“A Look at the Tryon International Film Festival”

Tryon, North Carolina.  Not your typical place for a film festival but when I was asked to participate as a Judge for the inaugural year I jumped at the opportunity.  Having been the Program Director of the Gwinnett Center Int’l Film Festival for the last three years I now have a new outlook on independent films and the film makers that make them.  Tryon would be my first film festival as a Judge hired to evaluate films based on my history not only as a Festival Director but as a film maker as well. 

Tryon is a small equestrian town dedicated to the history of equestrian arts (not to mention the arts in general).  The town is small but their roots run deep in the arts as they have various equestrian statues that greet you when you drive into town.  The poster for the event adorns a horse celebrating one of the city’s greatest assets.  Their other asset is the fact that it is the birth place of celebrated musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone, who also has a statue located in the center of the park with her namesake also in the center of the town.  These are the images that greet you when you enter into Tryon, NC and then you come to wonder why it took so long for a film festival to arrive to begin with.

The film festival was started by the Polk County Film Initiative (PCFI) who wanted to expand the film arts and they’ve done a fantastic job in their first year.  In addition to screening two films that demonstrate the heart and soul of the city – The Amazing Nina Simone and Harry & Snowman (an equestrian documentary) there was plenty of shorts and features on display from all genres.  There were also many panel discussions (I went to the Student Actor and Cinematography ones) and there were plenty of film maker after parties each night.

I didn’t see many films on the first night as I decided to focus on panel discussions but one of the highlights for me on the second day was Dig Two Graves, which took home the award for Best Feature.  This is a suspense thriller starring Ted Levine (of The Silence of the Lambs and Monk) as a small town cop whose past comes back for revenge on him and his family.  This is a dark yet poignant film from Hunter Adams and Jon Parker and I hope it finds the right distributor for a wider release as it is well worth it.  This is a film that will appease the horror fans who crave a thought provoking thriller with a touch of Winter’s Bone and television’s Justified thrown in.

This is not the only highlight of the festival as the much talked about Riingata from Napal filmmaker Nischal Poudyal, took home the 2015 Tryon International Festival Award for Excellence in Film-Making.  I, unfortunately, missed this film but I talked with the filmmaker all weekend about his film and wished that I hadn’t.  

I must acknowledge the achievements of directors Jessica Lawson and Stephen Sherwood whose short films Canine Interpretations: Hello, Who Are You? and The King’s Guitar, respectfully, were Official Selections of this event after screening at my film festival earlier this year.  I talked with the film makers about the success of their films and hope they continue to have a successful film festival life.

Other highlights that I happened to see were the short films Daily (Dir: Florian Genal), Beverly (Dir: Alexander Thomas), Quitter (Dir: Melanie Star Scot), and Sangria Lift (Dir: Melanie Star Scot) and the feature films Whatever Comes Next (Dir: Hildegard Elisabeth Keller) and Dar He: The Lynching of Emmett Till (Dir: Rob Underhill).  This is but a small sampling of the films that were screened but I couldn’t watch everything since there were so many other things to do during the event.

The most important thing that I should note about the event is my participation as the Judge for the Student Film category.  There were five films in the Official Selection which included Afterlight (Dir: Tom Jones), Bananafish (Dir: Jake B & Anna Les), Race to Sunset Beach (Dir: David Randolph), Small Beginnings (Dir: Joshua A. Foster) and Tension (Dir: Oliver Marsden).  The thing I love about this category is just how different each film was to the next in terms of story and execution and genre and style.  Small Beginnings ended up taking home the award for Best Student Short but all the films were a showcase for up and coming film makers and I was proud to have been chosen to Judge over them.

I enjoyed this year’s event as I’m sure all of the patrons and visiting film makers and look forward to next year’s event.  Tryon is a great location for an event that supports the arts with a community of people who do so as well and I’m just glad I was invited to the party.  If you missed any of these films or want to know more about them and where they might be screening next you can visit the festival’s official website at http://tryoninternationalfilmfestival2015.com/ and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/2015-Tryon-International-Film-Festival-1609237092676335/timeline/

You can view pictures of the event on Pinterest at https://www.pinterest.com/kevinlpowers/tryon-international-film-festival/ and on Instagram @TryonInternationalFilmFestival

Horror Films at the Gwinnett Center Int’l Film Festival

As a first year international film festival the Gwinnett Center Int’l Film Festival (held July 27-28) had a healthy dose of genre films (I should know since as Program Director I scheduled them).  Located in Duluth, Georgia right off of I-85 the Gwinnett Center houses three screening rooms and two panel and workshop rooms all within walking distance of each other.  This makes for an all encompassing event for the average indie film watcher.  As Program Director of the event I wanted to provide audiences not only with a healthy variety of international films but films of all genres which include sci-fi, comedy, drama, animation, and experimental including horror.

THE SHORTS

There were many shorts this year on display for the avid horror fans which include the Edgar Allen Poe inspired Her Heart Still Beats (which has great play in many film festivals thus far) Play House, which begs the question of how far would a father go to create the perfect family at any costs, and Root, a disturbing psychological look at a woman trapped between her fiancé and the man she’s having an affair with.  There were also a few interesting oddities such as the faux trailer Hell No, which demonstrates what would happen if all characters in horror films actually made intelligent choices (this was a personal favorite of mine) and the whimsical dance piece Dance Till You Drop.  There was also the Georgia Premiere of the second episode of the web series Ghost Trek: Goomba Bodysnatchers Mortuary Lockdown and the World Premiere of my own short film Primal (think infected mixed with zombie film) and the bad mothering of Wide Awake, where the dead children of a woman come back to haunt her.  Surprisingly, there was only a single student horror film which was Visitation Hours, which had a recently dead teenager return to make amends. 

Some of my personal favorites were Root, Play House, and Hell No as these films had something more to say about the human condition and the horror genre.  It’s always good when a horror film tries to say something more about the darker side of the human condition rather than simply be a gore film or a film that goes for the lowest common denominator.  More often than not many shorts have little to say other than be simply entertaining.  It should be noted that Root received the 2013 Audience Choice Award for Best Fiction Short.

THE FEATURES

There was a surprisingly large number of horror features on display this year and it seems that zombies were the monster of the year as they featured heavily in Ace the Zombie, a local production with the effects talents of 9 Cop FX behind it, and the Brazil film Beyond the Grave, a post apocalyptic world with zombies and all kinds of other manner of creatures and evil.  My feature House of Secrets is a suspense thriller that has a man buried alive to menace a group of women who wrongfully buried him and then there is the epic All Hallow’s Evil: Lord of the Harvest (with a running time of over 140 minutes) with every known type of monster thrown in; this film is for the hard core horror fan as Halloween is taken over by every type of monster in the book (zombies, werewolves, witches, goblins, ghouls, and even a killer clown, to name a few).

Each film presents its own challenges and offers a different perspective on the genre whether short or feature.  If you were unable to catch them at this year’s festival then I hope that you search them out online to see when they are playing at a film festival near you.

ON A FURTHER NOTE

The film festival also had a few other events lined up for horror fans!  9 Cop FX put together two workshops for our event which included “Special FX Makeup” where co-founders Ondie Daniel and Ace Talkingwolf applied make up FX to a couple audience members while also demonstrating how easy it is to create some of the amazing FX that they have achieved (they worked on Ace the Zombie).  Their second workshop on Sunday was “Distressed Accessories,” where they showed off some of their amazing props, costumes, and weapons created for the various films that they have worked on.  Another workshop was held by Ron McLellen (producer & writer of All Hallow’s Evil: Lord of the Harvest) called “Home Grown Special Effects” where he showed filmmakers and audience members how to use common household items to achieve low budget horror film effects.   These hands on workshops were a huge hit with the audiences and filmmakers.

We also had several panel discussions that interested our horror fans most prominently “Directing the Horror Film” with noted panelist Darla Rae (director of Brutal) and John Conkle (director of Zombeak!) and Christopher DiNunzio (director of Her Heart Still Beats) and Giles Shepherd (director of Ace the Zombie), to name a few.  There was also a panel discussion on “Fan Films” with Ron McLellen (who has directed fan films based on the Halloween, Friday the 13^th, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises) and Ondie Daniel and Ace Talkingwolf (who have worked on numerous fan films through 9 Cop FX both horror and sci-fi).  For the “real” horror fan we presented a one-on-one interview between Russell Cherrington (producer of Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut) and Craig Sheffer (star of Nightbreed) that encompasses the actor’s huge history in film.  This was followed by the Georgia Premiere of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut, which was our Saturday Late Night film screening, which started off with a Q&A of the film followed by the Director’s Cut of the film (which is approximately 145 minutes long).

All in all I believe this was a decent turn out for horror films and the horror fans as there was much for them to enjoy (and on occasion not so much to enjoy).  Next year I hope there is a bigger sampling of genre films especially from the student filmmakers and I hope to find another horror film worthy of the Saturday Late Night treatment.