Big news this week from the Tallahassee Film Festival!
Baltimore electronic music wizard Dan Deacon will headline our Saturday night party, with a DJ set at The Wilbury! The show, co-sponsored by Word of South and COCA, promises to be one highlight among many at our celebration of independent and international cinema. Deacon, whose eight albums include Spiderman of the Rings, Bromst and Gliss Riffer, is notorious for his wild and spontaneous live shows that meld the vibe of a performance-art happening with his free-thinking permutations on decades of avant-garde music lineage. In recent years, he also has won renown as a composer of film scores, work he will discuss in a special festival conversation.
The Collected Works
of
Jimmy Joe Roche
Another prominent Baltimore artist and a longtime Deacon collaborator, Jimmy Joe Roche, a Tallahassee native, will host a retrospective of his short experimental films on April 6. Roche, a graduate of SAIL High School, is a professor of Film and Media at Johns Hopkins University whose mix of video, sculpture and performance has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Museum of the Moving Image. A short history of his short pieces will include titles which features Dan Deacon’s collaboration.
The first wave of film announcements focuses on non-fiction cinema.
The lineup includes two features that explore controversial free-speech issues in the polarized space of American public life: Penny Lane’s subversive Sundance hit Hail Satan? a “hilarious movie about the Satanic Temple and its devilish role in the culture wars” (New York Times), and The Commons, an immersion into the explosive debate over Confederate statuary in a Southern college town, by North Carolina filmmakers Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley (Halos and Horns). Southern cultural figures flourish in another pair of films. New Orleans filmmaker Lily Keber (Bayou Maharajah) brings her new documentary Buckjumping, about the Big Easy’s buoyant street dance tradition, while Frosty Myers, a fabled sculptor and Warhol Factory member – and now a St. Augustine resident – is celebrated in The Art and Times of Frosty Myers.
The festival opens April 5 at CMX Fallschase Cinema – film to be announced – then moves to multiple venues around Railroad Square and College Town, including All Saints Cinema, Mickee Faust Club and the Student Life Cinema at Florida State University. Screenings will also be held at our partner theater in Wakulla, the Palaver Tree Theater. Pre-festival events include a free April 3 appearance by filmmaker and author Mallory O’Meara reading from her book The Lady from the Black Lagoon at Midtown Reader, followed by a screening of the Wakulla Springs-shot creature feature at Waterworks. April 4, New York singer-songwriter Peg Simone presents a “Southern Gothic Pocket Opera” at All Saints Cinema, in collaboration with Tallahassee artist Linda Hall, along with a screening of Charles Laughton’s nightmarish 1954 classic Night of the Hunter.
General admission to most screenings and events is $10. VIP passes are now on sale at the early-bird rate of $50, and includes admission to the Filmmaker’s Brunch April 7 at The Gathering. Early-bird all-access passes are $35. Passes and information: www.tallahasseefilmfestival.com