Atlanta Film Festival kicked off its 48th year on April 25, launching 11 days of red carpets, screenings, panels, and parties for the nearly 28,000 attendees flocking to the city.
One of few Academy Award-qualifying festivals in the world, it blends bigger “marquee” releases like “The Idea of You” starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine with a host of independent features, pilots and short films. 2024’s lineup shows 90 short films, 22 feature-length films and 22 “creative media” like pilots and music videos.
It’s put on every year by the Atlanta Film Society, a membership-based nonprofit aimed at leading the community through “creative and cultural discovery.” The Society is run by Chris Escobar, who also owns the Plaza Theatre and Tara Theatre — this year’s two festival hubs.
Twenty-four percent of all the films have some ties to Georgia, too. Marquee film “The Idea of You” from Amazon MGM Studios opened the festival and was shot in and around Atlanta and Savannah.
But the star-studded production is only one piece of the festival. It also screens local shorts and features ranging from a Georgia State University student showcase to the homegrown meta-horror film “Faceless After Dark.”
At the Georgia State University showcase, a roster of local college students showed different approaches to their respective shorts. The films included documentary short “Nurse” about a nurse’s stories working at the onset of COVID-19, experimental video “Doja Cat — STREETS (KJ DOGA REMIX)” comprised entirely of internet gifs, autobiographical visual short “Tell no Tales” about a woman reckoning with her estranged father’s death, experimental horror short “Beneath the Surface,” found footage film “Letters to Formation,” documentary “Our Home” about the filmmaker’s immigrant mother, music video “The Kiss” and “Bonobos,” a short where two girls contemplate murdering the rapist in the backseat of their car.
After the screening, an Atlanta Film Festival staff member led seven of the filmmakers in a discussion about their inspiration and future plans for film. Some were inspired by their direct lives.
Esther Lord made “Nurse” about her mother after hearing her experiences at the hospital at the peak of the pandemic.
“My mom, she would come home and tell me about her nights at work, and it’s just so stressful,” Lord said.
The young filmmaker was in a documentary class at the time and decided to point the camera toward her mother. Jimena Fuenmayor did the same, focusing on her family’s story of immigration to the United States. Others, like Sarah Sanchez-Kelly, told personal stories but used a different lens.
“I made a film about my dad dying because my dad died,” Sanchez-Kelly said.
She opted to include handmade paper stop motion animation, an experiment with the form of her short film. Daniel Palacios did the same, using archival footage he colored to explore personal growth through his life.
The roster of creatives is new to filmmaking, but many are already clear on what they want from the industry.
“I would definitely say lower budget films,” editor of “The Kiss” Mia Gant said.
She pointed to a focus on big-budget films like Marvel productions getting more attention than smaller productions but hoped that “we can all pave our own paths instead of having to go the complete industry route.”
While the students hoped for more independent and low-budget films, the festival screened a roster of local and global independent films like “Boca Chica” and “Aggro Dr1ft.” The Creative Conference, which runs alongside the festival, also focuses on independent films, including panels like “The Future of Indie Film in ATL.”
Georgia-based director Cash Robinson, a first time attendee and panelist at the Creative Conference said fostering independent success in Georgia requires a true film culture in the state beyond a beneficial tax credit.
“If we really want this to last beyond the tax credit and without Hollywood, then we have to make sure that there’s an infrastructure here that doesn’t need it because there’s nothing particular about Georgia that Hollywood likes except that it’s like a subsidized labor force and that it’s cheap to shoot here, Robinson said. “So we have to continue to have a culture of people that are going to make films regardless of whatever happens because that’s what they want to do.”
