Even a Little Rock can make ripples in the film industry at large. At least, that’s what Arkansas-born director Jeff Nichols and his Arkansas Cinema Society co-founder Kathryn Tucker are determined to prove by bringing Southern storytellers to the state capital each year.
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The centerpiece of ACS’ activities is the annual Filmland event — somewhere between a festival and conference, for which Nichols invites friends and former colleagues to show and discuss their work — although the organization operates year-round. ACS supports the local film community, amateur and professional alike, hosting Arkansas screenings of movies that might not otherwise get adequate exposure in the state, such as Oscar best picture nominees “The Zone of Interest” and “Anatomy of a Fall.”
Eight years ago, Nichols felt the need for a centralized team to reach the local film community. “I’d taken ‘Loving’ back to Little Rock because I wanted to show it to friends and family, and there wasn’t even a mailing list,” the director recalls. So Nichols reached out to Tucker, whom he’d known since high school, about launching something that could build film literacy and encourage young Arkansans to pursue a career in the industry.
A veteran of the Directors Guild Training Program, Tucker had worked in marketing at Miramax in Los Angeles, and moved on to producing independent features, but remained well-connected in Little Rock. Her brother is a state senator, and she’s friendly with many influential Arkansas players, which proves strategic when it comes to her ultimate goal for ACS: “What’s needed is a better film incentive so that bigger-budget movies can come to Arkansas, so that filmmakers can stay in Arkansas and get paid as much as they would in Oklahoma or Georgia.”
Until that issue is resolved, Arkansas stands to lose productions and talent to states with more aggressive tax incentives — but Tucker and Nichols are on the case. Last year, the organization hosted a screening of Oscar-nominated documentary short “The Barber of Little Rock” at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, where mayor Frank Scott Jr. conducted a Q&A with nonprofit community bank advocate Arlo Washington.
According to John Hoffman (who co-directed “Barber” with Christine Turner), they structured the short around Washington, but to make it, the filmmakers turned to ACS for help. “Our crews were always a blend of people that flew in and people from Little Rock. They were very helpful in pointing us to freelance crew members and equipment: sound, lighting, DPs, production assistants. We never felt that we were without good support.”
Modeled after what Richard Linklater built with the Austin Film Society (an inspiration to Nichols, who’s lived in Texas since graduating film school), ACS offers modest grants to support indie directors on the festival circuit, helps filmmakers interface with the local casting pool and aims to mentor aspiring young filmmakers.
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To that end, in early summer, Tucker hosts a Filmmaking Lab for Teen Girls, an idea borrowed from Reese Witherspoon. “We teach 10 to 15 girls, who come up with story ideas, then they pitch and decide collectively on which one to make,” explains Tucker, who steers participants as they write a script, learn about pre-production, then shoot, edit and sound design a finished short. “Then they have a film they can use when they apply to college.”
Tucker writes film school recs for her alums and just hired Isabelle Rogers, the program’s inaugural grad, as ACS’ education coordinator, now that she’s graduated from film school at Columbia College Chicago.
To support its many initiatives, ACS treats its annual Filmland event as both a social gathering and a massive fundraising tool, whose sponsors include Panavision and the Tyson Family Foundation. “The thing our one-off screenings don’t really provide is this networking opportunity for filmmakers, where they can connect with one another and make movies together,” Tucker says.
That’s where Filmland comes in, hosting four days of screenings, master classes and social events, including this year’s inaugural Southern Storytellers Panel, featuring Michael Schwartz (“Los Frikis”), Christy Hall (“Daddio”) and Clint Bentley (“Sing Sing”), hosted by Variety at this year’s Filmland event.
According to Nichols, “Regional specificity is the most direct path to universality in storytelling. Who would have thought that stories that take place in rural southeast Arkansas would resonate in France, at the Cannes Film Festival? But it’s happened,” Nichols says. “I’m the proof, and I think it’s because we live in a time when specificity matters.”
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