Nashville Film Festival Is Music to the Eyes

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Thursday, 15 April 2010 17:25

Written by Laura Blum

The Nashville Film Festival turned 40 last year, and while "41" doesn't cut the same dash, the South's oldest film festival should keep crowds plenty fortified over the next eight days: Running April 15 to 22, 2010, at the Regal Green Hills Cinemas, NaFF has a lineup of 230 films.

Naturally, music themes bloom brightly among these. Titles in the popular "Music Films/Music City" competition include several non-fiction films. There's The Bass Player, Niall McKay's road trip with his Irish jazz-performer dad, and Clark Stiles' Don't Quit Your Daydream. The latter, produced by Adrian Grenier, follows two musicians crisscrossing America in an RV and jamming with folks they encounter along the way.

The Entourage star directed another buzz-making film, Teenage Paparazzo. Closing the Festival with it is a bit of programming mischief that NaFF artistic director Brian Owens calls "almost deliciously subversive … in a town full of celebrities" where fame is downplayed. Bolded names from Alec Baldwin to Noam Chomsky bob up in this documentary about celebrity obsession.

Grenier will make the scene together with country music artist Brad Paisley, whose short film, When Mom's Away, opens the April 22 event.

Robert Patton-Spruill's Do It Again is surely the hoot of the tune tales. The documentary tracks a middlescent journalist's mission to reunite '60s rockers The Kinks. As sad sack as he and his profession may be, America comes off as sorrier still.

NaFF's Opening Night film, Nowhere Boy, cocks a snook at the British Invasion from the other side of the pond. UK director Sam Taylor-Wood dramatizes the young John Lennon's coming of age in post-war Liverpool with his mother, caretaker aunt and the US culture that helped raise him.

Other music-flavored events at the Festival are a "One On One" with composer Carter Burwell. The Coen Brothers staple will take this year's Mike Curb Career Achievement Award For Film Music.

A chat is also scheduled with Mario Van Peebles and the cast of his latest drama, Black, White and Blues. Shot in Nashville, this tale of spiritual redemption and the Memphis blues is one of nine films that will have its world premiere at NaFF.

One of the most hotly anticipated screenings is Radu Mihaileanu's The Concert. It centers on Bolshoi orchestra conductor Andrei Simoniovich Filipov, who was fired during the Brezhnev era for hiring Jewish musicians and who now seeks to reunite them for a Paris concert that the current Bolshoi was slated to perform. French screen veteran Miou-Miou co-stars with Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds).

Like The Concert, Provinces of Night comes to Nashville as a "Special Presentation." Set in rural Tennessee, Shane Dax Taylor's work in progress stars Grammy Award winner Kris Kristofferson as a musician, womanizer and drunk. Character actor W. Earl Brown scripted this translation of William Gay's novel, featuring music by T Bone Burnett. You'd think Crazy Heart might have exhausted the field, but judging by Provinces' reception at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where extra screenings were added, the film co-starring Val Kilmer, Dwight Yoakam and Hilary Duff will garner its share of kudos at Nashville.

For the rest of the international lineup that NaFF artistic director Owens either invited or winnowed down from 2,000 submissions, see NashvilleFilmFestival.org.

The Regal Green Hills Stadium 16
Apr. 15 – 22, 2010
3815 Green Hills Village Drive
Nashville, TN 37215
800-326-3264

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