Indie Memphis Film Festival lineup: 'Black Barbie,' 'May December' among highlights

Unlike Greta Gerwig's blockbuster, "Barbie," director Lagueria Davis' new movie probably will not earn a billion dollars at the box office.

But "Black Barbie," a documentary that examines the origin and impact of Mattel's 1980 introduction of the first Barbie doll of color, is likely to generate rich discussion and a wealth of opinion when it makes its local debut next month during the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

"Black Barbie" is among close to 60 feature films on the Oct. 24-29 festival schedule, Indie Memphis organizers announced Tuesday night during the organization's annual public "Preview Party," held this year at Black Lodge, a movie rental and entertainment venue at 405 N. Cleveland.

The prestige "get" of the festival may be French filmmaker Justine Triet's "Anatomy of a Fall," which won this year won the top prize, the Palme d'Or, at the world's most celebrated movie event, the Cannes Film Festival. This is an "art film" with a thriller premise, as an 11-year-old blind boy becomes the only "witness" to his father's murder.

Other notable films include the world premiere of "The Blues Society," a documentary about the Memphis Country Blues festivals of the late 1960s, directed by Augusta Palmer (daughter of a famous critic and musicologist, the late Robert Palmer); "The Scent of Linden," Sissy Denkova's Memphis-made drama that takes a deep dive into the city's underrecognized Bulgarian community; the world premiere of Connor Mahony's "Donna and Ally," about a pair of madcap Oakland petty thieves; "Juvenile: 5 Stories," a long-gestating Memphis documentary by Joanne Self Selvidge and Sarah Fleming about once-incarcerated young people facing the traumas that accompany freedom; and new work by some of world cinema's most notable filmmakers, including "Evil Does Not Exist" by Japan's Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose previous movie, "Drive My Car," won the Academy Award for Best International Feature.

Of particular interest is the festival's opening night feature, "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," which debuting writer-director Raven Jackson wrote after being selected in 2019 as the winner of the second Indie Memphis Black Filmmaker Residency for Screenwriting.

Chosen for the residency by Oscar-winning "Moonlight" director Barry Jenkins (who became a producer on the project), Jackson's movie about a Black woman in Mississippi in the 1980s and '90s had its premiere at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where The New Yorker's Richard Brody declared it an "extraordinary" film that would be "among the best of any year." Jackson developed her script in Memphis, as part of the residency grant, and shot the movie in Tennessee and Mississippi.

"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" will screen at the Crosstown Theater. Other venues for festival screenings will be in the Overton Square area, namely, the Malco Studio on the Square, Playhouse on the Square, Circuit Playhouse, and the Hattiloo Theatre.

Expect crowds at some screenings: Indie Memphis executive director Kimel Fryer said 8,814 people attended the 2022 festival.

Is there a theme? Indie Memphis artistic director Miriam Bale said several of this year's selections seem to grapple with the emotional, psychic and physical legacy of the COVID shutdowns and other associate traumas of recent history. "This seems to be the first year of films really processing the strange world we are emerging from over the past few years,” she said. “I can’t think of a better way to process than collectively, with audiences laughing and crying, or both."

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The films will take viewers from Senegal to Tokyo, from Haiti to the French Alps. The Mid-South will be well-represented, both onscreen and behind the camera. The Paris-set "Passages," the latest feature from Memphis writer-director Ira Sachs, which has stirred controversy with its frank sexuality, is on the schedule (for those who missed it during its recent Malco run), as is the long missing-in-action "Contemporary Gladiator," created on a shoestring budget in 1988 by Memphis kickboxing champion turned writer-director-actor Anthony "Amp" Elmore.

Those who prefer movie stars who exude less testosterone than "Amp" Elmore may find solace in the cinematic elegance of Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in "May December," the new drama from director Todd Haynes ("Far from Heaven," "Carol"), who describes his film as "a corrupt, twisted kind of fairy tale."

Other acclaimed filmmakers (to name a few) whose latest work will be showcased during Indie Memphis include Italy's Alice Rohrwacher, who will be represented by "La Chimera," starring Isabella Rossellini; and British documentarian Jeanie Finlay, an Indie Memphis favorite whose "Your Fat Friend" is about a large-bodied blogger pushing "a paradigm shift in the way that we view fatness."

Some other promising selections include Alex Braverman's "Thank You Very Much," described as "a comprehensive documentary exploration of Andy Kaufman's perplexing career"; Zach Clark's "The Becomers," about "body-snatching aliens" on Earth; and the eerily titled documentary "Mississippi River Styx," from directors Andy McMillan and Tim Grant. Meanwhile, the festival's "classic" movie revivals range from canonical French masterpieces (Jacques Rivette's three-hour-plus "Celine and Julie Go Boating," from 1974) to Wayans Brothers craziness ("White Chicks," from 2004).

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Of course, blocks of local, national and international short films will be on the schedule, along with music videos and numerous filmmaking panels and after-parties. The "Hometowner" category devoted to Memphis-area films will include 41 shorts and 16 music videos, in addition to at least seven features.

The full slate of feature films and other events can be found at indiememphis.org. Festival passes are available on the website, and individual tickets to the screenings go on sale to the general public Sept. 26.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Indie Memphis Film Festival lineup: 'Black Barbie' among highlights