Mere minutes after plopping down our bags in a nondescript room with two queen-sized beds on the ninth floor of Winston-Salem’s Twin City Quarter, the phone on the night table buzzed. I expected a neutral voice on the other end kindly informing me that the credit card I’d offered up for incidental room charges had been declined, yet heard instead a familiar rich baritone asking when I’d like to be driven to Little Richard’s, which, in said baritone’s opinion, offered the best BBQ to be had in the area. Given that it was a mere 2:30 in the afternoon, I politely demurred on heading out to an immediate dinner; that the call came at all, much less with such promptness upon arrival back in Winston-Salem after a year’s absence, immediately brought the pleasures of attending the RiverRun International Film Festival to the fore. That deep voice belonged to one Jerry Lawson, the festival’s longtime transportation coordinator who I wrote extensively about in this space last year. His concern over my dinner plans stemmed from an offhand query I made to my airport driver about local barbecue eateries. The overwhelming and ever-present concern for hospitality evidenced in this small interaction is unique to this festival among all others I’ve attended.
RiverRun, which just completed its fourteenth iteration, is a luckily placed event: the small city of Winston-Salem is far enough removed from other major regional festivals that it doesn’t need to compete hard for titles, and it falls far enough behind Sundance that many of the plum films that saw January premieres in Park City have already made other stops on the circuit, thus freeing them up for inclusion in smaller showcases like RiverRun. The weekend I spent at the festival, three of my favorites from Sundance all screened: Keep the Lights On, Wuthering Heights, and Detropia. I’d also had occasion to check out For Ellen (screened at Sundance, didn’t care for) and The Island President (screened in DOC NYC, liked quite a bit). In a normal year, these five movies would have been the poles around which I planned my festival itinerary; with them all under my belt, I was free to range and bit more widely, and wildly.
Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s much-lauded Girl Model was an obvious choice. The film’s portrait of Nadya, a 13 year-old Siberian girl plucked from a lineup and sent to Japan to begin a career before the camera, is twinned to the tale of Ashley, the despairing, cynical former model turned scout that found her. Though the film’s first thirty minutes feel a bit like puttering, it ably lays the groundwork for a surprisingly chilling, intellectually elegant climax. There were also pleasures to be found in Darwin, a portrait of the isolated Death Valley town of Darwin, CA (Pop. 35), a simple film that spends its time interviewing the hamlet’s odd inhabitants and investigating its landscapes. If it may not offer anything terribly unexpected (though why we only meet a third or so of the town’s residents remains an open question), the cleanness of the presentation and visual scheme is refreshing in a sea of hyper-active, wildly overproduced documentaries.
I also decided to plunge headfirst into the festival’s Altered States section which is devoted to new, low-budget American independent films. The four titles I screened (out of seven assembled by Program Coordinator Chris Holmes) suggested that the filmmaking youth of America, though struggling mightily to carve out a unique space and identity for itself, still hasn’t quite mustered much that stands against other periods of intense creative activity in American filmmaking. Sawdust City’s hangdog tale of two brothers getting drunk and searching for their deadbeat father rang truest, and hung together best as a filmic experience, even if its final moments take a sad lurch towards the schematic. Sophia Takal’s Green and Dustin Guy Defa’s Bad Fever are both remarkably adept at maintaining tone (the former a hazy, sensual oneirism; the latter a brutal, annoying confrontational discomfort), but both feel not unlike sketches padded into slim features by stammering, awkward pauses and odd digressions. Both are suggestive of better things, which is more than can be said for other filmmakers who seem continually intent on retreating from making anything that feels like a “movie.” The Buehl, Idaho-set Magic Valley (all of these features, it should be noted, showcase distinct corners of regional America), begins intriguingly enough as one of those overlapping narrative contraptions, but once it becomes clear that the mousetrap set for its characters is the realization of a young girl’s sudden death, the experience grows tedious and excruciating. The finale, in which all is revealed, is itself is a total punt, making the whole enterprise more or less unredeemable. I don’t envy Chris the task of putting together a viable program of this stuff, even if most of what I did see managed to be of at least fitful interest.
As a representative of this blog and parent distribution website, I’d been invited back to Winston-Salem to present Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a film that I picked for inclusion in the festival’s pre-Star Wars science fiction sidebar (other inclusions: 2001, Sleeper, Logan’s Run), the sequel to last year’s focus on Contemporary French Masters. I’m quite the fan of Tarkovsky’s adaptation of the seminal Stanislaw Lem novel, but fuck if I didn’t fall fast asleep mere minutes after promising the audience in my meandering opening comments, that, though leisurely, the great Russian filmmaker’s films never slowed to the glacial. I hope no one noticed, but I’m quite sure several did. It was the evening after the festival’s moonshine-soaked Intergalactic Space Dance Party, so what could anyone expect of this poor overworked film critic? To those who may have found my opening remarks obtuse, misleading and the like: please direct your criticisms here. To the fine folks at RiverRun: don’t hold it against me. I’ll do better next year.
