El Dorado Film Festival
South Arkansas Arts Center
El Dorado, Arkansas
Feb. 8 – 11, 2024
Independent filmmakers converged on the El Dorado Film Festival in Arkansas to show their work and collaborate on future projects. Doc Martens boots were de rigueur, and a New Haven producer’s movie won honorable mention.
Southern Arkansas may seem like an unusual place for a film festival, but it’s a center of independent cinema. El Dorado is in the orbit of nearby Shreveport, home of the Louisiana Film Prize which offers a $50,000 purse. The New Orleans film scene also draws talent to the region.
The short films The Hill We Climb by Raiden Greer and How Do I Tell You This by Lara Hill were among the featured movies.
Greer’s documentary covers efforts to improve an African-American neighborhood known as Ralph Bunche (or “The Hill”) in Benton, a small city near Little Rock.
Greer went to school with kids from the neighborhood. She observed segregation and violence firsthand. Her film chronicles attempts to revitalize the neighborhood -– mostly without the billions in anti-poverty grants that flowed to northern cities.
The first-time director has acted in movies with Saoirse Ronan, Will Ferrell and Jason Statham. When Greer guest-starred on five episodes of American Horror Story, her character was slashed to death, revived as a zombie, and eventually decapitated with a chainsaw.
Lara Hill’s film How Do I Tell You This is a split-screen Internet romance shot in Shreveport. Young indie star Jeff Pearson plays opposite co-writer and female lead Misha Molani who crafts a convincing character with wardrobe and mannerisms.
Hill worked on a number of films and television productions before coming out as transgender. Many collaborators hadn’t seen her recently and were getting reacquainted at the El Dorado festival .
“Bringing How Do I Tell You This to El Dorado feels like bringing it home,” Hill said. “It’s been amazing to reconnect, sharing both my work and myself.”
Music For A While, produced by Carla Jackson, assistant dean of Yale’s Geffen School of Drama, took honorable mention for best drama short. Directed and written by Kelvin Zachary Phillips and shot on the streets of New York City, the nine-minute film concerns the inner lives of unhoused people.
Music for a While is also the title of a 700-year-old aria by the English composer Henry Purcell. For the film, pianist Nicholas Posternak scored a new arrangement of the piece.
Grinell-Skot Gilmore stars as a homeless man wandering the streets. The sight of a busking saxophonist transports him to a higher level – and an imagined musical performance. Famous soprano Melissa Wimbish plays a singing role, looking like a young Bernadette Peters
“There’s always more to the story of unhoused people,” Jackson said, “but people are sometimes too judgemental to listen.”
The story is a unintentionally reminiscent of Margaret Holloway, New Haven’s “Shakespeare Lady.” Holloway graduated from Yale drama in 1980, but a promising career was “cut short by mental illness and drug addiction,” as the The New York Times put it. Holloway spent years reciting bard poetry for tips on New Haven streets, dying of Covid in 2020.
The South Arkansas Arts Center, a well-appointed venue in a converted armory, hosted the film festival. El Dorado pronounced (eldo RAY do) is a city of 18,000 that was once flush with oil and lumber profits. Now it resembles a New England textile town left with little after the mills closed.
El Dorado’s sturdy downtown of brick and stone office now emphasizes dining and shopping. An arts district borders a new Hilton hotel.
In 1902, a gunfight erupted in the city square between a sheriff’s posse and an outlaw gang. Several combatants died and others were wounded – including the local doctor who threw down too.
The city has a collection of classic movie memorabilia that fills several rooms at a historical society. An acquisitive cinephile who died 20 years ago donated the collection. Conservators are still studying the haul, some of which is rare or unique.
The quality of the films at the El Dorado festival varied, but none were even close to bad. The four-day event delivered fun and excitement, networking for the filmmakers, several big parties, and plenty of free snacks and drinks to fuel the brainstorming for future collaborations. After a three-year pandemic hiatus, the decade-old festival has made a strong recovery.
Indie filmmakers are known for their indomitable dedication. They eat ramen, beg parents to donate money, cajole friends and other filmmakers to work for free, cast boyfriends as leading men, and max out their credit cards
The 110-minute psychological thriller Shudderbugs, a favorite on the festival circuit, closed the event. Johanna Putnam, a Dartmouth film grad, is writer, director and star.
A young woman returns to her family’s rural home after the death of her mother under puzzling circumstances. Cryptic posthumous notes, a missing amber ring, an evasive coroner, and the requisite creepy guy in a dilapidated shack set the stage.
Putnam, co-star Brennan Brooks, and several friends made the movie during the pandemic. The location is her parents’ farmhouse in Cobleskill, NY, southwest of Albany.
Summer in the upstate farmlands means bugs – lots of them – in many shapes and sizes. A hypnotic cacophony of chirping crickets and other noises underlies the film’s sparse musical score.
As she unravels the mystery, the protagonist becomes deranged to the point where she fashions a crown from rusty barbed wire. The ending resolves her grief and remorse with an emotional payoff for the viewer that often escapes first-time directors.
What’s most remarkable about Shudderbugs is the excellence of its moving parts. Beyond the strong writing, directing and acting, the cinematography, set decorating, sound design, and editing all exemplify what a determined handful of filmmakers can do with a budget of only $11,000. At El Dorado, the film won two awards: Best Narrative Feature and the Spirit Award, totalling $1,500.
Like most independent filmmakers, Johanna Putnam hopes for bigger things someday. For now, she’s working as a waitress in Brooklyn and plotting a new indie movie with her Shudderbugs crew.
