca Film Festival. For seven days and nights in the Central Arkansas Library System's Ron Robinson Theater in the River Market and surrounding venues, the festival will host more than 100 fiction features, documentaries and short films from around the world -- including a healthy number made right here in Arkansas -- showcasing some of the best in independent film.

This is the ninth edition of the festival; with each new year, programmers are finding it easier to book the movies they want, rather than hoping they get enough good submissions. Levi Agee, who programs the festival's Golden Rock Narrative section, suggested that's because after filmmakers see how well they're treated in Little Rock, they tell their peers.

"About half of my program comes from word-of-mouth," Agee says. "That's been a change in the past few years. Filmmakers that have come here with movies like Short Term 12 and Beasts of the Southern Wild have become big ambassadors of our festival. That's a huge reason why we get the caliber of films that we do, because of other filmmakers saying that it's a must-attend."

"Friendliness" is an unusual selling point for a regional film

festival, but it has been an effective enough strategy that three times MovieMaker magazine has included the festival on its list of "25 festivals worth the entry fee."

Gabe Gentry, a local filmmaker recently named the festival's director, says making visiting directors feel welcome and appreciated comes naturally to this city. Little Rock audiences aren't spoiled. They fill the venues and ask good questions.

"We're just so appreciative to have the chance to have that cultural experience, and that dialogue with the filmmakers," he says. "And it's palpable."

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The film festival circuit has two seasons. The first begins in January with Utah's Sundance -- the spiritual home of American independent cinema for decades -- and ends in May with the world's most prestigious festival at Cannes, in France. The second season runs in the fall, when Toronto, Venice and New York compete to debut the movies that will go on to win Oscars.

In between, major events take place everywhere from Berlin to Austin, Texas. Then there are the smaller regional festivals, like Little Rock's, that try to bring some of the best of the other fests to movie buffs who don't have the connections or the money to fly off to France or Italy.

Gentry says the advantage of the festival for filmmakers is that it comes toward the end of that first festival season. Little Rock isn't the place for high profile, high pressure premieres.

"This is a chance for them to relax a little bit and have more fun," he says.

Robert Greene, who programs the Cinematic Non-Fiction section, says he had the opportunity this year to premiere an outstanding documentary and decided against it.

"Little Rock is great," he says. "And it has a great built-in audience and a great space, but it's not the kind of festival where you want to have the pressure of premiering a film."

The very existence of Greene's program is an example of another way the festival tries to distinguish itself: through "curation," as Greene put it.

The Little Rock Film Festival has a section called Made in Arkansas, dedicated to local productions, and two Golden Rock sections, for fiction narratives and documentaries. Greene's Cinematic Non-Fiction -- in its second year -- is modeled on Columbia, Mo.'s, increasingly popular True/False Film Festival, which explores the boundaries between fiction and documentary.

Greene pointed to some of the titles in this year's Cinematic Non-Fiction slate, like the bizarre Sweaty Betty and the poetic Tired Moonlight as examples of the kind of cutting-edge moviemaking that he's excited to bring to Little Rock.

"A film like Tired Moonlight, a big part of its appeal is that it really does shake off all of the conventions that you'd expect to be talking about in terms of experimental film vs. personal film vs. documentary vs. fictional narrative," he says.

Because each of the festival's sections is manageably small, it's easier for programmers to be selective and less likely for a film to get lost in the shuffle. That's another reason why a growing number of filmmakers like to come to Little Rock: They know they won't be competing for attention.

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When Owen Brainard, Jamie Moses and Brent and Craig Renaud conceived the Little Rock Film Festival in 2005, Arkansas' most prominent fests were the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and Batesville's Ozark Foothills FilmFest. This year, the festival is immediately preceded by the new Bentonville Film Festival, which has the backing of Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart and movie star Geena Davis.

The Bentonville festival's focus is on screening new work by the kind of filmmakers often marginalized in Hollywood, due to their race and/or sex. Little Rock's team believes that the addition of Bentonville to the Arkansas cinephile calendar benefits everybody.

"I think all of the film festivals around here are friendly neighbors," Agee says. "There are a lot of cliques in the festival scene, which I think is destructive. I'm interested in what Bentonville is doing with empowering women and minorities. That's something we've been trying to pay more attention to over the years, but they're taking a more direct approach and to me that's only a good thing. I can't wait to see how it unfolds. I'd love for there to be some kind brotherhood or sisterhood between us."

Gentry agrees.

"What Bentonville's doing is great for the state. We haven't had the opportunity yet to open a dialogue with them, but if their festival is something that continues into the future we hope to find ways to interact with each other and support each other."

All of that said, the Little Rock Film Festival isn't coasting on its reputation. For the past two years, the organizers have been focused on making their fest more walkable, to increase interaction among attendees. The idea, Gentry says, is for people with passes dangling from their necks to spot one another on the street, and stop and talk about "what they've just seen and what they're about to see."

Passes range from the $60 screenings-and-panels-only Bronze level to the more expensive Silver ($150) and Gold ($300), which allow access to some of the parties and VIP areas. But this year the festival is also introducing a cinephile card for the non-Gold tier, which will allow attendees who see enough movies to come to the closing night gala.

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Agee says the strong attendance for the festival has made him feel more responsible for the kind of experience he provides the audience. This year, he decided against programming one of his favorite films of the year -- the grim psychological drama The Tribe -- because he didn't want people to be "bummed out."

"I've got some films that deal with a lot of darker stuff, like H., but to me it has this surreal quality that makes it more interesting and affecting than sad. Krisha is dark, but it's hugely entertaining. To me, entertaining and engaging trumps dour and depressive."

Greene also says he tried to make sure that his more cutting-edge program has its share of crowd-pleasers. "A film like Breaking a Monster could be in any kind of documentary competition because it's a solid, great film with good characters. It's not particularly challenging, but I wanted to have it in my competition because I wanted to be able to talk about its craft and the things it does really well."

These are the kinds of concerns that face any festival in the 2010s -- even one that's doing as well as Little Rock's. Agee says the rise in digital availability of movies means that people who like unusual and more artistic cinema can sit at home and watch those films without having to go to a festival or move to New York.

The solution, Agee says, is "to program things that are more fun or that have a sense of spectacle to them, or some kind of communal aspect."

The hope for the Little Rock Film Festival's organizers is that their two primary impulses can boost each other: program movies that get audiences excited and let excited audiences make visiting filmmakers feel like they've come to the right place.

"I've screened at festivals," Gentry says. "It's a very vulnerable experience. You've given so much of yourself and your own finances to telling a story and it can be a little bit crushing if people don't want to be a part of that. I think [people] in Little Rock get that. We show up. We have a lot of questions after the fact. And as a result I think the filmmakers walk away remembering why they started the process to begin with."

Style on 05/10/2015