This article appeared in the November 27, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Bitterroot (Vera Brunner-Sung, 2024)

My first-ever piece for Film Comment was a report from the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2010, the year that Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture premiered there. What stood out to me then was the growing anxiety among festival veterans over how an event like Southby, dedicated to championing American independent cinema, would navigate the rush of new attention flowing into what had until recently been a fairly insular filmmaking community, out of whose loose aesthetic affinities and beer-lubricated social bonds grew the ascendant genre labeled “mumblecore.” A decade and a half on, with SXSW more likely to pursue a partnership with Raytheon than elevate microbudget films, we have our answer.

Film Fest Knox, which held its second edition from November 14 to 17 in Knoxville, Tennessee, is an intervention in the American regional festival circuit—an ecosystem I’ve often heard described as increasingly risk-averse and homogenous, prone to marginalizing lesser-known (and indeed, regional) work to make room for the awards circuit and its parade of celebrity guests. Knoxville is the home of HGTV, and is, by some accounting, “television’s true-crime capital,” with over a dozen series in production at any given time. Co-founded by Visit Knoxville, the 501(c)(3) that handles local tourism efforts, the festival shows off the city for venue-scouting indie producers always on the lookout for a tax credit, and offers a networking opportunity and resource pool for local crew members and aspiring auteurs. By design, the event, which takes over two of the eight screens of the Regal Riviera multiplex, is a compressed summer camp–like bubble in a downtown that locals take pride in describing as “walkable.”

Two pre-screening bumpers reinforced the festival’s emphasis with notable specificity: the Tennessee Entertainment Commission’s clip boasted surprisingly granular statistics (“$424M in annual Gross State Product produced by the motion picture/video production sector”), while the Visit Knoxville Film Office’s nearly four-minute promo short extolled a list of advantages that attendees could recite from memory by the end of the festival, including locations befitting different genres, equipment-rental houses, and tax incentives. (I suspect that “Right—the incentives” is a phrase that will rattle around in my brain for some time to come.) Film Fest Knox is straightforwardly an investment in the city’s potential; it’s rare, and gratifying, to see an industry-facing film festival mounted at such a grassroots scale.

The festival’s centerpiece, the five-film American Regional Cinema Competition, supports and spotlights, in the words of festival co-founder and artistic director Darren Hughes, “personal and ambitious work made outside of New York and Los Angeles”—the kind of cinema that can be willed into being by a resourceful and supportive community, but which is increasingly starved for oxygen at big-money domestic festivals like SXSW or Tribeca. Many of these competition films are enriched by their engagement with vernacular American landscapes. Consider The World Drops Dead by Brandon Colvin, who won the festival’s directing prize. A film about a young Quaker woman grieving her father’s suicide, it takes place in dusky Alabama locations that Colvin transforms into a hushed, oneiric backdrop for contemplation, much like how James Agee renders Knoxville itself in his 1957 novel A Death in the Family. The Jury Prize went to Vera Brunner-Sung’s Bitterroot, a character study of a middle-aged Hmong-American man navigating the aftermath of his divorce. The movie is distinguished by Brunner-Sung’s collaboration with the Hmong community of Missoula, Montana, and the congruences she explores between diasporic and domestic styles of small-scale agriculture and male malaise. The top prizewinner of the Competition, Kelsey Taylor’s To Kill a Wolf, riffs on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, with the path through the woods reimagined as the interstate highways of central Oregon—open, wet, and winding roads suggestive of loneliness and danger, apt for a story that explores the more modern perils of adolescent girlhood.

As part of the prize package, Regal Cinemas, which is headquartered in Knoxville and serves as a festival partner, will give To Kill a Wolf an Oscar-qualifying limited theatrical release—a unique award that’s a real boon for filmmakers increasingly swimming upstream in a star-driven exhibition market. Self-distribution was in fact a main topic at a “New Directions in Regional Filmmaking” panel at the fest. Several panelists held up Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers (2022)—the dialogue-free slapstick comedy that gained notoriety earlier this year when its makers took it across the country in a series of raucous, one-night-only road-show engagements—as an example of the kind of creative hustle increasingly required to activate audiences.

The rest of the programming complemented the regional theme, while also acting as a far-reaching festival of festivals, serving global film culture to crowds of enough college kids and NPR listeners to keep Screens 1 and 2 at Knoxville’s Regal Riviera multiplex mostly full throughout the weekend. The Revival section put the event’s forward-looking aims in conversation with the historic tradition of American independent filmmaking. Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) and Rob Nilsson and John Hanson’s Northern Lights (1978), with their striking depictions of rarely glimpsed locations in rural Pennsylvania and North Dakota and casts saturated with local color, endure in large part for their sense of reportage and serendipity—of discovery. In the independent-film boom that followed, festivals like Sundance regularly took chances on no-name filmmakers whose work was produced on the cheap, and was grounded in a sense of unique geographical and subcultural place.

That tradition is still valued, if precarious. Film Fest Knox’s festival-circuit sampler, International Currents, aside from claiming screen time in the Great Smokies for Mati Diop and Bruno Dumont, also showcased Roberto Minervini’s The Damned and Carson Lund’s Eephus—ensemble dramas that stage, respectively, a Civil War battle and a baseball game, on the purple-sky plains of Montana and the autumn fields of central Massachusetts. As the inclusion of the latter two films at the most recent edition of Cannes demonstrates, there remains a strong appetite abroad for exotic dispatches from the further reaches of America. As smaller festivals feel the squeeze from clout-chasing funders and boards, the decline of local journalism, and the numbing allure of algorithmically surfaced streaming content, the question becomes whether there’s still much will, domestically, to maintain the kind of infrastructure from which the next The Damned or Eephus, or the next Wanda or Northern Lights, might emerge—or through which it might connect with an audience eager to see their own quirks and concerns reflected on screen. Film Fest Knox is one attempt to answer in the affirmative; let’s hope there are more where that came from.

Mark Asch is the author of Close-Ups: New York Movies and a contributor to Reverse Shot, Screen Slate, Filmmaker, The Criterion Collection, and other publications.