Back to the Movies

Every fall from 1998 to 2024, the Indie Memphis Film Festival brought a program of diverse and artistic independently made films to the Mid-South. In the mid-2010s, the arts nonprofit behind the festival regularly sold more than 10,000 festival tickets per year, screened films year-round, and ran artist-development programs like the Black Creators Forum. After the pandemic shut down moviegoing in 2020, Indie Memphis survived by partnering with the Sundance Film Festival, invading the drive-in, and pioneering a hybrid model of online and in-person screenings. But by 2024, the Covid relief money had run out, and film festivals everywhere were feeling the pinch. “The organization was no longer sustainable,” says Joseph Carr, who was Indie Memphis’ director of operations at the time. “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.” 

Then, in 2025, the bottom dropped out for nonprofits as arts grants were canceled nationwide. Indie Memphis announced that there would be no 2025 festival and laid off its entire staff. The official line was this was a “pause” for retooling. 

“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. “I feel like Indie Memphis launched my career, and most of the people that I’m around feel that way, too.” 

George was in a unique position to help. She had deep ties to the independent film scene as a hair and makeup artist and producer, and a background in the nonprofit world. Unwilling to take “no” for an answer, she revamped the board of directors and wooed sponsors and donors to revive Indie Memphis. Now, the festival is on the verge of a comeback, with George and Carr as co-executive directors. The 2026 Indie Memphis Film Festival will take place November 5th to 8th, moving from its traditional home in Midtown to Downtown.

“I kinda just wanna reiterate how happy we are that Indie Memphis is back. There’s something for everybody at this festival, from rodeos to clowns to horror to drama to social justice. The community has been really rallying around us, and it’s been incredibly special to see how important this organization is to the film community, both filmmakers and audiences,” says Carr.

More than 50 feature films and dozens of short films and music videos will screen at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre and the Malco Powerhouse Cinema over the long weekend. Close to 100 filmmakers will be in attendance, both from Memphis and elsewhere. One of them is Sàngkofi Jones, whose first Indie Memphis was in 2019, when he earned his filmmaker badge by producing a music video which won a Hometowner Award. He’s excited to show his new work at this year’s festival. “One is a music video for one of my songs, ‘Lead to Steel,’ with Dame Mufasa and Ash León, which I directed. And then, Dame Smith’s short film, ‘Eyes of God,’ which I did the cinematography for. Yeah, technically I got two!”  

He says he is grateful for the return of Indie Memphis. “It’s exciting because this gives art an opportunity to continue to thrive once more. Especially in a city like Memphis. We have such great stories and such rich culture to share with the rest of the world. And just aside from the fact that this city has an amazing community, I think having this platform come back gives us an opportunity to show that, hey, not only can we have and facilitate great artists here, but we can also have a great enough platform for anybody across the world to come through.”  

George says that the festival has a great impact. “The city constantly talks about how the arts and culture is the most important thing for Memphis, and we need to capitalize on that. But we really need the city to understand how important a film festival like this is, you know, and the draw that it has. We have a distributor, Neon, coming to the festival. We have producers and over 50 filmmakers coming, and it could be the opportunity for a filmmaker or producer to be like, ‘This would be a really cool place to shoot in.’ And, you know, we’re exposing them to the city and how great this community is, but we really need the city to see that and get behind us.” 

Festival Bound

Brandon Harris’ first trip to Memphis was in 2012, when his film Red Legs screened at Indie Memphis. “I was just so galvanized by the audiences here,” he recalls. “I had a wonderful time.”

 He returned to Indie Memphis almost every year after that, first as a journalist for Filmmaker magazine, then, in 2016, as the festival’s lead programmer, a position he held for two years before decamping to Los Angeles to produce films for Amazon and Shaka King. Earlier this year, Carr and George asked him to return as artistic director to help reinvigorate Indie Memphis. “This team that has brought the festival back together really is people from almost every era of Indie Memphis who have sort of banded together to drag it back into existence,” says Harris. “I was honored when I was asked to return for a second round as programmer, and emboldened to try to make it bigger and better than ever.” 

Among those coming back to Memphis for this year’s festival are Clare Grant, the Memphis-born actor who starred in Craig Brewer’s pioneering web series $5 Cover, and husband Seth Green, star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and creator of the groundbreaking animated series Robot Chicken. They will join veteran actor Vondie Curtis-Hall for a panel called “Breaking In is Tough, but Sticking Around is Tougher” at noon on Saturday, November 7th, at the Halloran Centre. 

Last summer, the low-budget horror film Obsession became a sleeper sensation and the talk of the movie biz when it grossed $525 million at the box office. Vivian Gray, the film’s production designer, got her start making a music video for the Indie Memphis Youth Festival program. Crucially, she created the One Wish Willow, a magic novelty item which set the story of Obsession in motion by granting a young man’s wish, thus ruining his life. 

“Every great horror movie has a great prop or something that stands out,” says Carr. “One Wish Willow is just kind of like that, that’s gonna stick with you for the rest of your life.” 

Gray will go behind the scenes with the panel “Designing Obsession” at the Halloran Centre on Sunday, November 8th, at 11 a.m.  

The Lorraine

The National Civil Rights Museum is one of the city’s most important cultural institutions. But before it was a major international tourist attraction, it catered to tourists in a different way as the Lorraine Motel. Walter and Loree Bailey ran the establishment for decades, providing a safe haven for Black travelers in the Jim Crow South. The pool was a hangout for Memphis’ artists and musicians, such as Isaac Hayes and Eddie Floyd, who wrote hit songs there. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony outside room 306, the Baileys’ beloved hotel became collateral damage from the world-shaking tragedy. 

“Like most people, the only thing I knew about the Lorraine was that it was there, on that horrific day of April 4th, 1968, that Dr. King was assassinated, and not much else, except it was turned into the National Civil Rights Museum,” says Sam Pollard, director of the documentary The Lorraine, which opens Indie Memphis at the Halloran Centre on Thursday, November 5th.

Harris calls Pollard “a real stalwart of the American documentary establishment. He’ll be on hand with Alvin Hall, who produced the movie, and who I think really was the centrifuge for this movie coming about. We’ll have a number of members from the team at the National Civil Rights Museum, who obviously were very involved in the production of the film. We’re really excited to present that movie all of three blocks from the museum at the Halloran Centre.” 

 Pollard says the decision to focus on the lives of the Lorraine’s owners provides a new perspective on familiar historical events. “One of our executive producers/producer, Alvin Hall, was a major force behind shaping this story. He had done a podcast about the Green Book, and on his journeys traveling around the South, he came upon the Lorraine. 

“Alvin gave us an opportunity to look at the history of the Baileys and what they had done to make that hotel a place that was open to the African American community, from the musicians to the sports figures, to the political figures, from the 1940s up until that horrific day. So it was about just doing the homework, the research, and then trying to create a documentary that balanced the music history, the social history, the cultural history, and the personal history of the Baileys, as we told this story.”

In assembling the story of the King assassination, Pollard revisited the footage of the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, which King delivered in Memphis the night before he died. The clip of King proclaiming “I have been to the mountaintop and I have seen the promised land,” has been in hundreds of accounts of that night, but Pollard looked at the original film and used little-seen sections of Dr. King’s eloquence. “Even I realized that when we were doing this film, I don’t remember hearing that whole speech.” 

Even after a long and illustrious career in the documentary field, Pollard says the process can still surprise him. “The complications of being in the South have always been well-documented, but there’s always new stuff to kinda untangle.”

The Sachs Kids

The festival’s closing night feature is by a hometown hero. Ira Sachs began his career in Memphis in the mid-1990s with The Delta. His latest film, The Man I Love, has an international reach. “Ira’s new film, which was one of two American movies to play in competition in Cannes this year, is just a stunner,” says Harris. “Like so many of his movies, there’s a sort of provocative sexual politics in it. It’s this very beautiful look at at the way in which someone carries on in the throes of illness — in this case, Rami Malek’s character, Jimmy George, who was a performance artist in the late 1980s, in downtown New York and, although the movie never says it outright — it really uses ellipses in a very fundamentally savvy way — he is suffering from AIDS. I think it is every bit as powerful a performance as the one Rami won the Oscar for.” 

Ira’s sister Lynne Sachs hasn’t seen it yet. “I have to say, I have waited to see Ira’s movie until Sunday the 8th. So for me, it’s gonna be a premiere, so I’m excited about that.”

Lynne, for those who don’t know, is also a filmmaker whose works have regularly screened at Indie Memphis. “I have such good feelings about Indie Memphis, because I found my way into filmmaking in Memphis, going back to Central High School. We had a film club, and we would collect all our change together and try to bring a few foreign films to the school. So then when Indie Memphis grew out of kind of the demimonde artsy community of Memphis, it all made sense, and it seemed like it was a place for different parts of the, the community to come together and celebrate the city. So I feel really excited that I can bring my films back to my hometown.” 

Carr says that while Ira’s films, like Keep the Lights On and Love Is Strange, and Lynne’s films like Film About a Father Who, have played at Indie Memphis, “This year marks a first, in that, while we’ve programmed them both at different festivals, this is the first Indie Memphis where they both have a feature.” 

Lynne’s film is called Every Contact Leaves a Trace, and it grows from a mundane object: the business card. The film business is all about connections, and Lynne has kept all the business cards she has received over an independent film career spanning decades. One day during the pandemic, she thought about how the business card is vanishing in favor of electronic contact lists, and decided to scan her collection. “It’s not necessarily putting your best foot forward, but it’s how you distill who you are. I really did find that when I was holding the cards, I was overcome with memories of the person or of our interaction or of a moment in my life. And then it all became this theater that I was returning to. The cards really did that to me.” 

She decided to track down seven people whom she may have only met once, and asked them to be in her documentary. “I actually chose people who would offer me some kind of obstacle that would allow me to understand something about my whole investigative process. For example, with Lawrence Brose, I was daunted by his story and the complexity and whether I was gonna be able to resolve in my own head that he had been accused of a crime that upset me, but also I didn’t feel I really understood. It made me think about the ways that we judge people too quickly or without knowing the details, that almost every aspect of our selection process for people we will be close to and people we keep a distance from involves some kind of judgment.” 

In the film, Lynne’s interactions with people from her past become meditations on the nature of memory. But she couldn’t find everybody. In one case, a memorable conversation leads her to search for a former therapist for two years before she begins to wonder whether or not the conversation actually happened with the therapist, or if it was with someone else. So Lynne hires an actor to help her recreate and expand the moment that she had in her head. 

“Occasionally people have said to me, ‘Oh, Lynne, I’ll give you my box of cards.’ I said, ‘Your box of cards is just a box with little pieces of paper for me. That doesn’t send me back to any moments in my life, but I hope that my film allows you to rebuild some aspects of your life.’”

Hoop Street 

“I grew up in Coldwater, Mississippi, so all we did every day was play basketball,” says Princeton James.

James’ film Hoop Street is one of four Hometowner Features in this year’s festival, along with Christian Walker’s Hallelujah Station, Glenn Payne’s Safe and Sound, and Malik Tha Martian’s Outside Ain’t Free. James, who is also the creator of the popular theatrical experience Soulful Murder Mystery, says he was drawn into Indie Memphis by the Black Creators Forum, which Carr and George hope to revive. “It’s always been a space where there was a community of filmmakers, and I have always been able to meet filmmakers that were from around the world that would come into Memphis and have this experience.”

James says he was attracted to take on writer/producer Theresa Dickerson’s script because “I love a good coming-of-age story.” 

Set in South Memphis, the story follows Mason, played by Benjamin Holmes, a teenage basketball talent whose father has been incarcerated after being caught dealing drugs. The bitter Mason tries to use basketball to avoid his father’s fate, and Coach Williams, played by Demone Dickerson, believes in him. But his explosive temper repeatedly puts his career in jeopardy, and when the same gangsters with whom his father worked come calling, the temptation to take a risk for an easy buck is real.  

 “It’s always good to have stories that are direct reflections of our experiences because it was based on her [Dickerson’s] actual nephew,” James says. “I was super excited that she wanted to shoot in Memphis because I’m very, very passionate about that. And then when I saw the challenges that she was encountering, I realized that, oh, you need a team that’s gonna be on your side of the ring with you fighting, because it’s so hard. Making a film is literally a miracle, you know? So you need to be on the same team. At first, I said no to directing it. I said that I would produce it. But then, after I prayed about it and did some thinking and went and talked to my business partners, Jordan [Danelz] and Mark [Williams], about it, they said ‘We should do this and then you should direct it.’ This is a great movie, a great script, but most of all, the cast and the crew that was around it was incredible.” 

“The movie really sings,” says Harris. “I think from a look and feel and sound standpoint, it stands with anything in our national program. In the African American filmmaking community, people are often tired of the story of the kid who struggles with the lure of the life in streets. There’s that sense of like, oh, have we seen that story before? But I think Princeton really imbues Hoop Street with a specificity and with a sort of uniqueness.”

“It is a Memphis story from a Memphis lens, and I want people to have an open mind when experiencing it, and I want them to also find a character that is experiencing something that they can relate to,” says James. “I hope that they get inspired by the journey that the movie is gonna take them on. So have an open mind, get ready to experience Memphis, and also get ready to be inspired and encouraged.” 

The Indie Memphis Film Festival runs November 5-8 at the Halloran Centre and Malco Powerhouse Cinema. Encore screenings will take place on November 9-10 at Malco Studio on the Square. For passes, tickets, and the full schedule of films, go to indiememphis.org.