Discover 'wild beating heart' of festival's fans and filmmakers

The capital city community plays a starring role at the 16th Tallahassee Film Festival this weekend.

"We're incredibly excited to stage this year's festival at the Challenger Learning Center, whose IMAX screen is the grandest conceivable place to show a movie within a five-hour drive of Tallahassee," said Steve Dollar, TFF artistic director.

"It gives us the chance to really show off some visually stunning cinema in the most captivating way possible, in a state-of-the-art setting that will maximize the festival experience – while also providing audiences with a fun hang out space between screenings."

Florida focus: A complete guide to Tallahassee Film Fest: Sci-fi, animation and Florida on an IMAX screen

Dollar, a cultural journalist who was a former film critic at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Sun, programs the festival alongside creative director Chris Faupel, who has been with the event since its 2008 inception.

He emphasized the importance of the festival as a social enterprise. "We always like to say that it's as much, or even more, about community as it is about movies," he said. "It's a chance for local audiences and artists to engage with visiting independent filmmakers from all over the place, share visions and enthusiasms, and maybe get their minds blown – or at least get offline and out of the heat for a few very fun hours."

The festival also continues its long association with Cap City Video Lounge, in the embattled Railroad Square Arts District, which has been the site of much civic discussion over its future after tornados devastated the site in May.

"Cap City will forever be an essential partner of our festival," Dollar said. "It is the wild, beating heart of cinephilia in Tallahassee, and we've tried to match their freak with an equally wild selection of specially curated new films coming up from the American indie underground. "

Here's a look at the local filmmakers featured in the festival.

Sammy Tedder

“River Obscura —Secrets of a Blackwater River,” is the name of the visually mesmerizing film entered in Tallahassee’s 2024 Film Festival by Sammy Tedder.

Tedder, a “Florida boy,” was originally a saxophone prodigy, who by the time he was in his teens was playing in soul bands around the southeast U.S. He would add jazz and R&B along the way.

His musical career burgeoned, and Tedder, who never really left Florida, played in local bands like Wakulla, Labamba Brothers Band, and River Breeze. With his saxophone and virtuosity on flutes, whistle, duduk, bagpipes, and drums in high demand by the likes of BB King, Herbie Mann, and Tab Benoit, he also traveled to the old Soviet Union with Pam Laws. Yet always, Tedder came back to the Sopchoppy, where he and his wife continue to live in a wooden cabin and thrill to the river and the woods.

Tedder created his first full-length nature film, “Local Waters — Wild Places,” five years ago, adding visual poetry to the musical soundtracks he had already completed for three other films.

And now, with “River Obscura — Secrets of a Black River,” Tedder again blends his own haunting melodies, played “sacramentally” on flute or reed instrument, with the breathtaking colors of the Sopchoppy, brilliant greens, sun-strafed waters, and the animals who live in this paradise. “I wanted to document and share what we have before it changes…so people will know what we had.”

Jodi Wille

While Tedder is steeped in the magical melodies of the Sopchoppy, Jodi Wille is new to Florida and to Tallahassee. “We fell in love with this place,” she said from the locale she is leaving, Los Angeles. Wille's contribution to the Tallahassee Film Festival is just as much a quantum stretch as L.A. is to North Florida.

Wille, a poly-careered creative artist, had been a book publisher, an art curator, a podcaster, and now with, “Welcome, Space Brothers,” her second feature documentary, she is a filmmaker with a penchant for peering deep into American subcultures. In this case, it's the “this almost can’t be true” story of the Unarias Academy of Science, a community that looked for the arrival of “3,000 benevolent aliens,” as they practiced folk-healing, channeled extraterrestrials, and were directed by Ruth E. Norman, a charismatic 70 year-old woman known as Archangel Uriel.

Digging deep, Wille tells us of the surprising creativity of the group’s members who made four of their own feature films, put on “psycho-dramas” for public access television, all wearing home-made costumes and wigs worthy of a Broadway stage play.

“I think this film leaves us with new ways of seeing and understanding,” says Wille of the “mysteries of beyond” that have inspired her since childhood.

Ian Edward Weir

Ian Weir is a filmmaker who has produced environmental and social sustainability videos for the last 10 years. Using his talents as videographer, editor, musician, sound designer, he also teaches documentary editing at FSU’s College of Motion Picture and Recording Arts, where his students have gone on to win student Emmys and Oscars and awards at the Cannes’ Film Festival.

“Tigers of the Sky,” is Weir’s 2024 Tallahassee Film Festival’s entry and follows his love of filming nature in biodiverse landscapes around the world.

But in this case, not too far from home. “I love going to St. Marks,” writes Weir. “But I’ve never been able to film a Great Horned Owl. But after discovering an owlet in its nest with the mother nearby, I was “cursed.” Weir traveled to St. Marks to film and photograph the family more than 60 times over the next year and a half. He notes with a hint of mystery, “I could have never imagined what was revealed…and now I can share my journey with everyone!”

The Tallahassee Film Festival is an opportunity to see how talented filmmakers investigate the world, manipulate images into stories, turn truth into magic. For a full schedule, visit tallahassseefilmfestival.com .

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Discover 'wild beating heart' of festival's fans and filmmakers