Now in its third year, Film Fest Knox continues to be a model for what a small regional festival should be, combining highlights from the year’s art cinema, restorations and experimental programs, a main competition with serious but low-profile feature films, and professional opportunities for local filmmakers and short films. In addition to seeing a variety of work they would otherwise not be exposed to, attendees get to experience the festival as a space to interact with artists and cinephiles from around the region and country. Such spaces are an invaluable contrast to our increasingly homebound viewing habits, even more for the community and critical discussion than for the bigger screens.
The heart of the festival is its American Regional Cinema competition, this year consisting of five independent films made outside of the industry hubs of New York and Los Angeles. Artistic director Darren Hughes has impressively managed to fill this competition with features that feel like serious and complete works, “real movies” that a general audience will enjoy but which have had little to no prior attention. The competition has even featured world premieres (The World Drops Dead in 2024 and Other Houses in 2025).
Even more impressive is that the competition has always cohered as a slate of thematically connected works and not just several nice films. “Regional cinema” is a broad descriptor that could be stretched to cover most anything, but it feels concrete when you watch all of these works together on a weekend. Each year has had its own character, and what stands out this year is how each film takes a particular physical location — a house or a stand-in home — as a lens for characters’ relationships to their current or former cities. Other Houses (co-directed by Thomas Southerland and S. Cagney Gentry) is the most direct about this theme, framing its story around its protagonist Radka’s effort to sell her house in Lexington, Kentucky, and move back “home” to Bulgaria. Through that process she meets a partner who is looking to buy a house in Lexington so he can move back there to be with his mom. The film is warm and slightly melancholic, filled with gentle insights about art and the places we live and choices we make.
Bird in Hand is also about houses and searching for one’s place. A young biracial woman with a drinking problem, Bird, shows up unexpectedly at her mom’s house, ostensibly to plan her wedding (in truth, she’s on the outs with her boyfriend), but actually in the hopes of meeting her father for the first time. The house at the center of this film is not Bird’s childhood home but a former plantation down the street which is now being renovated by an entrepreneurial couple whom Bird and her mother get variously involved with. The story of Bird’s Black father, her prickly white mother, and the other couple’s efforts to rebrand a plantation as an acceptable place to host expensive events intertwine in a dramatic spiral that threatens to go off the rails but never loses control. Director Melody C. Roscher makes smart choices about where to use humor as the vehicle for her ideas about thorny racial and familial issues, and where to use poignant drama — and perhaps most importantly, where not to attempt poignancy or closure of a sort that would be too neat or familiar.
Each year the competition has included one film which stands out from the rest through a formal conceit or gamble that places it outside the bounds of mainstream narrative filmmaking. In 2023 that was Graham Swon’s An Evening Song (for Three Voices), in 2024 it was Brandon Colvin’s The World Drops Dead, and in 2025 it’s Hansel Porras Garcia’s Tropical Park. To speak of Tropical Park as authored by its director is even more misleading than such auteurist language usually is, because this film is a single-shot, single-take improvisation between two actors in a car. Porras wrote a brief script outline with no dialogue, met with and coached the actors two times each, and then let them make the film in a car by themselves, the camera in the backseat and the real challenges of Miami traffic outside. Ariel Texido plays a Cuban immigrant who moved to Miami 20 years ago and now has a wife, two kids, a small business, and a Trump flag on his front porch. His trans sister, who he didn’t know had transitioned until she got off the plane, has just arrived a month ago and is staying with him. They spend an hour and a half catching up, releasing the tension that has been building over the past month, opening old wounds. Any further description would be a disservice, because the wonder of the film is in how organically and believably the conversation unfolds and fills in the histories and personalities of these characters. It’s hard to believe this was made with the severe production constraints it had and works so well. Tropical Park uses a car, not a building, but it’s equally as complex an interrogation of “home” as the other films.
The last two competition films also look at home from distinctive angles. Mouse, from director Kenny Riches, is a thriller about a petty thief who infiltrates a rich man’s home to pretend it’s his own for a date with a pen pal he is falling in love with. Naturally, things go very wrong. The last act is an effective genre exercise, but much of the earlier sections attempt social commentary through the neurodivergent protagonist’s observations of life around him — which trigger asides where we see imagined moments from these anonymous people’s lives — and most all of this falls generically flat. [Elsewhere, Libby Ewing’s Charliebird follows a music therapist at a children’s hospital with terminally ill patients, though this writer was only able to catch a few minutes of the film because of schedule overlaps.]
The non-competition Currents and Revival sections of the festival offer highlights from new and newly restored major works of art cinema, many of which are difficult to see outside of the festival circuit or not yet in wide release in the U.S. These included Albert Serra’s documentary Afternoons of Solitude, the beautiful neorealist drama Spring Night, Summer Night set in Appalachian Ohio, the Ghibli-like French animation Arco, and a variety of short and underseen works from the filmmaking collective Sailor Bear (which includes David Lowery, James M. Johnston, and Toby Halbrooks, the second of whom was a juror for this year’s competition).
For the more adventurous cinephiles, however, the most special programs here were two sets of experimental short films impossible to see elsewhere. The first was a full program of films by Peter Bundy, a much less well-known contemporary of ’70s structural landscape filmmakers like James Benning, Peter Hutton, and Chris Welsby. Bundy’s work has some of the character of documentary and ethnography, as he travelled around the country filming regionally distinct sites and landscapes and interviewing some of the coolest old folks you’ll ever see on camera (including his own grandmother, who ponders at length just what the hell young folks are talking about when they try to “find themselves”). But the films are very much not edited like conventional documentaries, following instead the structural tendency to highlight the means and conditions of their own creation and playfully manipulate sound and shot sequence. This is often quite funny. At one point in Alabama Departure, an extended shot of flying fish jumping out of the water is accompanied by a guitarist playing a near-random note at the exact moment each fish flops into the air. The film moves back and forth between such structural exercises in beautiful natural settings and an interview with an old man on a bench with much to say about the church down the street and the wealthy ladies who bury their dogs in a cemetery. It closes with him playing a gospel tune on an old organ. All of these films are very good in their own way, but Alabama Departure in particular is one of the great, and heretofore almost totally forgotten, works of the ’70s avant-garde.
That Bundy program opened the festival on Saturday, and almost 12 hours later the day closed with another set of experimental shorts under the name Flicker and Wow. This program included two films by local Knoxville artists, Nathan Swann’s Palm Sunday and Janelle Vanderkelen’s Niches, both of which have also screened at other prominent experimental festivals this year (the former at Light Matter and the latter at Mimesis, Brooklyn Film Festival, and elsewhere). These works did not feel the least bit out of place alongside some of the best films of the entire year made by luminaries of experimental cinema like Basma Alsharif’s Morgenkreis (which this writer elsewhere covered at length), Blake Williams’s stereoscopic FELT, and Scott Stark’s Tulsa. Indeed, the films were clearly in conversation with each other and their common influences. The shadow of avant-garde greats Ken Jacobs (who passed away this year) and especially Robert Beavers was visible over most all of these works, and then both are explicitly quoted in the Blake Williams film that closed the program. Here’s to a world where every small city has artists making such ambitious work, and serious film festivals to support and exhibit it.
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