A few Atlanta Film Festival highlights
Southern brand of storytelling figures strongly in lineup
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, April 12, 2009
The Atlanta Film Festival opened Thursday with 166 independent movies over 10 days that run the gamut of time, place and subject: from a documentary short on a poor school district in the Bronx (“A Bronx Dream”) to a madcap comedy about three abandoned siblings in Russia (“Get Brunette”).
Yet there’s always a special resonance at the festival to the films made by or starring Southerners.
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Real-life twins Maggie Hatcher (left) and Tilly Hatcher, who grew up in Morningside, play twins in ‘Beeswax.’ Acclaimed indie director Andrew Bujalski, a friend of the Hatchers, wrote the film after they agreed to be in it.
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Maggie Hatcher carries twin sister Tilly Hatcher, a Paideia School teacher paralyzed from the chest down, in a scene from the lyrically unpretentious ‘Beeswax.’
Atlanta Film Festival
The Black Lips, Deerhunter and Mastodon, bands that now have a national reputation, are among the groups featured in ‘We Fun,’ a documentary about Atlanta’s indie rock music scene.
IF YOU GO
Atlanta Film Festival. April 16-25. $10 individual ticket; $300 all-access pass. Landmark's Midtown Art Cinema, 931 Monroe Drive, Atlanta. 678-495-1424; atlantafilmfestival.com
"That Evening Sun": 5:30 p.m. April 19; 4 p.m. April 21
"Beeswax": 9:15 p.m. April 20
"We Fun": 7 p.m. Saturday; 2:05 p.m. April 22
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“The South is becoming the new Australia,” said Ray McKinnon, an actor (“Deadwood”), director and producer from Adel, whose “The Accountant” premiered at the Atlanta Festival before winning an Oscar for live-action short in 2002. He’s back this year with “That Evening Sun.” “It’s fertile ground for new ideas for storytelling.”
There are a slew of Southern contributions on this year’s schedule.
Here are a few of the highlights:
‘That Evening Sun’
The longer Scott Teems was away from the South, the more he wanted to recapture on film what he’d left behind.
“You expect that your children will see the world as you do,” said Teems, 34, who grew up in Lilburn, graduated from Georgia State University and now lives in Los Angeles. “Then one day I realized I have a son born in Manhattan and a daughter born in Los Angeles. And I started contemplating what that meant.
“In many ways, this is my attempt to convey that life experience,” Teems said of “That Evening Sun,” a Tennessee-set adaptation of a William Gay short story, starring Hal Holbrook. “To say to my children, ‘This is a little bit of who I am. This is how I see the world. This is what I want to pass on to you.’ “
“That Evening Sun,” Teems’ feature debut as a director, arrives in Atlanta with perhaps more buzz than any other entry. It won two prizes at last month’s South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
It’s the story of an aging Tennessee farmer (Holbrook) who flees a retirement home to return to his homestead, where he confronts a life lost and an old enemy (Ray McKinnon). A dark grudge match unfolds to the cicada beats of a lush Southern tone poem.
Teems wrote the screenplay with two actors in mind: McKinnon and Walton Goggins (“The Shield”). The director has long admired the producing partners’ Southern films. He persuaded them to produce and star in the film.
“I was not interested in doing another low-budget indie film any time soon,” McKinnon said. “Then I read the script and we called [Teems] and said, ‘Let’s talk.’ “
For Teems, having the film show in Atlanta is “the ultimate payoff. To me, it’s what it’s all been building to.”
Raised in a middle-class suburb, with deep family roots in Georgia, Teems made his first video at Gwinnett’s Trickum Middle School. He kept making videos at Parkview High School, where the then 6-foot-4, 240-pounder played offensive tackle on the football team.
Teems says the characters in “That Evening Sun” are heightened examples of what can be found anywhere in the South.
“Flannery O’Connor says that for the blind you have to draw big and startling pictures, for the hard of hearing you have to shout. These characters are larger than life. But I know these people.”
‘Beeswax’
This is how Tilly Hatcher, a wheelchair-using Paideia School teacher who’d never really acted before, wound up with a major role in “Beeswax,” the latest feature from acclaimed indie film director Andrew Bujalski:
She knew the director.
Her twin sister, Maggie, had met Bujalski while both were at Harvard. Maggie wound up in his thesis film and later introduced him to Tilly. Bujalski and the Hatcher sisters, who grew up in Morningside and are now 33, have kept in touch ever since.
When Maggie ran into Bujalski again about four years ago, he asked whether the sisters wanted to be in one of his movies.
“Like most people who don’t have a twin, I find twins fascinating,” Bujalski said. “These two in particular. They’re so charming individually, but when you put them together it’s kind of overwhelming. In the back of my mind, I wanted to try to translate some of what I like about them to the screen.”
So when the twins agreed, Bujalski wrote the script.
That’s how it often works in “mumblecore,” a recent, much-ballyhooed genre of low-budget indies that mostly use friends rather than professional actors.
In “Beeswax,” Tilly Hatcher plays a paraplegic who runs a vintage clothing store in Austin, drives friends around in her car and makes out with her boyfriend, who first has to arrange her legs in bed. It’s not very long into “Beeswax” that the wheelchair becomes less noticeable than the pink streaks in Hatcher’s hair.
“Usually when someone’s in a wheelchair in a movie it’s an able-bodied actor doing it,” said Hatcher, who had a spinal cord tumor removed in junior high school that left her paralyzed from the chest down. “For me, there’s a genuine obliviousness to it.”
At a screening in Austin, a man in a wheelchair came up to Hatcher and told her, “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this movie.”
“It was never our intent to make a statement,” Hatcher said. “But subconsciously there are things you want to convey. … I’m picturing this night [when the movie screens], and all these wheelchairs in the parking lot, and people saying, ‘Where we going to put them all?’”
‘We Fun’
Filmmaker Matthew Robison lives in Nashville. Yet when a friend told him about all the indie rock records he was buying by bands from the same city (Atlanta), often even from the same neighborhood (East Atlanta), Robison headed to Georgia to document the local music scene.
The result: “We Fun,” an inside-the-house-party look at how that scene grew. Centered on no-compromise, uneasy-listening bands such as the Black Lips, Mastodon and Deerhunter, now known across the country, the film portrays Atlanta as evolving from “a place where dreams go to die” to a goofily committed musical soundscape where “young men with a Peter Pan complex reached critical mass.”
“There were characteristics that could only be Atlanta,” Robison, 34, said of the local scene’s DNA. “You’d see a guy in Mastodon at a show booked months in advance not being able to find a guitar. Or somebody else not sure they could make it. It was always something. But it always came together in some way.”
The dominant Atlanta band personality: fiercely slacking.
“The comparisons are made to Faulkner,” Robison said. “It’s a character-driven music scene.”
