This fall, the Tallahassee Film Festival breaks into new frontiers of sound and image.
Legendary culture-jammers Negativland + Sue-C highlight the 18th annual festival with an Oct. 10 performance at the Challenger Learning Center, which returns this year as TFF’s presenting sponsor.
The “Significantly Less Deceptive” tour features projections by “real-time cinema” artist Sue-C on the massive IMAX screen. The Bay Area legends, formed in 1980, mix original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland surreally re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to.
The group is a subliminal cultural sampling service concerned with making art about everything we aren’t supposed to notice. This first-ever Tallahassee performance is co-presented with Super Cool Awesome Music Services.
Florida in Focus
The multimedia collective’s mindbending creative vision is just one facet of the festival, which expands to four days (Oct. 8-11). Once again, the lineup centers on homegrown themes, with programming that elevates Florida filmmakers, explores social, political and ecological themes of urgent interest, and reflects the immediate world around us. This year, its exciting focus on life in the Sunshine State is ever more kaleidoscopic. Friday’s opening night belongs to debut filmmaker Costa Karalis, a graduate of FSU’s film program, who brings a genre-defying sensibility to the Panhandle town of Marianna, exploring the magic realism of childhood imagination in “Frogtown.” Karalis will join us to introduce the film and participate in a post-screening Q&A. The show is immediately followed by the Opening Night Party – free to passholders – from 9:45 p.m. to midnight at The Assembly on Adams, with a DJ set by Burlap Productions.
Other remarkable films with their eye on the Sunshine State include “First They Came for My College,” Patrick Bresnan’s documentary about the state’s conservative takeover of Sarasota’s innovative New College; “The Moths & The Flame,” Kevin Contento’s poetic look at Black fatherhood, shadowed by the sugarcane fields of Pahokee; and “Andre,” the debut from Tallahassee writer-director Spencer Levy, which offers a uniquely surreal vision of the Capital City and its eccentric personalities. Dylan Melcher’s comedy “Jellyfish Season” turns a weekend escape to the beach into a strange odyssey for three buddies looking to reboot their lives. Sundance favorite “Take Me Home” draws on writer-director Liz Sargeant’s own life in an emotionally powerful family drama set amid a dangerous Florida heat wave.
Among multiple shorts blocks devoted to everything from comedy to nonfiction, the Tallahassee Filmmakers group premieres the Tally850 Short Film Competition. Competing teams were tasked to make a short film in 90 days, and the top ranking films will premiere on the big screen in the “850” shorts program on Saturday, Oct. 10.
Education and Regional Filmmaking
The Tallahassee Filmmakers group also will host multiple events focused on the city’s filmmaking community. On Friday, there will be an Actors Workshop, featuring guest instructors Monika Gossmann, Assistant Professor of Performance at Florida State University’s School of Theatre, and Michael Curtis Johnson, a graduate of the American Film Institute Conservatory’s directing program and the founding chair of the University of North Alabama’s Department of Cinematic Arts & Theatre. Johnson will also screen his “The Undiscovered Country,” a no-budget drama made with his students at the University of North Alabama, as well as direct and shoot a short film with workshop students throughout the festival weekend which will be premiered at the Awards ceremony, the evening of Sunday, Oct. 11.
Saturday afternoon the group will host a panel on Film Festival Strategy and Distribution featuring Jodi Wille, an acclaimed filmmaker, curator, and publisher; Thomas Rondinella, an award-winning independent filmmaker, producer, writer, editor, and educator who serves as Professor of Media Production at Seton Hall University; Krystal Alexandria, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, editor, and director from Australia who is recognized for her work in film, television, and documentary production; Tommy Hindy, an award-winning filmmaker from Atlanta, Georgia, and a graduate of Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts. This film festival strategy panel exclusively will be free and open to the public.
Friday will also feature our first ever Regional Filmmaker Showcase with screenings all day, including the locally produced documentary from Bobby Buccellato and Adam Baumel, “Carter Country,” which explores Jimmy Carter’s rural Georgia roots and features more than 40 voices, including grandchildren Josh Carter, Kim Carter Fuller, and Buddy Fuller portraying their grandparents, alongside a rich chorus of local voices, including Tallahassee community leaders, historians, artists, and public servants. Also on Friday, musical legend and naturalist Sammy Tedder unveils “River Obscura – Episode 2,” with further explorations from above and below the Sopchoppy River.
Mean Streets and Rolling Thunder
Icons of rock’n’roll and cinema whose careers are potently intertwined are examined in a pair of literary events. On Thursday Oct. 8, New York Times Magazine contributing writer Mark Binelli visits the Challenger to talk about “Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film” (Metropolitan), the first major biography of America’s greatest modern filmmaker, accompanied by rare public screenings of two essential Scorsese short films, “American Boy” and “What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?” On Saturday, Oct, 10, Chicago filmmaker Michael Smith will discuss his book “Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think” (McNidder & Grace), an analysis of the protean songwriter’s cinematic vision, accompanied by Ben Creech’s short film adaptation of the book. (Smith also will screen his latest comedy, ‘Hekla”).
Cap City Video Lounge: Bigger, Longer, Uncut
Longtime festival partners Cap City Video Lounge will host a bespoke program on Saturday, Oct. 10, in their new, expanded screening space on West Pensacola Street. It’s fully loaded with fresh and unpredictable new work from rising indie filmmakers. The roster includes the Montreal sendup “Messy Legends,” a fractious comedy about delusional millennial scenesters from the duo known as Voyeurism (Kelly Kay Hurcomb and James Watts), and Jennifer Kroot’s “Hunky Jesus,” a documentary about San Francisco drag legends The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.” New York City is the main character in Jess Zeidman’s “Human Theories,” which tracks an array of encounters across some 40 vignettes throughout a day in the life of a metropolis. Taylor Olson’s “Stitches,” a psychological freakout in three episodes, takes the late-night slot, preceded by a block of horror-themed shorts.
Strange Days
Ecological themes find compelling expression in a pair of visionary documentaries focused on earth and sky. “Daughters of the Forest” is a story of entanglements: between humans and mushrooms; the visible and the invisible; generational knowledge and modern science. “Shifting Baselines” offers a strikingly monochrome meditation on outer space and our complicated contemporary relationship to the stars, as Elon Musk fantasizes about colonizing Mars. It’s not the only film about the strange times we live in. “The Great Experiment,” from Steven Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar, chronicles in spellbinding black-and-white American life between the years 2017 and 2021, holding up a mirror to a country at war with its own reflection. Rob Rice’s “Ponderosa” offers its own dark and subversively wry study of surreal contemporary Americana through the prism of an odd relationship between a wealthy real-estate developer (the brilliant Bill Camp) and an aimless young man. “Lost Cause,” from Adam Kritzer, is a meta-narrative about a Yom Kippur service that turns into a group therapy session for a Stephen Miller-like bureaucrat that turns into a musical. The found-footage documentary “Nova ‘78” spotlights cultural giants from the Beat and Punk eras – William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Timothy Leary, Laurie Anderson – as they perform at the 1978 Nova Convention in New York, offering uncanny projections of the future: our present.
Special Events
Free outdoor fun is on the cards Oct. 10 with a 30th anniversary screening of Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!” on the green by Kleman Plaza. The cult favorite, a deliriously nutball spoof of 1950s alien invasion movies, stars Jack Nicholson, Jack Black, Annette Bening, Danny Devito among many. Those surf-rocking apes from space The Disasternauts play at 7pm, with screening to follow at 8. Blankets and lawn chairs encouraged.
The festival also presents The Way Things Are, a new gallery exhibition by Florida artist, photographer, and filmmaker Dylan A. Taylor. Through a series of meticulously staged tableau photographs, Taylor explores how social reality is constructed through the often absurd routines of everyday life. Created using a film production approach, talent, and crew, these striking images reveal the performative nature of the familiar, inviting viewers to question the cultural assumptions and unconscious patterns that shape the world around them. Opening Friday, Oct. 2 and on view at 621 Gallery throughout October. Taylor’s short film “Miniature Man” also screens at the festival.
And last but not least, the festival once again hosts its world-famous Filmmaker/VIP brunch, sponsored by Dear Sunday Cafe, where VIP passholders get to mingle with guest filmmakers from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Challenger Learning Center exhibition hall.
If You Go
VIP ($150) and All Access ($60) passes are on sale at the links below for this website. Tickets to individual programs can be purchased at the door (and in advance online for some select programs). Festival venues are Challenger Learning Center, 200 S. Duval St. and Cap City Video Lounge, 2122 W. Pensacola St. Full schedule coming soon. Learn more at the links below.