Rants and Ruminations

The 52nd Nashville Film Festival opens today – in Nashville and on your personal device. Nash Fest is a hybrid in-person and on-line event, which means that you can watch some of the films through October 6 without even traveling to Nashville.

These Nash Fest films can be streamed anywhere in the United States:

• Socks on Fire is Bo McGuire’s tale of his own family’s inheritance battle over a Hokes Bluff, Alabama, bungalow. The family of church-going Bama football fans – and one drag queen – is jarred and wounded by the mean behavior of one aunt. Enriched by old home movies and re-enactments, this ain’t your conventional talking head documentary. Socks on Fire swings between funny and operatic, and there’s a sweet remembrance of a grandmother in here, too. Won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival.
• Clean Slate: In this clear-eyed documentary, Cassidy and Josh are living in a faith-based recovery program – the kind you need to avoid incarceration. They are working to make a short film about the program. It’s stressful enough to make an indie film – finding a no-budget cast and crew, braving torrential downpours while shooting exteriors, and wrangling a roadkill armadillo. But more than a movie is at stake with these guys – they’re both hanging on to their sobriety by their fingernails. Like living with an addict, Clean Slate has its heartbreaking moments. Over 23 million Americans are living in long-term recovery from addiction. Clean Slate is the rare film that explores the connection between relapse and recovery – and it’s a cliff hanger.
• Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine has the best title at the festival and must be the trippiest movie. A worker on a cruise ship touring Patagonia opens a door in the crew quarters and finds himself inside a Montevideo apartment. There’s a parallel story set in the Philippines highlands where villagers find a mysterious concrete shed. How do people react to a portal that disrupts the space-time continuum? The film hails from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Netherlands and the Philippines.
• Fable of a Song is a documentary about the writing of a song; this film was originally intended to document the creative process, but real life intervenes both to stagger the artists and to impact the very meaning of the song’s lyrics. There’s an insider’s peek into a cowrite, where professional songwriters take a glimmer of inspiration and work over two days to form it into a complete song. In a no-dry-eye moment, the song is performed for its subject in a personal studio concert.
• Adventures in Success: This broad comedy traces the misadventures of a self-help retreat center led by a self-described energy transformationist who claims to have experienced a 12-hour orgasm. Her movement is centered on the female orgasm, the mantra is Jilling Off, and the sessions are essentially orgies where men are not allowed to ejaculate. Opens with an impressive 28-second performance of urination art.

These films can be streamed anywhere in the Southeastern United States (Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina):

• Poser: This deeply psychological portrait of an artistic wannabe among real artists is the Must See at this year’s Nashville Film Festival. Lennon (Sylvie Mix) reveres the underground music scene of Columbus, Ohio’s Old North (which she compares to Renaissance Florence). Her entrée is a podcast, which allows her to meet a panoply of local artists, including Bobbi Kitten, the charismatic front woman of the real life band Damn the Witch Siren. At first, we chuckle and cringe at Lennon, until it becomes apparent that a much darker personal plagiarism is afoot and Poser evolves into a thriller. A shot of the recording of a train’s sounds is indelibly chilling. Be prepared to be creeped out by Mix’s performance and to be dazzled by Bobbi Kitten. Poser is the first narrative feature for directors Ori Segev and Noah Dixon (Dixon wrote the screenplay), Mix, Kitten and damn near the entire cast and crew, and it’s packed with original music. Must See.
• Faye: Filmmakers Kd Amond and Sarah Zanotti have ingeniously braided horror elements into an unexpectedly funny grief movie. Faye (Zanotti) is a best-selling author who is paralyzed by grief. She holes up at her editor’s vacation house in a Louisiana bayou to get herself writing again – her own personal Overlook Hotel. So, we have a woman isolated in a swamp, and she can hear things go bump in the night and the neighbors’ chainsaws. The first thing we notice about Faye is that she is talking to someone who isn’t there – her dead husband. As we listen to Faye (ironically, a self-help author) talking herself though the stages of grief, her sanity goes on a roller coaster and Faye takes on the look and feel of a horror movie. That idea, the exquisite editing and Zanotti’s’s performance makes spending 83 minutes with a neurotic woman eminently watchable.
• The Neutral Ground: In this pointed documentary, C.J. Hunt explores the continuing legacy of Confederate monuments in America. Hunt, a producer for The Daily Show, started out to make a snarky YouTube video, but he found himself drawn more deeply into the history of Confederate monuments, so intentionally braided with white supremacy.  Hunt is fascinated by the chorus of White Southerners advocating for the preservation of Confederate monuments, all claiming that the Civil War was not about slavery. Hunt probes the disconnect between historical fact and the Lost Cause lie – and his own racial consciousness.
• Fanny: The Right to Rock documents the first all-female rock band to get signed by a major record label and churn out five albums. Fifty years ago, the band Fanny was breaking ground for women musicians – and for lesbians and Filipinas. These women can still really rock in their 70s, and they’re a hoot.

Check out the program and buy tickets at the festival’s Film Guide. Watch this space for Nashville Film Festival recommendations (both in-person and on-line) and follow me on Twitter for the latest.