Back to selection
FILM FEST KNOX 2025: 96 Hours in Knoxville
Peter Bundy's Alabama Departure The last time I visited Tennessee, I was 15, traveling around Memphis with my parents, and spent most of the time listening to In Rainbows on cheap headphones; we ate barbecue, visited my grand-uncle and toured Graceland. 17 years later, I returned to Tennessee for the third annual FILM FEST KNOX, co-founded by filmmaker Paul Harrill and Filmmaker contributor Darren Hughes, and quickly realized my half-remembered teenaged experiences bore almost no relevance to this trip. For all intents and purposes, Knoxville might as well be in a separate state called East Tennessee, or so I’m told given the so-called Grand Divisions. Most East Coast friends I polled didn’t know much about Knoxville. One mentioned that he heard there was good antiquing in the area. Another told me that some locals call Knoxville “the couch” because it’s “a place too unassuming to shout about but too comfortable to leave,” per a circa-2008 New York Times 36 Hours column.
Per Hughes’s opening night remarks, FILM FEST KNOX embodies the spirit of “personal ambitious regional cinema,” screening 20 features or shorts programs on two screens at the Regal Riviera across four days. The Made in Tennessee program, alongside the eight shorts in the proof-of-concept Elev8or Pitch competition, highlights work by local filmmakers. Picks from the year’s festival slate—this year including Sirāt, Afternoons of Solitude and Blake Williams’s latest 3D short FELT—make up the Currents selection, while the American Regional Competition, the festival’s refreshingly condensed main selection, spotlights five new features filmed outside of New York or Los Angeles.
I watched three of those five, including first-place winner Mouse, a small-scale thriller set in Salt Lake City a year before the 2008 financial crash. Writer-director Kenny Riches plays first-generation Japanese immigrant Danny, an awkward petty thief who lives with his mother (played by Riches’s real mother) and gets by swindling bicycles, scamming grocery clerks and stealing from art museums (not art, but cash from the donation box). His loneliness pushes him to sign up for a pen pal service run by scam artist couple Tess (Sarah Coffey) and Maury (Kimball Farley). Tess writes letters and sends cute Polaroids to entice lonely guys to send her cash or jewelry; when Danny overplays his hand by pretending to be a wealthy finance type with a McMansion, the couple travels to Utah to rob their mark in person.
Winner of the Best Narrative Feature and Grand Chameleon Prize at this year’s Brooklyn Film Festival, Mouse largely illustrates how derivative genre mechanics can thrive under limited budget conditions. The plot goes in one predictable direction, a few key locations and low lighting sets a functional noir-lite mood and committed performances (mainly from Coffey) elevate broad characterizations. It’s not a bad bet: Holly- and Indie-wood used to make these kinds of movies all the time. There’s still no reason why the dueling voiceovers, delivered by Riches and Coffey, have such an unfortunate “You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation…” quality. The writing proves near unbearable when it overexplains loner psychology or the difference between haves and have-nots, but does better burrowing deep into the nitty-gritty of credit card fraud and supermarket cons. Mostly, Mouse coasts on the circa-2025 topicality that undergirds the mid-’00s narrative, like atomized lifestyles replacing genuine community and an eat-the-rich mentality that would quickly go mainstream across the next two decades. It will likely fit well amongst the holiday fare during its Oscar-qualifying run at Regal Cinemas, which is headquartered in Knoxville and is Film Fest Knox’s presenting sponsor.
In a few afternoon hours of sightseeing around downtown Knoxville, I visited the Sunsphere, the last remaining remnant of the 1982 World’s Fair and a symbol of Knoxville’s energy-dominated economy, probably best represented by the federally-owned electric utility the Tennessee Valley Authority. Much like James Agee’s writing, the TVA still holds considerable sway in the city, with its legacy as a successful New Deal creation recognized at sites including in the Knoxville Museum of Art, where pictures by TVA-commissioned photographers Lewis Wickes Hine and Charles E. Krutch are presented below a wing dedicated to modernist TVA architects Alfred and Jane Clauss. The TVA currently lacks a quorum to make major decisions regarding electricity and flood control after President Trump fired three Biden-appointed board members earlier this year. It would not be a major surprise if the five Trump-backed nominees currently awaiting Senate confirmation eventually strip the TVA for parts to be sold to private corporations.
Despite the Sunsphere’s symbolic import and commanding stature, the ten-dollar price tag to visit the observational deck was a little steep. The impressive 360° view of Knoxville notwithstanding, its commemorative panels split the difference between World’s Fair history and innovations—the debuts of Cherry Coke and Petro’s Chili & Chips, touchscreens and pay-at-the-pump filling station technology—and general circa-1982 pop culture artifacts: Ms. Pac-Man! E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial! Thriller! A shooting script of the 1996 Simpsons episode “Bart on the Road,” in which the eponymous Simpson and his friends end up stranded in Knoxville after toppling the Sunsphere on an impromptu road trip, was also on display, basically to amuse obsessives like me.
While the Sunsphere revels in nostalgia for the flashiest cultural objects, FILM FEST KNOX’s Revivals section features at least one perilously underseen or relatively obscure selection. In their inaugural year, Hughes announced before a screening of the 4K restoration of Peter Kass’s Time of the Heathen (1961) that it might be the North American premiere of the film itself; in 2024, FILM FEST KNOX screened John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Northern Lights (1978), a Midwest indie about the founding of North Dakota’s Nonpartisan League, an early-20th century left-wing political party, that won the 1979 Camera d’Or. This year’s discovery slot was filled by “Edited Documents: Films by Peter Bundy,” a program featuring nine newly digitized short films by a seemingly forgotten experimental filmmaker.
If you Google “Peter Bundy film,” two Minnesota-area obituaries published in 2020—one from Carleton College, and the other from the Aitkin Independent Age—comprise the non-FILM FEST KNOX related links, both largely focusing on Bundy’s career in land management and forest restoration. “He liked to rub shoulders with others who loved forests and trees,” reads the Aitkin write-up, which details Bundy’s “holistic approach to forestry” evinced in his Forest Stewardship plans and, presumably, through his tenure as the president of the forestry consulting business Masconomo Forestry. Both obituaries make brief mention of his “poetic films,” but Hughes’s program notes go into admirable detail about Bundy’s brief foray into filmmaking, drawing upon the first issue of Spiral—a “film journal” that more or less resembled a zine, supported by Stan Brakhage and a couple hundred other subscribers—and information graciously shared by Bundy’s widow. Basically, Bundy was a privileged scion of political influence (his uncles were advisors to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson) who fled his Northeastern upbringing for the Midwest, where he fell in love with the open scenery on which he frequently trained his 16mm camera. Hughes places Bundy in the context of late-’60s structuralists and, sure enough, the first film in the program takes a title-as-punchline approach, a la Wavelength (1967), as lengthy static shots of passing ships filmed through holes in the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge are ultimately clarified by the reveal of the film’s name, Underbridge (1978).
“Edited Documents” can be divided into two broad categories: nature films like Underbridge that bask in environmental imagery, and Americana portraits which break up observational footage with interviews of colorful subjects. The former generally exhibit good formal instincts—State Highway (1978) features a single static shot of a bare road from the vantage point of a cemetery disjunctively scored by the sound of whizzing cars; Laurel Fork (1978) uses melting icicles as a vehicle for abstraction. The latter mode, however, suggests a stronger, albeit slightly more conventional non-fiction aesthetic. Films like Alabama Departure (1978) and Wyoming Passage (1982) continue to showcase Bundy’s passion for American landscapes, but his interviews, presented in media res and edited to the bone, illustrate his capacity to develop a credible rapport with compelling strangers and intimates alike.
Wyoming Passage, for example, repeatedly circles back to a conversation with an elderly man who waxes anecdotal about bar fights, which compels in the same fashion as M. Emmet Walsh’s drawling voiceover in Blood Simple (1984). Bundy’s autobiographical To and from Childhood … A Portrait (1982) features an interview with the filmmaker’s elderly grandmother, who shares an unsentimental perspective on life, death and a growing generational divide. (“I don’t know what ‘finding yourself’ means,” she repeatedly claims.) Before he permanently moved into forestry, Bundy went into screenwriting, with one of his scripts becoming a finalist in the early days of the Sundance Institute. Though I obviously haven’t read any of his work, his keen editorial eye and judicious taste for unique voices and faces would indicate a formidable talent for narrative cinema. Bundy’s career pivot was undoubtedly a boon for the longevity of the American woodlands but potentially a sizable loss for independent film.
Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee, the “flagship permanent exhibition” at the Knoxville Museum of Art, includes work by Henri-Cartier Bresson, pioneering street photographer and one-time assistant to Jean Renoir. Cartier-Bresson’s photos of ordinary Knoxville life—a woman with a white eye patch staring out of a driver’s side car window; a large cross engraved with the message “JESUS IS COMING SOON,” framed by broken-down automobiles on one side and an enormous barn on the other—stand out from the New Deal-era documentation primarily by their comparatively candid nature and implicit menace. The informally-captured, essence-defining “decisive moment” which the photographer coined and then sought with his still images came to mind during the early moments of S. Cagney Gentry and Thomas Southerland’s Other Houses (2025), which played in the American Regional Competition section. The film opens with a woman sitting at her kitchen table, contemplatively staring at a mug in her hand as she tries to ignore the knocking at her front door. Even sans aural context, Gentry and Southerland lend the woman’s private moment understated mystery and grace befitting Cartier-Bresson’s axiom.
The woman is Radka Winslow, played by real-life Bulgarian poet Katerina Stoykova, who previously starred in Southerland’s Proud Citizen (2014) and Gentry and Southerland’s Fort Maria (2018). Together, the three films comprise a loose trilogy about immigrant life in Lexington, Kentucky, with Stoykova playing different characters loosely based on herself. In Proud Citizen, she plays a Bulgarian playwright who travels to Lexington to see a community theater production of her play about living with her abusive father, taking in the city with wide eyes while relying upon (and occasionally exploiting) the kindness of strangers. Meanwhile, in Fort Maria, Stoykova’s a fortysomething naturalized citizen struggling with agoraphobia following a break-in at her home. All three films are light on plot, heavy on conversation, observationally photographed in digital black-and-white and feature Stoykova’s actual poetry or writing, usually in voiceover.
After playing both tourist and resident, Stoykova now naturally plays a soon-to-be-departing expat in Other Houses. When Radka decides to return to Bulgaria to live as a full-time poet in a considerably less expensive country, she commits to selling her Lexington home within the final three weeks of the adult poetry class she teaches. (The person knocking at her door whom she briefly ignores is a photographer tasked with shooting the house to entice potential buyers.) Gentry and Southerland luxuriate in the various headaches and frustrations that come with engaging in real estate: pushy agents who speak in controlling patter, the stress of turning one’s house into a gallery and—most maddening for Radka—being exiled from one’s home all day to accommodate lengthy private showings.
Southerland, assisted by Gentry, displays stronger photographic and editing instincts in Other Houses than his previous two films, shortening scenes to their bare essentials and keeping improvised dialogue to highlights. Southerland reportedly discovered Stoykova after hearing her on the University of Kentucky’s student-run radio station and correctly determined he could build films around her strong voice and unique backstory. Still, he likely couldn’t predict that she would be such a compelling screen presence, one that shades in and often transcends the screenwriting, and certainly couldn’t foresee she would become more relaxed and confident with each successive film. This film’s narrow scope and compressed timeline facilitates a patient gaze that emphasizes static compositions and set design. It’s easy to reverse engineer some of the formal and narrative influences on Other Houses—early Jim Jarmusch, contemporary Hong Sang-soo, any number of first-wave American mumblecore films—but local color sets the film apart from American independent contemporaries. Both southern natives, Gentry and Southerland embrace regionality as a productive shortcut to specificity: Lexington settings like the Carnegie Center for Literacy, where Radka hosts her class, and the Mary Todd Lincoln House are prominently featured. Almost the entire cast is comprised of non-professional Kentuckians, most of whom deliver lines free from the burdens of performance. Gentle authenticity emerges, illustrating hometown charm without devolving into tourism advertising. Each film in the trilogy benefits from the directors’ experience with documentary practices, but, despite predominantly fictive elements, at its best Other Houses feels like a work of creative non-fiction. The scenes in Radka’s class, featuring actual poetry students sharing their real work, captured with two cameras in real time, demonstrate a valuable off-the-cuff quality.
Any appreciation or judgment I have of the ~96 hours I spent in Knoxville, much of which was spent attending the festival or hanging around the main stretch of Gay Street, is necessarily limited to the handful of bars and restaurants I visited, the copies of the Knoxville News Sentinel and the Knoxville edition of the Tennessee Ledger I perused and the people I observed and conversed with. I did my best to run the gamut between festival attendees and civilians: I spoke with Northwestern University professor Vera Brunner-Sung—panelist, invited guest, and Made in Tennessee jury member—about the complicated politics of film festival tiering, and also with a father of a student at University of Tennessee who works in healthcare about the lasting beauty of Wawa and why the NFL might be rigged.
One night, I received a glimpse of the larger industry ecosystem outside of FILM FEST KNOX by speaking with Bryce1, who works for the Reelz reality documentary series On Patrol: Live, a COPS-esque program co-hosted by veteran broadcaster Dan Abrams and retired Tulsa Police Department Sergeant Sean “Sticks” Larkin2 where camera crews go on local ride-alongs with law enforcement agencies. On Patrol: Live is the second iteration of Live PD, an A&E show also co-hosted by Abrams and Larkin, that similarly live-broadcasted the actions of on-duty cops. After Live PD was cancelled in 2020 amidst nationwide protests against George Floyd’s murder, Half Moon Pictures, a subsidiary of Live PD’s production company Big Fish Entertainment, shepherded On Patrol: Live onto the air and successfully weathered a lawsuit from A&E, who claimed copyright infringement.
From what I could gather through a handful of YouTube clips, On Patrol: Live is what you’d expect: a stilted and slightly staged display of badge- and gun-wielding authority designed to exhilarate people who enjoy watching cops kick ass. Bryce didn’t mention in what capacity he worked on the show; he was more interested in talking shit about Blumhouse Productions and how they ruined the Halloween franchise. When the conversation found its way back to FILM FEST KNOX, he mentioned that he had seen the signage in the Regal when he was there to watch Black Phone 2 but hadn’t investigated further. He appreciated that there was a space for young filmmakers to exhibit their work but also noted how amusing it was to watch non-festival attendees try to take photos on the red carpet outside the theater.
FILM FEST KNOX has so far avoided becoming an awards season player (beyond the Regal-sponsored Academy-qualifying run awarded to the American Regional Competition winner) and instead doubled down on its modest, edifying profile. “Personal ambitious regional cinema” is an admirable mandate, one that implicitly rejects the twin directives of mass appeal and continuous growth as end-all-be-all ambitions for arts organizations; FILM FEST KNOX achieves it simply by screening locally made work feet away from multiplex fare like Black Phone 2. It’s one thing to admire a mission statement, another thing entirely for a festival to introduce me to two filmmakers I didn’t previously know and push me to seek out more of their work on my own time.
1 Name has been changed.↩
2 Larkin stepped away from the show in July 2023, saying that he wanted to “enjoy time with family, friends and other adventures” and apparently also to begin hosting a Fox Nation series Crime Cam 24/7. His spot was permanently filled by Captain Tom Rizzo of the Howell Township Police Department.↩
