The 12th Indie Memphis Film Festival begins this week with more
than 150 films — features, documentaries, short films, local
films, etc. — screening over eight days, primarily at Studio
on the Square. On these pages we preview the festival’s opening-night
films — the documentary Shooting Robert
King and the feature That Evening Sun— as well as perhaps the festival’s busiest visitor, Chicago
filmmaker Joe Swanberg. We also put the spotlight on a few other highly
anticipated screenings.

In addition to the films mentioned here, the festival boasts a
couple of potentially spectacular special screenings: The three-man
Alloy Orchestra will perform live Monday night, accompanying the
screening of relatively new prints of two classic silent films (Buster
Keaton’s The General and the influential Russian
film Man With a Movie Camera). And Overton Park
will welcome the return of an old tradition as Elvis Presley’s “’68
Comeback” special, the Memphis Music at SXSW documentary, and the Coen brothers’ cult favorite The Big
Lebowski will screen — for free! — at
the Levitt Shell Friday night.>

You can see the full festival schedule in the special pullout
elsewhere in this issue. For more Flyer coverage,
see memphisflyer.com
throughout the festival.

“Mumblecore” Grows Up: The evolution of Chicago
filmmaker Joe Swanberg.

There are roughly 150 films screening over the course of eight days
at this week’s 12th annual Indie Memphis Film Festival, and it seems
like Joe Swanberg is involved in most of them.

The Chicago filmmaker’s most recent film, Alexander the Last,
which screens Friday, October 9th, at 7:45 p.m., is one of the
festival’s most high-profile features, and Swanberg also will conduct a
free workshop, “Amateur Hour with Joe Swanberg,” about working with
nonprofessional actors (1 p.m., Sunday, October 11th, at the Memphis
Brooks Museum of Art).

But Swanberg’s presence doesn’t end with those two events. He also
plays a part in four other works screening at the festival: He was the
director of photography for Memphis filmmaker Kentucker Audley’s
upcoming feature Open Five, which will premiere its trailer at
Indie Memphis (3:45 p.m., Friday, October 9th). He co-stars (alongside
Alexander the Last cast member Justin Rice) in The Mountain,
the River, and the Road (5:45 p.m., Friday, October 9th). He was a
producer on his wife Kris Swanberg’s debut feature, It Was Great,
But I Was Ready To Come Home (noon, Saturday, October 10th). And he
was a crew member on Dallas filmmaker (and Alexander the Last
and Open Five crew member) David Lowery’s St. Nick (2:45
p.m., Sunday, October 11th).

Swanberg, via such features as Kissing on the Mouth and
Hannah Takes the Stairs (the latter the only previous film of
his to screen in Memphis), is one of the leading names in the
quasi-movement that was memorably but perhaps unfortunately dubbed
“mumblecore.”

A Village Voice critic proffered a less snappy but more
descriptive shorthand for a body of films that has united like-minded
indie filmmakers from around the country: “postgraduate naturalism.”
These films have taken a vertité approach to the travails of
white, urban twentysomethings, often musicians or artists, most of them
haphazardly employed.

Whatever you call it, the scene is real, linking filmmakers around
the country not only working in a similar style but often collaborating
on each other’s films, among them Swanberg, Boston’s Andrew Bujalski,
Seattle’s Lynn Shelton, and Memphis’ Audley.

“I would say festivals are the key ingredient there,” Swanberg says
of this geographically fractured coterie. “But it’s also one of the
things we’re seeing as a result of the Internet, which is that your
friend group can be constructed on the basis of the people you really
like — who have similar interests or filmmaking styles
— and not just the people who live close to you.”

These films differ from earlier youth-based film scenes in part for
their utter lack of pop-culture references.

“I think that’s an extension of getting into movies in the ’90s when
[indie films] were more like a student paper about your favorite
movies,” Swanberg says. “I think we all came up on those movies, and
they seemed cool at the time. But it got old to watch like the 50th
movie that references the [same] Tarantino shot. I think everybody got
sick of that stuff, so I think all of us independently had a reaction
to go completely in the opposite direction. Nobody’s trying to prove
that they’re cool, which I think a lot of those other movies with all
those pop-culture references were doing.”

With Alexander the Last, however, Swanberg seems to be
evolving past postgraduate naturalism in both form and content. The
film focuses on a young married couple — a stage actress,
Alex (Jess Weixler), and a touring musician (Justin Rice). While her
husband is on tour, Alex develops a crush on her co-star in a new play
she’s working on, deflecting him toward her single sister to contain
her own temptation.

Visually, the film is more ambitious and consciously artful than
Swanberg’s previous films or others in its scene, with some showy and
effective crosscutting between a theatrical sex scene and a real one
and a poetically sardonic closing shot.

“I think it’s a more deliberate film, and certainly my attitude
toward camerawork has changed a lot or progressed over the course of
making these movies,” Swanberg says. “It’s not hung-up on naturalism or
realism.”

Rather than clinging dogmatically to the mumblecore style, Swanberg
is eager to let his work evolve.

“I feel like right now I’m still moving from that small-scale,
naturalism place. I’m trying to get to some new place now where I can
have a little bit more breathing room,” he says. — Chris
Herrington

Shooting Robert King

Shooting the Messenger: Memphis war photographer
Robert King, on the other side of the camera.

Most people would do anything to avoid the carnage of war, but most
people aren’t wired like Robert King, the subject of Shooting Robert
King, a darkly comic documentary about a green kid from Memphis
whose shocking images of combat in Sarajevo, Chechnya, Rwanda, and Iraq
have bloodied up the pages of Time, Newsweek, and various
other national and international publications. These days, King, the
40-year-old son of Vance Willey and Ardent Records co-founder John
King, is most likely to be found at one of the Memphis farmers’ markets
selling the heirloom tomatoes he raises. But he’s just making ends meet
and logging as much family time as he can while raising the money he
needs to get back to the American front in Afghanistan, where he plans
to share living quarters and expenses with two freelance
photographers.

“I figured it up one time, and I’d have to cover something like 60
things a month,” King says, explaining why he’d rather sell tomatoes
than work as a freelance photographer in Memphis while waiting to get
back overseas.

The centered family man sipping lattes at a downtown coffee shop and
complaining about a lack of journalistic opportunity in his hometown
isn’t the scruffy Forrest Gump-like figure who shows up in Sarajevo at
the beginning of the documentary, determined to win a Pulitzer without
any real sense of what’s going on. More seasoned journalists openly
mock him. Even Richard Parry and Vaughan Smith, the British filmmakers
behind Shooting Robert King, seem to go out of their way to
establish their subject as a dim and delusional figure headed for an
early grave from a mental collapse. King’s candid admission that he’s
always believed he was put on earth to “deliver a message about human
suffering” seems uncomfortably messianic. Even after he gets wise and
starts delivering one extraordinary photograph after another, the young
man’s fondness for booze, women, and drugs threatens to take him down,
infusing most of the film with the kind of edge-of-your-seat tension
usually reserved for potboilers.

“When I went to Sarajevo, it was the beginning of the digital age,”
King says in his own defense. “Now people get on a plane with their
laptops, and by the time they arrive at their destination, they’re
experts.” Besides, he’d never intended to be a front-line photographer.
He wanted to live with and shoot the people who lived and worked in
Sarajevo. He wanted to tell everyday stories. “Because that’s important
too,” he says. But in 1993 there was no immediate market for those
kinds of pictures, so he adapted.

“There’s this saying, ‘If it bleeds, it leads,'” King explains,
showing that even in middle age, he’s as cynical as ever.

By the time King got to Iraq he was a well-established professional.
He knew all the players, and he knew the game. Only, in Iraq, the game
was completely different. In every other circumstance he’d lived
closely with the locals. “In Iraq, nobody wanted us there,” King says.
And in Iraq the only thing worse for journalists than being embedded
with the troops was to not be embedded. In an attempt to get the kind
of photographs he wanted, King disembedded, only to be kidnapped in
Fallujah.

“These guys were wearing suicide vests and everything,” King says.
The kidnappers told King about family members who’d died as a result of
American bombing and demanded one good reason why they shouldn’t kill
him immediately. No matter how hard he wracked his brain for an answer,
he couldn’t give them one. Fortunately for King, he was able to escape,
disproving — for the moment anyway — a theory proposed by a
fellow photographer shortly after King’s arrival in Bosnia 15 years
ago. “I don’t mean this in a bad way at all,” the more-seasoned
photographer said, “but I’m not sure you’ve got the aura of luck that
the war photographers I know of have.”

“There’s no question that I’ve been lucky,” says a thankful King,
who is now happily married and has a 6-year-old son. — Chris
Davis

Shooting Robert King screens at 7:15 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. Thursday,
October 8th. Indie Memphis will host an opening reception of the
first-ever exhibition of King’s photographs, 5-7 p.m. on
Wednesday, October 7th, at Marshall Arts.

That Evening Sun

Old Man and the Farm: Hal Holbrook shines in
That Evening Sun.

It’s been a good year for movies about old white Southern dudes
dealing with end-of-life issues. First up was Goodbye Solo, the
marvelous North Carolina-set film by Ramin Bahrani that starred Memphis
native Red West as a man bent on ending his life on his own terms. Now
we have That Evening Sun, another good one, made near Knoxville
by Scott Teems and starring Hal Holbrook as a man who escapes a nursing
home so that he can return to his homestead and live out his days in
the place of his choosing.

The problem for Abner Meecham (Holbrook) is that, when he gets back
to his farm, he finds out that his son has rented the property to the
no-good Choat family. Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon) readily reflects back
Abner’s dislike; Lonzo’s wife Ludie (Carrie Preston) tries to play
peacemaker but sees the opportunity her family has to rise above their
family name; and their daughter Pamela (Mia Wasikowska, about to be
famous in the titular role in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland)
is curious about this surly elderly gent who has invaded their
lives.

Denied entry into his own home, Meecham’s plight literalizes the
dispossession of advancing age. Meecham says, “The road ahead ain’t
long and it ain’t winding. It’s short and straight as a goddamned
poisoned arrow. But it’s all I got.” So Meecham takes up residence in
the farm’s tenant house, a small sharecroppers’ cabin practically in
the shadow of the big farmhouse.

The film is based on the William Gay short story “I Hate To See That
Evening Sun Go Down,” the title of which comes from the Jimmie Rodgers
song “Blue Yodel No. 3.” The song makes a number of appearances in the
film, covered by the Drive-By Truckers, that band’s Patterson Hood, and
Holbrook himself.

That Evening Sun deploys the look of mildly Southern Gothic
still photos at times, many of them involving Holbrook, who cuts a fine
jib and is perfectly suited to the task. “[Holbrook] is the consummate
professional,” Teems says. “Hal has been acting twice as long as I’ve
been alive. I realized pretty early on that I wasn’t going to teach him
anything. My job was to trust him and get out of the way.

“Working with an actor like him, you can put the camera on him and
[capture his] life and history immediately,” Teems continues. “It goes
hand-in-hand with the way I like to shoot, which is quite reserved. I
can just sit back and watch and observe character.”

There’s also the crucial casting of Dixie Carter as Abner’s deceased
wife Ellen, who’s only seen in flashback and never speaks a word. She
haunts this film, and the memory audiences have of Holbrook and
Carter’s marriage freights the film with extra meaning.
— GA

That Evening Sun screens Thursday, October 8th, at 7 p.m. and 10
p.m.

Locals

This year’s Indie Memphis slate doesn’t boast a high-profile feature
screening from a previous “hometowner” winner (excepting a
work-in-progress preview from Kentucker Audley), but there’s still
plenty of local action in the mix.

A resurgent Live From Memphis is at the center of four big
screenings: their annual and always popular Music Video Showcase (7:30
p.m., Saturday, Oct. 10th); the debut of a new slate of their Flipside
Memphis short docs on local culture (5:30 p.m., Friday, Oct. 9th); the
latest edition of their Li’l Film Fest (5:30 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 11th,
at the Brooks Museum of art); and a Best of Li’l Film Fest compilation
screening (9 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 14th).

In addition to Audley’s unofficial screening (3:45 p.m., Friday,
Oct. 9th), local filmmakers Corduroy Wednesday will screen their web
series The Conversion (8:45 p.m. and 9:15 p.m., Tuesday, Oct.
13th). Screening alongside The Conversion is Chasing
Daylight, a making-of doc about Old School Pictures’ upcoming
vampire drama Daylight Fades. Another work-in-progress offering
a sneak preview is David Harris’ Memphis-shot web-based horror series
Savage County (3:15 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 10th, at the Brooks
Museum of Art), produced via Craig Brewer’s BR2 Productions. Look for
more info on other local screenings at memphisflyer.com throughout the
festival. — CH

Robyn Hitchcock

In one scene from Sebastian Gutierrez’s film Women in Trouble
(9:15 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 14th), Elektra Luxx, a porn star played by
Carla Gugino, boasts that her affordably priced and anatomically
correct rubber vaginas (which vibrate, squirt, and come in three
designer colors) have outpaced the competition to become the
best-selling “celebrity vaginas” in the world. It’s the kind of
entirely plausible, utterly weird dialogue that might form the basis
for a Robyn Hitchcock song. That’s why it’s so appropriate that
Hitchcock, the surrealist, sex-obsessed rocker who began his career as
a witty art-punk in 1976 fronting for the Soft Boys, wrote and recorded
the soundtrack for Gutierrez’s film. And if Women in Trouble
leaves you hungry for more Hitchcock, you’ve got two chances: the
concert film Robyn Hitchcock: I Often Dream of Trains (9 p.m.,
Tuesday, Oct. 13th) and the man himself. Hitchcock is closing the
festival with an intimate acoustic set in one of the Studio on the
Square theaters (7 p.m., Thursday, October 15th, $20).
— CD

Pontypool

Pontypool

and Zombie Girl:

The Movie

Two zombie-inflected pictures are highlights on this year’s Indie
Memphis lineup: the fictional thriller Pontypool and the
documentary Zombie Girl: The Movie.

Pontypool is the festival’s midnight movie Saturday, October
10th, and it’s perfect for that setting. The film is a claustrophobic
tour de force, one of the best films to screen in Memphis this year.
Set in the titular small town in Ontario, Pontypool premises a
talk-radio station as the hub for a strange news day that begins with
reports of a hostage situation and evolves into sounding like a
zombie-type event. Think The War of the Worlds imagined by
Arthur Miller.

Zombie Girl: The Movie (12:30 p.m., Saturday October 10th) is
more straightforward and certainly a sweeter, cheerier imbibe than
Pontypool. The documentary introduces us to Emily Hagins, a
sixth-grader in Austin, Texas — where else could this happen?
— who instigates a fairly mature amateur film production with her
zombie-horror Pathogen. Zombie Girl is essentially a
making-of doc, but it doesn’t require you to have seen the movie it’s
about. The star here is Hagins, a super-sweet, precocious kid who fell
in geek with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and was inspired
to try her own hand at filmmaking. — Greg Akers

The Hand of Fatima

The Hand of Fatima

Augusta Palmer’s documentary The Hand of Fatima (5:45 p.m.,
Sunday, October 11th) is many things at once. It’s a detailed biography
of her father Robert Palmer, The New York Times music critic and
Deep Blues author who abandoned her when she was a month old.
It’s also a portrait of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, the
1,300-year-old Sufi brotherhood championed by Beat-era luminaries such
as William S. Burroughs. But Palmer’s film begins like a proper Disney
classic, with the animated image of a big red storybook, and is
ultimately a tragedy-laced fairy tale about a young woman who follows a
trail of crumbs from the juke joints of north Mississippi to a secluded
Moroccan village looking for home, harmony, and something like a happy
ending. Mixing animation and live action with archival footage and
interviews with artists such as Yoko Ono, Genesis P-Orridge, and
Donovan Leitch, The Hand of Fatima is a sophisticated piece of
documentary filmmaking that explores how we make our myths and how
they, in turn, make us. — CD