Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Faces of the festival
Filmmakers prepare for virtual Bentonville event.
The sixth annual Bentonville Film Festival may have adjusted its month and its format, but the festival’s dedication to sharing underrepresented perspectives, in front of and behind the camera, is as prominent as ever. Through a hybrid of virtual events and drive-in viewing opportunities, BFF soldiers on in its pursuit of equity and inclusion. Here, six filmmakers highlight just four of the 68 films that will be showcased — available to stream on-demand for the duration of the festival through the BFF Film Festival platform.
The films offer just a glimpse of the variety being presented at this year’s festival, but each also plays into the Bentonville hallmark of inclusion in its own way, shares John Wildman, the festival’s PR spokesman.
“Yes, ‘My Darling Vivian’ has a little local touch,” Wildman begins, “but it also brings to light an unheralded and little known story of Johnny Cash’s first wife. ‘The Donut King’ is not just directed by a woman but is one of the all-time and enjoyable tales of an immigrant who succeeded in the U.S.
“‘The Planters’ and ‘Thin Skin’ are both not just incredibly creative and entertaining films, but just as importantly, they are prime examples of the indie filmmaking spirit, and the kind of films that Bentonville film fans depend on this film festival to pull the curtain back on as a counter to the usual multi-plex big studio movies we get during the rest of the year.”
‘My Darling Vivian’
Director: Matt Riddlehoover
Competition: Documentary
About: Turning the documentary lens on Vivian Liberto, Johnny Cash’s first wife and the mother of his four daughters.
Q. Rare, beyond the truly hardcore and in-depth Johnny Cash fans, is more than a cursory knowledge of the relationship between Cash and his first wife Vivian Liberto. When you have that kind of canvas of discovery to work with, where did you choose to start? And what was a genuine surprise that you discovered during the course of making the film?
Riddlehoover: Out of necessity, I started by poring over the wealth of primary materials that I had access to. Family scrapbooks, home movies from the 1950s and 1960s, the thousands of love letters Vivian and Johnny wrote to each other — it was incredible. From there, I went to Vivian’s own memoir to create the outline for the interviews with her daughters. The story told itself; I just needed to listen. The thing that surprised me the most was that these four women, Vivian’s daughters with Johnny, all had the same upbringing, but they had very different childhoods. It was fascinating.
Q. Johnny Cash became a genuine icon in the music world for a number of reasons. Beyond his music talent, what came out during the exploration of his and Vivian’s relationship and marriage (and his career’s beginnings) that, from a distance, is very telling on that front?
Riddlehoover: There was a letter Johnny had written to Vivian when he was overseas, before they married, in which he perceived that she had an inferiority complex. This wasn’t something she had opened up to him about. I was stunned by the level of sensitivity in him as a 19- or 20-year-old man. It’s prominent in the home movies from the 1950s as well — he’s clearly in love with Vivian and fawning over his young family. It’s a side of Johnny Cash I don’t think the world has seen and was news to me as well.
‘The Planters’
Co-writers and directors: Alexandra Kotcheff and Hannah Leder
Competition: Feature Narrative
About: A dark comedy about a reclusive telemarketer grieving the loss of her parents who forms an unlikely friendship with a Jesus-loving vagrant with multiple personalities.
Q. The “crew” for this film was only the two of you. How exactly did that work? Who ran the camera, did lights, sound and everything else while the two of you were both in the scene together?
Kotcheff and Leder: Through magic! For real though, it was just the two of us running the camera, setting up the lights and sound. Doing our own hair and makeup. We would set up our shots on tripods and do test shots, hit record and run in the frame. We rigged shotgun mics to apple boxes with gaffers’ tape when framing wouldn’t allow for mic stands. It was an unusual, insular process which ultimately allowed for maximum creative expression.
Q. It took 127 days to shoot “The Planters.” That’s a long shoot for even a mid-range studio film, so can you offer some insight into what went into that shoot schedule?
Kotcheff and Leder: Ultimately, the great length of the shoot had to do with the fact that we shot the film without a crew. With only four hands and legs, there was only so much we could get through (and accomplish) in a day. What might take a full crew a day to shoot would take us a few days.
Q. Every film shoot has its tough moments where it looks like all is lost until someone keeps the ship sailing, so to speak. Which one of you more often would cheer both of you back into action and keep it going? Or did that role alternate between the two of you throughout production?
Kotcheff and Leder: One of our actors (Phil Parolisi who plays “Richard Cox”) liked to call us “Hanzandra — two bodies, one brain.” We really functioned as a unit. It was a true seesaw. When one of us was having a tough day, the other would be the motivator. It flip-flopped quite evenly. We’ve known each other since we were 8 years old, so there’s a real synchronicity to our ways!
‘Thin Skin’
Director: Charles Mudede
Writers: Mudede, Ahamefule J. Oluo, and Lindy West
Competition: Feature Narrative
About: A film adaptation of Oluo’s Off-Broadway hit musical play “Now I’m Fine,” about a harrowing period in the comedian and musician’s real life. It’s challenge enough to hold your family together and keep a grip on everything without literally having your body fall apart at the same time.
Q. This is an adaptation of a popular and critically successful stage production. Can you describe some of the elements that worked wonderfully in a live theater setting that needed to be changed or developed for that same material to work for on-screen audiences?
West: To me, the biggest challenge, and the most rewarding one, was translating the live music of the stage show to the screen. When you’re in the theater with that brass orchestra, it’s overwhelming; it gets in your bones. Trying to transmit that feeling through a camera, in a narrative setting, required a lot of innovation and coordination and brilliant work from the crew. We shot all the musical sequences live — you’ll never see an actor pantomiming along to a prerecorded track — and that’s just almost never done in film, especially lowbudget indies. The fact that we pulled it off, and I can feel the same emotional surges watching the movie that I get from the stage show, is such a joy.
Q. When you are telling your own life story — and have told and literally performed a version of that life story for some time — it takes a tremendous amount of trust to allow a director, a writer, cast members to perform their versions of people from your life in some very different ways. How difficult was that? Or did you find it freeing to release that hold?
Oluo: Trust is the most important part of any creative collaboration.
If you can’t trust the person you’re
working with, then you’re never going to get the best out of them. But it’s not just trust in regards to their artistic abilities, it’s also trust in how they see you as a person and in how they see your story. And when I say trust, I don’t mean it in a “I have your back till the end, you can always rely on me” kind of way. I mean it more in a way that says, “I’m going to listen to you, and I hope you listen to me, and I hope we can put our egos aside and try to make something beautiful.” This is what I always felt with my creative collaborators on this film.
Q. The relationship of music to
movie storytelling is so intertwined that there are classic film images that would never replay in our minds without that accompanying soundtrack. Your music was also the bedrock of the play prior to the film. How was the music approached here — a set soundtrack to lay images over in a way, or was that also reimagined along with everything else?
Oluo: Because I had spent so long working on the music for the play “Now I’m Fine,” and I was very happy with that music and those themes meant a lot to me and they felt really tied to the story, I didn’t feel the need to construct new music from scratch. In fact, I thought to do so would be in contrast to the feel of the film. So that left me with a body of existing work which I could radically re-adapt to fit this new thing. With the burden of creating new pieces taken off of my back, it freed me to think about new and different ways that I could have the score interact with the film, and because I was so familiar with that music, it was very easy for me to interpret it in a multitude of ways. Some things for the score were written before we even finished filming, and some things were sketched out before the final recording session just two days before the lockdown order for covid. For me, the goal was to have an abundance of music, and abundance of music built through an abundance of approaches. And I feel like that was very successful; I don’t think there’s another score like this in film.
‘The Donut King’
Director: Alice Gu
Competition: Documentary
About: The near classic story of Ted Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee, who escaped the Khmer Rouge in the ’70s, made his way to the States and built the unlikeliest of empires based on baking America’s beloved pastry, the doughnut.
Q. The film balances much more than one might be expecting going in. What part of the story became more prominent as you were editing versus when you first began filming and gathering footage?
Gu: Hmmm. Tough question! This was a film that, from the beginning, I knew would be challenging and