25th Annual Maryland Film Festival: Reviews and Reactions Part I
From Opening Night to special screenings to short films.
BALTIMORE - When the Maryland Film Festival announced a hiatus in 2023, an uneasiness was felt in the local arts community, (this is how we got the New/Next Film Festival.) Even with good faith efforts to return, creatives and patrons understand the volatility of an arts organization, particularly one stretched thin by the pandemic and the movie-going habits it affected.
But the folks behind the festival made good on their promise, and the 25th MDFF kicked off Thursday night at the SNF Parkway Theatre with their Opening Night festivities. "This is going to be the time when we lift up our creativity," said Maryland Governor Wes Moore, who spoke before the Opening Night film. "It's a celebration," he continued, "of a vision, of a tremendous amount of hard work, and of these creatives and filmmakers." He would go on to proclaim that day, May 2, 2024, Maryland Film Festival Day in the state of Maryland.
The stage was set for a jubilant evening.
I've been at the festival since that Thursday evening party and what follows is my coverage, reviews and reactions, from the first two-and-a-half days of the festival.
Luther: Never Too Much (2024)
Luther Vandross always thought he would be a star. The film “Luther: Never Too Much” explores the formative years of Luther’s musical career, back to the epicenter of black culture, Harlem’s very own Apollo Theater…we explore his process of creation, an exacting style that culminated in the most exquisite compositions. A portrait of a master emerges. He would control what he could as best he could. His weight, his craft, his love of family and close friends. If romantic love eluded Luther, he made up for it in other ways. Luther is a man of passion, a man who delighted in beauty and luxury.
Opening Night brought acclaimed documentarian Dawn Porter (The Lady Bird Diaries) back to the festival with her new film, Luther: Never Too Much. While we're all familiar with the music of Luther Vandross (and by all, I mean all - the singing and dancing that accompanied the screening caused Porter to dub this crowd "the best audience so far"), but most of us are less familiar with his life story.
From his childhood in Harlem and nights learning how to perform at the historic Apollo Theater, the brownstones of Sesame Street to writing jingles for Juicy Fruit and Miller High Life, opening for Bowie and Bette to his headlining career, Porter was given full access to the Sony Music archives, which means we get full-length performances and never-before-seen footage. We get to see the man behind those legendary rhythm and blues vocals, the man with a great sense of humor, fantastically collaborative spirit, and deep appreciation for the history of this music. "I got a sound in my head and I gotta get it out," he says when his records become auto-biographical.
And yes, we get to be seduced by the music all over again. "If you wanted to fall in love, you'd let Luther do the work for you," says producer Jamie Foxx in one of the film's talking head interviews, (he also does a great bit on how Luther could sing about anything.) It's become fashionable to criticize the talking head documentary, which almost always boils down to a criticism of its uncinematic qualities. But with Luther gone, Porter understands that we need his closest confidantes and collaborators to tell his story on his behalf. Oh, and the star power of Foxx, Mariah Carey, and Clive Davis doesn't hurt either.
While the documentary is told largely chronologically, Porter occasionally uses clips thematically, which can be a bit confusing. Clips from The Arsenio Hall Show and In Living Color come before his 1986 car crash, for example, and this can be a little jumpy for folks who need this to be a Luther biography. But this is essentially a nitpick for a film that is otherwise dynamic and passionate.
This documentary has been a centerpiece of many festivals, from Sundance to Tribeca to the Opening Night screening of Hot Docs to the Opening Night screening of MDFF. It's easy to see why - it's excellent. "I love every frame of this movie," said Porter in the post-show Q&A. And if this audience's reaction was any indication, a lot of people will as well.
Family Dynamic Shorts (2023-2024)
Every family has its quirks. From a deathbed rap battle with a grandparent, exploring generational differences regarding protests in Iran, or coaching your kids to lie on national television, these short films give us a potpourri of utterly unique family relationships.
End of Summer: A number of the films in this collection centered around the death of a grandparent and regular readers of this website already know that I lost my grandmother just over a year ago. Needless to say, I had to brace myself and it started right away with this Chinese-language film about the belief that when a loved one passes, their soul doesn't leave us quite yet. This was a tender short with plenty of contemplative silence as the wind rustled the trees and the fire crackled and fans oscillated on one particular day when a young boy says goodbye to his grandmother.
Balloon Boy: Remember this shit? Have you thought of it since 2009? Me too and me neither. Well, co-directors Arlin Golden and Brian Gersten have used archival footage to recreate the pandemonium around the six-year-old boy who wasn’t floating through the skies of Colorado in his family’s homemade flying saucer. When the boy revealed later that evening that “we did it for the show,” the mystery only got more complicated. Fifteen years later, this short film is a condemnation of 24-hour sensationalized news (while also feeling like a memorial to the canceled shows and dismissed newscasters of that era - remember Headline News?), an examination of police ineptitude, and the celebrity-fabricating we can do with even the worst of actors, like hoax mastermind and family father Richard Heene.
Echoes of Pomegranate: Director Alex Bijan Zandi makes a slightly autobiographical narrative about generational differences in cultural politics. It sees a father and daughter fighting over their points of view on the world, framed around their experiences living in the shadows of the Iranian diaspora. He’s cynical, she’s hopeful, and they both have every right to be. Shot in just three-and-a-half days, it’s an example of making the most of your short film circumstances.
Got Lead?: First-time filmmaker Myron Higgins calls himself a "lead baby," one of countless children raised in a Baltimore home with high lead levels. That lead poisoning has brought a lifetime of "headaches, Bell's palsy, seizures, anger management, and pain in my bones" all because he grew up in "the average Baldamore slumlord house." He received a $250,000 settlement that was gone in months after he used it to pay everybody's rent, bills, parking tickets, even taking the whole block to the movies one night. Although he got this money at 18 years old, he did not receive any access to healthcare or education on his condition or his newfound money. Years later, he has created this fascinating look at this issue that has affected so many and the way the system has all but abandoned them. Myron makes music under the moniker Sun of Baltimore, but I look forward to seeing more movies from this local artist.
Bob's Funeral: Mixed-media artist Jack Dunphy has made a tremendous short about the passing of his father and the passing of his father and how those two things, despite only happening within five months of each other, could not have been more different. His grandfather's death brings the titular funeral for a guy nobody seemed to like and can't seem to come up with nice words for when remembering him. His father's celebration of life, meanwhile, sees person after person after person eulogize this beloved friend and family member. Why so different? In this shockingly funny half-documentary half-animated portrait, Jack says it might have something to do with dick size, but it might be so much more. A highlight of this festival, for sure.
Terminally Ill: A story about a young man who realizes his freestyling can raise the lazy beeps on his grandmother’s heart monitor. What he doesn’t realize is that she’s ready to move on and he is the one that needs to let go. We all hope to have that one last goodbye with the person that we love and if we’re really lucky, they leave us with the one thing we wanted to hear. It’s a theme found in End of Summer and Bob’s Funeral, but this short is the one that personally touched me the most, that felt the most close to home.
Butt Boy (2019)
Chip, an IT specialist, is miserable. He has no friends, his boss sucks, and his wife finds him repulsive. But his life will change forever during a trip to the doctor’s office, where he undergoes a prostate exam. Much to his surprise, Chip likes it… too much.
“…Honey, have you seen the TV remote?” Things turn from innocent to sinister as Chip’s obsession with this newfound form of pleasure consumes him… and everything in his path. When posters of missing children and beloved pets increasingly pop up around the quiet Florida suburb, Detective Russell Fox starts digging deeper into the case until he is hot on Chip’s tail.
Every year, the folks at MDFF invite Baltimore legend John Waters, the Pope of Trash himself, to program a special revival screening. As is par for the course with Waters, it’s often a maligned film that he believes deserves a reappraisal. He resides over his court of public opinion at the SNF Parkway.
Butt Boy, as you can guess from the title alone, is no exception. Waters discovered the film through the glowing New York Times review (Jeannette Catsoulis called it "a hilariously bawdy, intermittently inspired act of vivacious vulgarity"), but the pandemic put the squash on him (or anyone else) seeing it in a theatrical run. The response since has been iffy at best, which makes sense because this is not the kind of movie that would play well at home. You need a crowd to giggle and groan and gawk and guffaw with. As always, John Waters knows what he’s doing.
At its most basic, Butt Boy follows a guy who likes to shove things up his butt after he learns something about himself following a rectal exam. But really, as Waters put it in the post-screening Q&A, “this is like a real cop drama in a way” because the titular Butt Boy tries out bigger and bigger submersibles of both the inanimate and animate variety until local children begin to go missing and detectives take notice. They have to find who’s leaving behind all these dingleberries.
The film stars director/co-writer Tyler Cornack and this is a guy who understands what he brings to the table, a dopey look and a one-ply dry sense of humor. The detective is played by Tyler Rice and he’s really what sells the hard-boiled of it all. He’s a greasy, raspy, hot black coffee-drinking no-nonsenser, which is, of course, the perfect foil to the bad guy who has to spread his checks every time he strikes. Waters was right, it’s a surprisingly serious mystery and the tone-shifting is quite impressive. If you expect it to go totally, uh, explosive in the end, that’s the least of your worries. The climax’s cavernous setting is something you just don’t see in movies. “No location scout needed,” Waters quipped, “the director was sitting on it!”
A Nightmare on North Avenue Shorts (2023-2024)
“For no mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller.”
A collection of horror shorts featuring demons, zombies, and perhaps the most devious of all: human beings.
Anyone who knows Baltimore would probably choose a nightmare on Elm Street before a nightmare on North Avenue 364 days out of the year, but this special occasion of curated horror shorts is the rare exception. I was able to check out three of the five selections:
The Lonely Portrait: This story of a haunted painting in a creepy AirBNB is a creative camerawork, largely no-dialogue horror kinda-comedy. I wasn’t entirely sold on the conceit until the final scare, but that made the familiar flavors of Barbarian and Tales from the Hood and Oculus more palatable.
The Thaw: A black-and-white period piece that does in 17 minutes what The VVitch did, for me, in 93 minutes. I didn't care for The VVitch, maybe it was just too long.
Inner Demons: Horror as a metaphor for mental health is nothing new, but it is a narrative shortcut to use your 11 minutes to show off your filmmaking and technical skills.
Body and Soul (1925)
The Rt. Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins is a charismatic preacher who commands the respect and reverence of his congregation in Tatesville, a small Black town in Georgia. Martha Jane, one of his devout congregants, is determined to have her daughter Isabelle marry the reverend. Meanwhile, Isabelle is in love with Sylvester, the reverend’s twin brother. Unbeknownst to Martha Jane and the rest of the town, the reverend is actually an imposter and a fugitive who has been drinking, gambling and stealing the church’s collection plate for himself.
How often do you get to see a silent film from 1925 directed by a pioneering black filmmaker projected in a historic movie palace built in 1915 with a live improvised score?
The answer is at best rarely, but most likely never.
That sentence would probably turn a lot of people off, but it is no different than visiting a museum or aquarium or botanical garden or science center. Informational, yes. But no less entertaining. Using his keys and a handful of small percussives, Baltimore musician Aaron Hill freestyled a score, both lively and melodramatic, to bring this Oscar Micheaux picture back to life. Restored in digital 4K by the George Eastman Museum, Body and Soul is Micheaux’s early attempt at depicting the unique hardships of Black life on screen. Paul Robeson, an actor of silents and talkies (and singies), makes his film debut as a lying, cheating, drinking, raping ex-con posing as a preacher.
It was controversial (and still is today) for its depiction of Black people as crooks and criminals, but Micheaux’s narrative is a self-aware criticism of the way his people were typically seen on film. If we will watch Spike Lee and Tyler Perry do that same thing in their films, then we need to take ourselves to the rare screenings of films like Body and Soul to see where this began. MDFF provided the folks in attendance with a rare treat.
BaltiShorts (2023-2024)
Starting in 2019, BaltiShorts has become a staple in the MdFF program, highlighting movies made by DMV creators or films about the greater Baltimore community. This year’s BaltiShorts program features docs, narratives, experimental work and animation spotlighting quintessential Mid-Atlantic stories and sensibilities.
BaltiShorts is a premiere screening of the Maryland Film Festival and this year’s packed house was shown 11 short films.
El Camino del Pan a Baltimore: José Vargas, the owner of Vargas Bakery in Baltimore's Highlandtown neighborhood, calls himself a "servant." To his family, those who run his business with him, of course. To his wife and children and siblings. But also to his customers, those who enjoy his fresh, hot, fluffy treats. I'll be visiting soon if that's the way he thinks about his customers and his business.
Strut: From Gene Kelly to Soul Train to ballet to roller-skating, vibrant dancers create color in black-and-white worlds through their expression.
Squeegee Boy: Baltimoreans being forced to watch a movie about squeegee boys must feel as reductive as Philadelphians being asked about cheesesteaks or Floridians watching another high-humidity weather report. Been there, done that. (I'm also seeing a documentary about the same subject on the festival's final day - I will go in with an open mind.) I’ve also never seen a squeegee boy in Charles Village.
Making Our Spaces Sacred: If you treat a place as sacred, from a beautiful park to a bustling street corner, then other people will too. Their behavior in that space will change. This was a call to action to try that out in the places that need it the most.
Family Dinner: It's a story about two step-siblings who bond over the restaurant they each shared with their parents back when it was just them. The biggest response from the audience came when they ordered Chocolate Cokes.
Bug Box: What kind of bugs smell the best? Deodorants.
Behind the Brand: BLK ASS FLEA MKT: A commercial for Baltimore's BLK ASS FLEA MKT, an incubator of Black products in Baltimore, which they refer to as a Black utopia. "We see a lot of shea butters and candles," says co-owner Sola, who is credited as the business's Fly Aunti. But they want to encourage entire households of black products, from clothes to jewelry to food to tech.
730 Days: A short about the loss of a partner. How all of the things you used to do with them, you now do alone. All of the places, experiences, and foods that make you think of them are all different now. It's a scary thought. How do you honor their memory while living your own life?
Faidley's The Center of the Universe: Faidley's is a Baltimore icon that has served seafood across three different decades, including laying claim to the superior gourmet crab cake recipe. If there's one thing Marylanders know, it's crab. If they say Faidley's is the best, it must be the best.
Landmarked Part Five: A Tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer: About 300 yards from my home stands a pedestal without a statue. It once held a statue of Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, but those two were put in storage a few years back. Since then, the stand has been the site of frequent political graffiti, protests, and art installations. Something new pops up every week or so. Choosing to perform your political protest here speaks for itself. This short sees conceptual artist Ada Pinkston perform interpretive movement atop the pedestal, accompanied by a famous 1971 speech by Fannie Lou Hamer.
The Flacalta Effect: Ozempic abusers won't know what hit 'em when Flacalta hits the market. You'll look great, but it will also turn you into a literal zombie in this horror-comedy.
Each plot synopsis and all photos are from MDFilmFest.com