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SLAM!

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  1. SLAM!

    Drive-In Doldrums: The 2020 Cucalorus Film Festival

    By SLAM!,


    Festival Retrospectives
    Hello again, and welcome to my retrospective of the 2020 Cucalorus Film Festival. This was the year that the Covid-19 pandemic shut virtually every business down, and Cucalorus was no exception. The show must go on, however, and Cucalorus took an inflatable projector screen to UNCW’s Kenan Auditorium parking lot and played the audio of each film through everyone’s car radios!
     
    But most films were not shown in the drive-in setting. In fact, most films were instead made available through an online platform. That’s where I watched that year’s Animated Short Film block, and this year there were some pretty good selections. One of them was about the history of a tribe of Pacific Islanders, and that one ended up getting shortlisted for the Animated Short Film Oscar. There were also some cool DYI films in the mix as well.
     
    Anyways, I ended up seeing three films through the Drive-In option. It was supposed to be four, but I thought the screening for that movie was at 8:00, so I spent time with my mom and drove to the ticket window, only to be told that it started at 6:00 and I missed it completely. Whoops. I was supposed to review it for the college newsletter, too. That film was titled “Summer” something.
     
    Anyways, the first film I saw was Beast Beast, and that was one of the films from that year’s Sundance festival. It was a coming-of-age thriller with an adventurous narrative style and great performances. Will Madden, who collaborates often with Jim Cummings, plays a college graduate who tries and fails to become a gun enthusiast YouTuber, and his obsession and false impressions lead him down a dangerous path. He’s not the main character though, it mostly follows two  high school students. Anyways, I won’t spoil it beyond that, but it gets pretty wild.
     
    Then I saw Freeland, and that was about people in the California mountains trying to grow pot illegally, only to be thrown through a loop when it becomes legal. Krisha Fairchild from A24’s Krisha is in it, and a then up-and-coming Lily Gladstone is also in it. I thought the movie was pretty good!
     
    The the last one was my favorite; it was called Dramarama and it was about five drama students who throw a murder mystery party at their house the day before one of them goes off to college. So it’s this somewhat comedic, somewhat dramatic coming-of-age film and I thought it did an excellent job making all their relationships feel real. And guess what? Megan Suri is in it! Yep, the Miseducation of Bindu star! There she is, killing it in the indiesphere! Keep it up, Megan Suri!

    After every film, everyone in their cars honked their horns. That was everyone’s makeshift applause! I was honking my horn along with them at all three of my drive-in screenings!
     
    Then, there was Drought. Yep, the movie my dad catered for the previous year! It’s about an autistic weather enthusiast who ropes his friends into an adventure where they track a hurricane in an ice cream truck. Very small budget and very indie, but still a cool concept. I wanted to see this at the drive-in but couldn’t because I was doing the college newsletter thing and someone else claimed writing a review for Drought before I could. But I got to watch it through Amazon Prime, and it was good!
     
    Anyway, thank you for reading this retrospective. Not much going on this time especially due to the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Covid-19. I will say though that there were some notables films available online this year. Test Pattern, an abortion drama that would later find success at the Gotham and Independent Spirit awards, was a selection in 2020, as was the documentary Belly of the Beast, which saw its original song, “See What You’ve Done” by Mary J. Blige, shortlisted for the Best Original Song Oscar. So the next time you’re at a film festival, keep your eyes peeled, because you never know if a film you’re considering watching has more eyes on it than you might think!
  2. SLAM!

    Humble Beginnings: The 2019 Cucalorus Film Festival

    By SLAM!,


    Festival Retrospectives
    Hello again, and welcome to my account of the 25th annual Cucalorus Film Festival. In this blog entry, I will talk about the films I saw and the experiences I had as a volunteer. I’m titling this entry “Humble Beginnings” because this was the first Cucalorus I was truly a part of.
     
    In years before 2019, I had a head knowledge of Cucalorus and was mildly interested in attending, but never actually did. You can chalk it up to other responsibilities like for school and stuff, but a major reason was the fear surrounding not knowing anything about the films they were screening. I remember one year when I first scrolled through the selection, and I was telling myself, “I’ve never heard of any of these films.” Simply put, that is the worst possible way you can approach a film festival. “I have not heard of the film, therefore I will not give it a chance”—NOOOO! The discovery of the handcrafted artistic works of filmmakers is the entire point of a festival, right?
     
    In film school, folks from Cucalorus came to my classes to talk about the event, and it was something about the way they talked about it where I really wanted to attend it this time. I think the presentation of Cucalorus coincides with my realization of how impactful festivals can be to films and the amount of attention they get from audiences. Two of those speakers were film directors Hannah Black and Megan Peterson, who talked about their experience with entering and winning a fundraising event hosted by the Duplass brothers so they could shoot a film called Drought, and it was their enthusiastic presentation about Cucalorus and indie filmmaking that sold me on attending the festival. But how was I going to attend it?
     
    My dad helped me out! He did catering during the production of Drought, and he catered events for Cucalorus in the lead-up to the festival. His volunteering allowed him to earn a free pass to the festival, and he gave that free pass to me. But there were obstacles to my attendance despite the free pass. I was in a terrible car accident a month before the festival, and that festival left me without my own transportation until around Thanksgiving. Not to mention I was already a shut-in and an internet addict who preferred to stay inside my apartment and devote myself to my schoolwork (the semester was eighteen hours) and my online hobbies. The trouble is, I was hardly doing anything aside from that, and not engaging with other people is a dangerous way to live your life. In the parking lot of the apartment complex, my dad was asking me why I wasn’t going and telling me about what he did to earn the free pass. And the day after, I curbed my social anxieties and attended the festival!
     
    ****
     
    Before I get into the experience, I will first set the scene by telling you where Cucalorus screens its films. Most films are screened in Thalian Hall, which is a cultural building and performing arts venue that has been a part of Wilmington, NC since the late 1850s. Today, Thalian Hall regularly screens indies and documentaries in the main theater as part of its cinematheque program.
     
    There are three location in Thalian Hall where Cucalorus can screen a feature or a shorts block. The first is obviously the main theater, where certain selections and programs with the best chance at gathering a large audience are screened. Upstairs, there are two more location: the Thalian Ballroom, which can host a variety of events in addition to films, which are screened via the trusty screen/projector comb; and Thalian Black, a “black box” theater setup which is a great space to watch a movie in.
     
    In 2019, Cucalorus also screened movies and shorts blocks in Jengo’s Playhouse, a small lounge venue, as well as the auditorium at UNCW’s film building. Jengo’s Playhouse doesn’t have many seats, but it makes up for that by generally being awesome. The film building auditorium is also a good place to screen movies; the chairs are wooden, but besides that, it has multiple DVD players as well as a retractable curtain where you can open and close the curtain depending on the aspect ration of what you’re screening. I will always love this theater!
     
    ***
     
    The very first film I saw at Cucalorus was the dramedy Lucky Grandma, about an elderly Chinese-American woman who steals a bag of money and gets pursued by mafia gangsters. I saw it with my stepdad, and he enjoyed it! It was a memorable film with great performances, and it was later picked up for a VOD release by Good Deed Entertainment; it’s also available to watch on Paramount+.
     
    My second film came later that night, and it was my personal favorite of the festival. I’m talking about A Great Lamp, which is available for free on YouTube. That film is an experimental black-and-white indie that’s way more poetry than narrative, and it was shot on the streets of Downtown Wilmington guerilla-style. (Makes me feel like a loser knowing there’s these great films being shot in my town and I’m missing my chances to help with filming.) Anyway, I made a complete fool of myself because the credits were rolling, and I was loudly yammering about how the film was great but I was leaving the ballroom; then an actor from the film stared at me in disbelief, and I sat back down because I was embarrassed that I almost left before the Q&A. Of course that would happen to me 😅. But the Q&A was awesome, and I told the actor that I would tell all of my friends about it (which I did).
     
    I only sat through two shorts block, the first of which was the animation block. I’m a diehard animaniac and I love watching animated films whenever I can, though I’ve since come to favor the realness of live action just a little bit more. But this block has good shorts, including an experimental one about a night trucker losing his sanity, as well as one of the ten shortlisted films for the Animated Short Oscar, which was about a shy airplane model maker and the little guy living in his mind. Mind Over Mind, I think?
     
    The second shorts block was dedicated to *excellent* short films, like burgeoning auteurs who definitely knew what they were doing. There was a drama in a barbershop, then a film about Jamaican Americans where a teenager was trying to find his father, then a horror film (more like “first ten pages of a feature script they’re trying to make”), which was a cross between Get Out and The Descent, and I really hope they make it. It ended with Pony Boy, about a male prostitute working in a laundromat (a wink to My Beautiful Laundrette perhaps?) and that was a very well made short film. I saw a few short documentaries during my volunteer hours, one was about the injustices caused by nuclear plants, and another was about Native American motorcross racers (or some sort of motorcycle sport). Those two were awesome!
     
    Then I’ll ramble about the documentaries next; the docs I saw were Hope Frozen, Pariah Dog, and a film I forgot the title of, but that one had the filmmaker follow a boy in a third-world country with the camera, and it was very poetic. But Hope Frozen was about the little girl in either China, Taiwan, or another place who was put in cryosleep. Then Pariah Dog had the filmmaker travel around India to film these packs of street dogs as well as the human discourse surrounding whether they should be taken care of. That was like Kedi but not as lighthearted.
     
    Before I get to other features I watched, I want to talk about how I volunteered. And the only crummy part about volunteering is getting a shift that conflicts with your ability to watch a film you really want to watch. In my case, I had to volunteer around the time Bacarau was screening. Yeah, the Boffy-winning masterwork, and I still haven’t seen it too… Anyway, they had me usher in Jengo’s Playhouse, so I was making sure everyone got to their seats, and that there were enough seats for everyone. Then I was pulled aside along with a classmate, and we were in someone’s kitchen peeling shrimp for someone’s huge batch of shrimp and grits they were making for a late night house party. You haven’t volunteered for Cucalorus until you’ve peeled shrimp for shrimp and grits!
     
    Okay, it’s narrative feature time again. I watched a film called The Miseducation of Bindu. It’s a high school coming-of-age starring an Indian-American girl who tries to fulfill her final requirements so she can skip Senior year and get the heck out of that dump of a public high school. Up and coming actress Megan Suri stars as Bindu, and with my limited film and television watching experience, I can safely say she’s one of the hidden industry talents I’m rooting for at the moment. She starred in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever as well as a film I’ll be talking about during the 2020 blog post; she will also appear in the Searching sequel Missing. And Miseducation of Bindu is available on Tubi and Peacock if you want to watch it for free!
     
    Finally, my last film that I remember watching was The Twentieth Century, a Canadian treasure which takes a zany and satirical approach to the early 1900s divide between British Canada and French Canada. It’s filmed in a old film style, like super old, and it has expressionistic production design. I campaigned it during the 2020 Boffies and got it a bunch of noms, because users were starving for good films to nominate due to the pandemic shutting down theaters. Good times!
     
    ***
     
    I had a ton of fun at the 2019 Cucalorus Film Festival, and my experience is going to keep me going back to the festival again and again, and also volunteering again and again. If you want to hear about how they pulled off presenting a festival during the pandemic, stay tuned for the next blog post (a much shorter post), where I talk about the 2020 festival!
  3. SLAM!

    What is the Cucalorus Film Festival?

    By SLAM!,


    General Information
    So what exactly is Cucalorus, and what makes it different from other film festivals?
     
    Cucalorus is approaching its 28th annual festival, which will be going on between Wed. November 16th and Sun. November 20th. From then and now, it’s been screening narrative and documentary films and short films of all types as well as hosting a variety of other events. But wait a minute: what kind of films does Cucalorus select?
     
    I will start not by answering this directly, but by instead providing a grand revelation: Cucalorus is a non-competitive festival. No awards at all, and that includes both jury things and audience things. There’s a lot of films out there specifically aiming for awards in order to increase awareness of the project, and honestly, that’s a valid pursuit because festival films compete for attention with stuff like House of the Dragon and typically need all the “reasons to watch” they can muster. But for those films, if they can only get into a certain number of festivals, or if they schedule their release shortly after big awards festivals like Venice/Toronto, then the chance a festival like Cucalorus gets awards-seeking films is slim to none.
     
    So in light of all that, what kind of film is typically finding its way to Cucalorus? It’s this: quirky and/or soulful indies, bold international works, and films willing to experiment. Common types include colorful coming-of-age, character studies about middle-aged and elderly citizens, films about family, exciting indie horrors, smaller films from the previous Sundance, and films and docs about important social issues like disability, race, LBGT+, and the environment. And the fact that “bigger films” don’t usually screen actually makes Cucalorus even more exciting, because it means you’re watching movies that you’re unlikely to have access to anywhere else.
     
    Uniquely, each year Cucalorus also programs one short film block that is solely dedicated to dance films. The festival itself focuses on dance as well as film, as dancers often perform before a movie starts, and there’s even a separate stage event called Dance-a-Lorus, which is one of Cucalorus’s most popular events. I’ve been to a dance film block (which I’ll elaborate on in due time), and it’s safe to say that there’s more than enough in Cucalorus’s dance films to separate them from a simple “music video” moniker.
     
    I wanted to do a “here’s a list of films Cucalorus has screened before,” but I am currently not knowledgeable of an expansive screening history beyond the festivals I’ve attended. There is one film I know for a fact was screened in 2018 though, and that’s Burning—yes, the fantastic South Korea one. And I was this close to seeing that screening but chose not to go. And I still haven’t seen it. I’m kicking myself (;_;). Anyways…
     
    Cucalorus is about films with a heart, films with a soul, and films with a message; unburdened by the pressure of awards, Cucalorus films are free to exhibit their artistic traits to an engaged and grateful audience, and the filmmakers and audience can start a discussion about a film without any need to seek out a lucrative Netflix deal. In short, it’s a festival about sharing and enjoying art for art’s sake, and it’s a place for DYI artists and burgeoning auteurs on the margins of the film bubble to truly thrive.
     
    If you have any more questions, ask away in the comments, where I plan to continue the discussion!
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