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

Tallahassee cinephiles can get a taste of filmmaking glamour with out the paparazzi.

Sky-high spectacle and down-to-earth artistry promise to make the 2024 Tallahassee Film Festival the most dynamic edition yet for the 16th annual celebration of independent moviemaking, which moves downtown for the Labor Day weekend event.

Programs are scheduled Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 on the five-story IMAX screen at the Challenger Learning Center, the festival’s presenting sponsor, and its planetarium, as well as at Cap City Video Lounge in Railroad Square. More than 50 films – including eight shorts programs — will be screened at three screens. Get your tickets and passes at tallahasseefilmfestival.com .

Florida focus: Discover 'wild beating heart' of festival's fans and filmmakers

To make the most of the opportunity, the festival is going big with films that will splash vividly across the giant screen.

Opening with animation

Highlights include Saturday morning opener “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a boldly colorful sci-fi fable from visionary animator and rising star Julian Glander. The New York Times raved about its premiere at the Tribeca Festival: “Following a cast of slackers and crackpots in suburban Florida, the video game-like musical comedy marries gummy 3-D graphics and stoned-guy humor with sly commentary on hustle culture and the gig economy.”

Bookending the fest is more animation, as it closes Sunday night with a double-bill from singular artist Don Hertzfeldt, presenting his latest short “Me” with a revival of the 2012 “It’s a Beautiful Day.”

40th anniversary centerpiece

There’s lots more in between, including the festival centerpiece, the 40th anniversary re-release of “Paris, Texas,” at 1:25 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 1. Wim Wenders’ 1984 classic, starring Hollywood legend Harry Dean Stanton as a lost soul on a quest to reunite with his wife (Natassja Kinski) and son, is marked by Robby Muller’s stunning cinematography and an unforgettable Ry Cooder score.

Likewise eye-popping is “Grasshopper Republic,” which combines intense macro photography and striking sound design for an immersive dive into the grasshopper industry of Uganda, where the insect is a delicacy – harvested in apocalyptic droves.

North Florida in focus

Tallahassee filmmakers shine in two special shorts programs. “Florida Gone Wild” explores the natural world at our doorsteps, with Ian Edward Weir’s “Tigers of the Sky,” a beautiful documentation of a pair of Great Horned Owls and their offspring at the St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge, and Sammy Tedder’s “River Obscura,” the beloved local musician’s tribute to a tributary, the Sopchoppy River.

Homegrown shorts also are featured in “The 850,” which glimpses at the city and its characters through multiple perspectives. Spencer Hopkins’ ‘Life Inside the Seed’ blends Big Bend geography with slice-of-life scenes and wonderfully surreal moments.

The charged legacy of racism in an infamous onetime “sundown” town is the subject of “Welcome to Jay,” a world premiere from Jeffrey Morgan that explores the 2010 killing of a young Black man in the West Florida town. The Ku Klux Klan goes on trial in “How to Sue the Klan,” which chronicles a historic 1982 lawsuit brought by the “Chattanooga 5,” a group of Black women assaulted by members of the white supremacist organization, produced by Tallahassee superstar lawyer Ben Crump.

And for something completely different, there’s “Welcome Space Brothers,” the new documentary from Jodi Wille, a newly Tallahassee-based filmmaker who explores the far-flung worlds of the Unarius Academy of Science, a Southern California cult that channeled alien intelligence and had a pioneering role in public access television with its cosmic film productions.

Indie discoveries

As always, the festival showcases fresh new work from a wide array of rising talents, as well as films lauded on the international festival circuit.

There are selections from Rotterdam (a pair of gripping, poetic nonfiction portraits “A Man Imagined,” from Canada, and “Flathead,” from Australia), Slamdance (the fictional self-portrait of a New York sex worker in flux “Sam’s World”), Tribeca (“Mountains,” a moving family drama set in Miami’s Little Haiti), and Wilmington, N.C.’s Cucalorus (“Rats!” a boisterous, gag-a-minute stoner comedy), among others.

Shorts

In addition to its two local programs, the festival boasts six more blocks of short films, with comedies, experimental work, documentary, drama, complicated sagas of love, and LGBTQIA-themed stories.

Special events

In keeping with tradition, the festival once again will host its VIP/Filmmaker Brunch on Sunday, Sept. 1, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Challenger Learning Center, where patrons and attending filmmakers get the chance to eat, drink and converse ahead of the afternoon’s screening of “Paris, Texas.”

Some of them may have been up late the night before at the fest’s Saturday night karaoke party, to be held this year at Barrel Proof Lounge Midtown and upstairs at the Over Hang Bar.

How to get tickets

Passes ($95 VIP, $50 all-access) are available online at tallahasseefilmfestival.com , and can be picked up from 10:45 a.m. Saturday Aug. 31 at Challenger Learning Center, 200 S. Duval St. Individual tickets are $10, and can be purchased at each screening. See a schedule of all the films at tallahasseefilmfestival.com .

If you go

What: Tallahassee Film Festival

When : Various times, Saturday, Aug. 31-Sunday, Sept. 1

Where : IMAX Theatre at Challenger Learning Center, 200 S. Duval St.

Tickets: Individual tickets $10; passes ($95 VIP, $50 all-access) are available online at tallahasseefilmfestival.com

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: A complete guide to Tallahassee Film Fest: Sci-fi, animation and Florida on an IMAX screen