Film Fest Knox 2024

Film Fest Knox 2024 will open with Yen Tan’s All That We Love, starring Margaret Cho as Emma, a woman whose daughter is moving out, whose ex has returned to complicate her life, and whose dog passes away in the very first scene. “What could sound on paper like a saccharine sobfest becomes a gentle meditation on love in all its forms, and the grooves it leaves behind even after the objects of our affection have gone,” writes Angie Han in the Hollywood Reporter. “Fair warning, though: You will cry during this one, especially if you have pets.”

All That We Love is one of five features in the International Currents program, which also offers Mati Diop’s Dahomey, the winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, screening with Hansel Porras García’s Ana y la distancia, a ten-minute portrait of a Cuban mother awaiting the arrival of her son in Miami. Bruno Dumont’s The Empire split critics in Berlin, Roberto Minervini won the Un Certain Regard award for Best Director in Cannes for The Damned, and for Jessica Kiang in Variety, Carson Lund’s Eephus, an ode to baseball, is a “lovely little sundowner movie, during which a bunch of middle-aged casual players use the excuse of the last game of their season—and perhaps ever—to valiantly fight the dying of the light.”

Dispatching to RogerEbert.com from Austin back in March, Matt Zoller Seitz suggested that Tracie Laymon’s Bob Trevino Likes It, which would go on to win SXSW’s Grand Jury Award and Audience Award for Narrative Feature, is “an example of what some people have called ‘Nicecore,’ a work of art that stresses kindness, generosity, empathy, and other positive behaviors and doesn't undercut them with irony or cynicism.” A twenty-five-year-old home care nurse (Barbie Ferreira) and an all-round good guy old enough to be her father (John Leguizamo) strike up an unlikely friendship. “Like Paterson and Field of Dreams,” writes Seitz, “this is the kind of movie that will make certain viewers roll their eyes but inspire others to see it multiple times in a theater, just to have that great feeling again.”

Griffin in Summer, another highlight in the American Regional Cinema program, won Best U.S. Narrative Feature as well as the Best Screenplay award and a special jury mention for director Nicholas Colia when the film—four years in the making—premiered at Tribeca this summer. Griffin (Everett Blunck) is a fourteen-year-old playwright living with his parents (Melanie Lynskey and Michael Esper) in an anonymous suburb and dreaming of making it big in New York. “Describing Griffin in Summer as Rushmore meets Call Me by Your Name with a dash of Theater Camp would probably create too-high expectations around what is a smaller, more delicate undertaking,” writes Jesse Hassenger for Paste, but Colia “builds out Griffin’s world slowly, and winds up with a quietly formidable ensemble.”

A selection of three experimental shorts and four features make up the Revival program. “Before Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman peeled potatoes, scrubbed the bathtub, and knifed a client in her bed, and before Varda’s vagabond Mona hitched rides, slept in trailers, refused work, and trudged through vineyards, there was Barbara Loden’s Wanda, their spiritual predecessor, ghostly successor, tenacious forbearer, belated guest,” wrote Elena Gorfinkel a few years ago, and her book on the 1970 film, Wanda, the only feature Loden directed, will be out next May.

“Emerging at the very moment that women’s filmmaking was getting under way,” wrote B. Ruby Rich in 2017, Donna Deitch “made Desert Hearts [1985] a milestone, the only film to use that energy to fuel a genuine lesbian cinema.” Film Fest Knox programmers note that John D. Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), starring Zohra Lampert as a woman fresh out of a mental institution, is “built from well-worn Gothic horror tropes—an isolated home, zombie-like townspeople, mysterious strangers, and an unreliable neighbor—but Hancock’s style and Lampert’s disarmingly unnerved performance invest the story with rich complexity. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a still-relevant film of its early-1970s moment, with a deep interest in the emotional lives of women.”

When a new restoration of Northern Lights (1978) premiered at the New York Film Festival last month, Alex Lei spoke with directors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson for Filmmaker about shooting in their native North Dakota to tell the story of farmers’ struggles against banks and railroads in the early twentieth century. “Northern Lights is as sharp and invigorating as the smell of snow,” writes Imogen Sara Smith for Film Comment. “Cinematographer Judy Irola, shooting on black-and-white 16 mm, gives vivid texture to both landscapes and faces. Frost outlines the furrows of bare fields, the wind keens through dry grasses, and leafless birch trees and weathered barns shine cleanly in the winter light. Against this bleak beauty, human warmth flickers, flares, and sometimes gutters out.”