Cover Story: Movie binge

Atlanta Film Festival gluts local theaters with 150 features, documentaries and short films



Last year was a very good year for the Atlanta Film Festival. Not only did it break attendance records, drawing 13,000 attendees, but it enjoyed the prestige of debuting the “The Accountant,” which qualified the short film to win an Oscar last March.

At 25 years old, Paul Marchant is one year younger than the Atlanta Film Festival is now, but he has no qualms about shaking things up at the institution. As the new festival director for IMAGE Film & Video Center, he has deliberately programmed a lineup that features bigger-name movies than usual for the event, soliciting hits from the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, in addition to culling the best out of the 750 films submitted to IMAGE.

“This year, we have a lot more films with a lot more stars in them, and more that already have distribution,” he says of the festival’s schedule, which includes 150 features, documentaries and shorts.

This year’s roster includes Sundance’s Best Director winner, Tadpole, an off-beat romantic comedy about a prep school boy attracted to his stepmom (Sigourney Weaver), and Best Documentary winner Daughter from Danang, an account of an Amerasian orphan reunited with her Vietnamese mother. The festival opens with Cherish, which stars Robin Tunney as an ’80s rock fanatic under house arrest and stalked by a killer, and closes with Lovely & Amazing, a family comedy with Brenda Blethyn playing mother to three neurotic daughters (including Catherine Keener).

Arliss Howard directs and stars opposite his wife, Debra Winger, in Big Bad Love, based on Larry Brown’s novel of a writer struggling with family problems, while Jodie Foster both produces and plays a peg-legged nun in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, a stylish memory piece about two Catholic boys that features animation from Todd (Spawn) McFarlane. (Note: Films with national distribution deals were unavailable for review by CL.)

While Marchant hopes that the Atlanta audience will appreciate seeing these films before the rest of the country, he emphasizes that he doesn’t want the festival to go Hollywood at the expense of showcasing new talent. He points out that this year includes more student work than ever before.

Nevertheless, the 26th Atlanta Film Festival (“and Video” has been dropped from its name) seems less narrowly focused on local and regional work. Homegrown films, once collected in the “Locals Lounge” program, are now spread among other films in the 16 shorts programs. “The goal is to pick films that are the best and can stand alone, local or otherwise,” says Marchant, giving special praise to the Atlanta-shot feature film Big Ain’t Bad and the short film “Cliche.”

Marchant’s background in the area film scene comes from his previous work with Athens’ Kudzu Film Festival and the Short Attention Span Film and Video Festival, as well as a recent stint at New York’s Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. “Each film festival has its own identity,” he says. “My driving philosophy here is to have a diverse program, since Atlanta is such a diverse community.”

For Marchant, part of that diversity includes looking back at movie history. The festival salutes director Peter Weir with a screening of his classic 1977 thriller The Last Wave and pays tribute to filmmaker Sam Fuller with screenings of the TCM documentary The Men Who Made the Movies: Sam Fuller as well as the director’s 1963 mental asylum melodrama Shock Corridor. And this year, the Atlanta Film Festival has gone increasingly global, featuring more foreign films than in previous years, including award-winning French office comedy Read My Lips. Marchant says, “It’s all part of building that diversity. There’s a whole world outside of the U.S. independent scene, both out of this state and out of the States.”

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com??