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Knoxville's 4th annual Valleyfest brings aspiring filmmakers to town
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
A former Metro Pulse writer once told me about what it was like to live in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival. Every year, the small mountain resort would be flooded with a mixture of Hollywood brass and scruffy cinematic hopefuls from around the world. For the locals, it was one long week of non-stop parties and celebrity spotting. (My friend once looked out his window to see a moderately famous actor urinating in his yard.)
Well, Knoxville's Valleyfest isn't quite at that level yet. Unless you hang around Regal's Downtown West theater this weekend, where the festival is based, you probably won't notice a significant profusion of hip young things smoking Gitanes and dissecting the final minutes of Memento frame by frame. But in its fourth year, Knoxville's independent film festival is showing laudable signs of growth in its content and its profile.
"We were named one of the top 10 new film festivals in North America by The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide," says Glen Glover, Valleyfest's program director. "It's like the bible for indie folks going to film festivals."
That probably helped spur the more than 150 submissions Valleyfest received this year, from filmmakers near and far. Glover says the number of submissions has risen by 15 to 20 percent every year. Glover and his partners in Euphoric Productions, which organizes the fest, accepted 69 films to show during the four-day event, ranging from short animated pieces to documentaries and features.
As usual, they were careful to include a healthy number of Tennessee filmmakers. Valleyfest opens today (Thursday, March 14) with "Tennessee Film Day," featuring three documentaries: you don't know what i got, a Chattanooga filmmaker's celebration of strong, successful women (among the subjects is folk-punker Ani DiFranco); Welcome to Nashville, an affectionate look at Music City's annual Fanfair celebration; and Sixty Seasons, a documentary about the Oak Ridge Playhouse's 60th anniversary. Those are followed by short local films, including a documentary by last year's Sundance (and Valleyfest) award-winner Paul Harrill, a longer documentary about preachers in the Old City called The Final Word, and the feature-length comedy Growing Hair by local director Corey Meredith.
Friday night will feature the festival's keynote speaker, West Virginia documentarian Jacob Young, who will screen his cult hit Dancing Outlaw. A portrait of an off-kilter mountain man named Jesco White, the movie was named best documentary of 1993 by the American Film Institute and has become a favorite of everyone from the Hollywood elite to college frat boys. Young (who will also speak at the festival's closing banquet Sunday night) will also show a pilot of a "reality TV" series called American Breakdown—about people broken down at the side of the road.
Also noteworthy is Valleyfest's first British feature, the indie action thriller Reckoning Day. It has a Knoxville connection, too—the star is local actor Roman Karpynec, who met British director Julian Gilbey while studying overseas at Edinburgh University. The movie is billed as "the largest scale independent action feature ever filmed on British shores." Karpynec stars as an American Special Forces agent who tracks a violent criminal to the U.K. It will show Saturday night at 10:30 p.m., and it should have a good crowd: "The whole herd from the movie are coming over here [from Britain] for it," Glover says.
In fact, a total of 30 filmmakers represented in the festival plan to attend, Valleyfest's largest contingent of directors and producers yet. Many of them will be available for question and answer sessions after their films. They will also be participating in workshops on Saturday at the nearby Clubhouse Inn on Marketplace Drive. Glover also notes that nearly half the films showing during the festival have never been screened anywhere else. (Several films that premiered at Valleyfest in past years have gone on to be shown at other festivals and even earned theatrical or video distribution deals.)
The Valleyfest slate is advancing technologically with the rest of the industry. "The first year, half the entries were shot on 16 mm or 35 mm," Glover says. "This year, maybe a quarter were...The digital revolution is coming to filmmaking." The majority of this year's animation submissions were digital, and even documentaries and features are increasingly shot on digital video.
Overall, Glover says, the festival promoters are encouraged by their continued expansion—even if it has yet to pay off. "We're not a not-for-profit, we are a for-profit festival, even though we've never made one," he says. "It is still a labor of love. But yeah, things are going really well. We've had good publicity and good word-of-mouth."
For more information, visit the Valleyfest website at www.valleyfest.com, or call 525-7575.
March 14, 2001 * Vol. 12, No. 11
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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