For many Memphians, fall is film festival season. Since 1998, the Indie Memphis Film Festival has attracted thousands of cinephiles for a long weekend — or sometimes two — of off-the-beaten-path, independently produced films, some of which turn out to be awards contenders. But this year, thanks to massive cuts to federal and state arts funding, there is no Indie Memphis Film Festival. As behind-the-scenes maneuvering to save the 27-year-old festival continues, one Indie Memphis alum has taken matters into his own hands to produce a new festival with a new focus.
Making Movies for Kids
“I actually remember a turning-point moment that involves you,” says Noah Glenn.
Sitting in Otherlands Coffee Bar with Glenn, my eyes widened in surprise. “A good one, I hope.”
“Yeah, very good. Like, I might not be in this position if it wasn’t for this,” he says. “I became a dad and, you know, that usually means you’re not getting out to the theater as much. This would have been 2015 or so. Twitter was still more of a thing. My first daughter when she was like 2, we went to her first movie. It was Moana. I had that 30-something attitude of not having been a parent, not having really engaged with children’s media in a long time. I kind of looked down my nose at kids’ movies. I sent out some kind of sarcastic Tweet, like ‘I haven’t been to the theater in two years and now we’re going to Moana for my 2-year old.’ And you replied like, ‘Yeah, Moana’s really great!’ I went to the film and I watched it and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. It actually is good! Maybe I should take this kind of stuff more seriously.’
“Now, I love kids’ films and family movies. I think there’s a lot of depth to them that people don’t always give them credit for. And there’s a lot of depth to the young audience. Kids are capable of abstract thought and big ideas. They don’t need to just have things dumped down in a bright flashy package. They can engage with interesting, nuanced stories in the same way that anyone can.”
Glenn is a graphic designer and audio engineer who found a place for his filmmaking talents at Indie Memphis. His films such as 2019’s “Life After Death” and “The Devil Will Run” have earned awards at dozens of film festivals from Arkansas to Athens, Greece. He says he didn’t find his footing as a filmmaker until after he became a parent. “Through being a dad and reengaging, getting on their level, enjoying the things that they enjoy, that really reignited a passion for movies and storytelling in general.
“I started a children’s podcast in 2020, Like You: Mindfulness for Kids. That grew out of both my experiences with my kids, but also every other parent I know, things we’re going through with our kids. When you’re a young kid and you’re experiencing big feelings for the first time, they’re new. You don’t understand them. And a lot of times, their parents weren’t given tools to really understand and process and handle their own emotions, so they may not feel equipped to help guide their kids through these typical feelings.”
Glenn’s podcast attracted the ears of parents all over the globe. “Fifty percent of my audience was outside of the United States. It did really well.”
For Glenn, the success of the podcast was a clarifying moment. “I’ve really kind of come to define all my goals, all my mission, the things that I want to create, around using creative media to equip kids with tools for emotional growth and mental health — which can sound a little clinical, but really, it’s entertainment first. It’s creating something that a kid wants to watch, wants to listen to. Because if they don’t want to watch it, your message isn’t going to get there, you know?”
In 2021, Glenn premiered “Devil Will Run.” The short film, funded by Indie Memphis’ IndieGrant program, was based on a childhood memory from his collaborator James Dukes, aka IMAKEMADBEATS, the producer who founded Unapologetic records. The short, with an all-kid cast, won Best Hometowner Short Film and the Audience Award at Indie Memphis. It went on to have a long festival run, earning five more awards in the process. It was especially popular at festivals aimed at children. “I didn’t know I was making a kids’ film until it got into children’s film festivals,” Glenn says. “I had so much fun at those festivals in New York and Seattle and Chicago and Boston, and I thought, why doesn’t Memphis have this?”
Like You
Glenn decided to be the change he wanted to see. First, he approached Indie Memphis about partnering with the existing nonprofit to start a new program. But at the time, the aftermath of the 2023 strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild had thrown the film industry into a period of deep uncertainty. As a result, sponsorships the nonprofit depended on were drying up. Then, within weeks of Donald Trump assuming office, the grants the organization relied on for basic operating expenses were canceled. The annual film festival was canceled; the organization is currently searching for new leadership and new sources of funding. Glenn would have to start fresh.
“The Like You Film Club is a new nonprofit that supports the emotional growth and mental wellness of kids through the power of film,” Glenn says. “That includes year-round screenings that have conversation, curriculum, and activity supports to pull social-emotional learning lessons out of the films we’re watching, and then, putting parents in a position to have conversations about the themes after watching a movie at home. So that’s year-round, and then after the festival we’ll also be working to curate programs that can be played either as field trips or in school, in libraries, kind of bringing independent shorts out into the community. But the big flagship event is an annual festival. The inaugural festival is this November 22nd and 23rd, at the Pink Palace. We’ve got nine feature films, 88 shorts, three behind-the-scenes presentations, workshops, activities. It’s two days and there are two screens there.
“We’re doing our best to not only create a new experience that is focused on kids and families but also fill that void of Indie Memphis not being here this fall, and just trying to create as much as we can for people of all ages. My opinion is that there’s no reason you can’t make a great film with a great story that happens to be PG. It’s fun for kids but can be enjoyed just as much by adults.”
Glenn admits that throwing a film festival in 2025 was not in his original plan. “I was going to work slower at just doing a screening here and there and kind of test it out and then maybe do a festival in 2026. But the loss of Indie Memphis this year spurred me on to do it real quick. I thought, ‘Okay, can I just book a venue and show a handful of films one day? I think I can make that happen.’ But then the more I started talking to people about it and working on it and watching films for it, it just kind of kept expanding. It quickly became a lot bigger than I originally anticipated and, you know, in a very positive way.”
Not Just For Kids
The board of directors for the new nonprofit includes Glenn’s collaborator Dukes, as well others with experience in both art and psychology. Once the festival announced a call for films, they received hundreds of submissions through portals like FilmFreeway. Glenn recruited a volunteer screening committee to find the right films for this prospective audience. “One of our board members, Chris Reed, works for Compass Community Schools and does a lot of their social-emotional curriculum. And so we were having conversations about that aspect of features and he was watching and helping pick what we’re playing. And a friend of mine in New Jersey who works in children’s media helped with the programming decisions.”
While Glenn admits he was taken off guard by the scope of the endeavor, he says all the work has so far been very rewarding. “It’s a two-day festival that’s really packed full of stuff, and it’s been a wonderful experience for me, having been a filmmaker, to be on this side of identifying talent, and finding what’s playing in other cities, and what are they doing in Europe or Japan. Because I’m a dad and it’s a children’s film festival, it’s been fun to get screeners and round up the family and watch together, so it’s not just, ‘Did I like it?’ but how did they react to it? I found we generally had pretty similar tastes. There wasn’t like anything that I hated and they loved or the other way around.”
Glenn says the festival features filmmakers from all different kinds of backgrounds. “I get the question all the time when people hear ‘children’s film festival’: Is this films by kids or is it films for kids? Primarily, it’s films for kids and families: professional films, independent films. We do have one bloc of kid-made films [Nov. 22nd, 11:15 a.m., Deep End Theater], and several local kids, including my own daughter, have a film in there.”
The festival program and film guide include commentary and guidance on each film that tell parents what to expect, in terms of content, so they can make decisions about which films are most appropriate for their charges. There are no midnight movie screenings at this festival, but there is some more mature fare on offer, such as the Parenthood Spotlight film, Color Book (Nov. 22nd, 6:30 p.m., Deep End Theater). “Our focus is pretty specifically on families and kids, but I also wanted to make sure we were programming things that any film lover, anyone who wants to go to a festival in the fall would come to.”
Written and directed by David Fortune, and shot in Atlanta, Color Book has had a popular run on the general festival circuit, including appearances at the Tribeca Festival in New York and a Best Narrative Feature win at BendFilm in Oregon. Glenn says the film speaks to the challenges of parenting. “It’s a beautiful story of a father-son relationship, of a dad raising his son with Down syndrome after the loss of their wife and mother. He’s trying to take him to his first baseball game, and just everything that gets in the way of that. It’s a sweet story, and the ethos of it really felt like it fit with our focus on kids and families. But it’s not a ‘kids’’ movie.’”
Animation
As you might expect from a children’s film festival, Like You features lots of animation. The festival kicks off at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 22nd, with a short film program aptly titled “Saturday Morning Cartoons.” The 15 short animated films come from all over the globe, beginning with Ottilie Collingridge’s short “Le Château des Chats” about Parisian cats who open their own secret jazz club.
The first animated feature of the weekend comes at noon in the Pink Palace Giant Theater. Hola Frida! is co-directed by French-Canadian animators André Kadi and Karine Vézina. The film tells the story of Frida Kahlo, the celebrated artist whose magical realist self-portraits have attracted legions of fans, as she grows up in the revolutionary Mexico of the 1910s. As a young child, she was the precocious life of the tiny village of Coyoacán. But when she is stricken with polio and confined to her own bedroom while she recovers, she discovers a whole new world of her colorful imagination, which shows her the way towards a groundbreaking life as an artist.
Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (Nov. 22nd, 6:15 p.m., Giant Screen Theater) was a hit in France for director Benoît Chieux. Two young sisters find themselves inexplicably drawn into their favorite children’s book, where they must navigate a surreal world as anthropomorphic cat people. Will they find the mysterious sorceress who can help them find their way back to the “real world”?
Workshops and Local Films
If you’ve got a child who is not just interested in watching films, but making them, Like You has opportunities for learning. “We’ve got a handful of workshops from local filmmakers,” says Glenn. “I’m teaching one about family filmmaking. IMAKEMADBEATS is doing a session about the emotions of music and how they influence the emotions of a film.”
Memphis-based filmmaker Matteo Servante will oversee “Young Filmmakers, Big Stories” (Nov. 23rd, 11 a.m., Discovery Theater Workshop) where he walks the class through the steps needed to make their own short film in 45 minutes. Cloud901’s Amanda Willoughby will dig into the basics of video editing on both smartphones and desktop computers (Nov. 22nd, 2:30 p.m., Discovery Theater Workshop). The director’s documentary Shine On: The Story of Tom Lee will screen with director Thandi Kai’s doc Bluff City Chinese and Glenn’s “The Devil Will Run” on Nov. 23rd at 4:45 p.m. in the Deep End Theater.
In the Pink Palace’s Activity Station Room, kids can get hands-on demonstrations in stop-motion animation. “Sean Winfrey works at St. Jude in their Maker Space, doing stop-motion videos with kids and their families. There will be three films by St. Jude patients and their families, stop-motion projects, that are included in the kids’ bloc. Sean will also be in the interactivity space for a few hours each day with his stop-motion stuff set up for people to drop in and play around with and experiment with making their own stop-motion,” says Glenn.
New York Times bestselling authors Brad and Kristi Montague will host a story time on Nov. 22nd at 10:30 a.m. in the Discovery Theater. The authors of The Circles All Around Us and The Fantastic Bureau of Imagination will share a sneak peek of their new book, The Daily Wow! Brad Montague will also share some behind-the-scenes videos and discuss the inspiration behind his new YouTube show Zip and the Tiny Sprouts.
The Like You Children’s Film Festival runs Saturday, Nov. 22nd, and Sunday, Nov. 23rd, at the Pink Palace Museum & Mansion. For more information, a complete schedule, and tickets, visit likeyoufilmclub.org.
For more information on films appearing in the festival, see Chris McCoy’s Film column.