Each year, the city rolls out the red carpet to thousands of guests from around the world for the Atlanta Film Festival. The packed lineup features local, national and international works across 11 days — and it’s all helmed by Christopher Escobar, Executive Director of the Atlanta Film Society.
“I’m looking forward to welcoming folks back, getting everyone together and our team finally being able to share all of these films and these conversations about film with that they’ve been working on for months and months with the audience that they’ve been imagining and intending to share it with,” Escobar said.
From April 25 to May 5, the Plaza Theatre and the Tara will transform into hubs for one of the world’s few Academy Award-qualifying festivals. Nearly 28,000 people come from around the world each year to see some of the 90 short films, 29 feature-length films and 22 creative media pieces shown in the festival.
For 13 years, Escobar has run the Atlanta Film Society, a membership-based nonprofit aimed at leading the community through creative and cultural discovery. He also owns Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre and Tara Theatre.
He’s become a fixture in the growing Atlanta film community across the past 13 years, and with the festival Escobar aims to knit its factions together.
“For all the talent there is for an arts community, I will say that in many other cities, the film community is a little bit more settled, and we’re much more in pockets here in Atlanta,” Escobar said. “This, to me, I think, is an exciting opportunity to create some more unity across it.”
For the first time, the festival will be hosted in part at the 56-year-old Tara movie theater. The Tara briefly shut down in 2022 before being purchased and reopened by Escobar. Since then, it’s become a hub just like the Plaza for partnered events with Wussy Magazine, Wax & Wane Productions and Videodrome.
Now, the iconic Atlanta cinema will reach a whole new section of residents. Escobar said that “a lot of Tara people and Plaza people don’t cross-pollinate” due to the distance between the locations. The festival splits screenings and premieres between the two theaters.
Uniting the film community of cinephiles, filmmakers and creatives is a major goal for the festival. Independent filmmakers, major productions and different creatives don’t often come together — until the annual film festival weaves three things together.
“Two of them have been by design since year one, which is showcasing the latest of Georgia-made independent films alongside the latest and greatest from around the world,” Escobar said. “That’s been the intent from year one and that is what’s happened from year one.”
As the industry grows, the festival has also weaved in more Georgia-made major industry films into the festival.
Movies like Amazon’s “The Idea of You” starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine and critical darling “I Saw the TV Glow” with Brigette Lundy-Paine and Justice Smith will garner major attention, but the growing industry also makes the festival a hub for homegrown filmmakers.
The creative conference coincides with the screenings and features in-person and online sessions like “The Future of Indie Film in ATL” and “Developing Features and TV Shows in Georgia.”
For filmmakers and audiences alike, the Atlanta Film Festival is a look at creative success on either end of the production spectrum.
Independent group Trash Mouth Productions made it into the festival with their pilot “The Murder at Cape Melancholy,” a Georgia-shot episode put together on a shoestring budget.
Producer Zachary Echols said the pilot is a “whodunit murder mystery that basically dropped out of school to disappoint its parents.” It centers on a small town called Cape Melancholy, where Todd Bishop’s routine gets interrupted, and he must vindicate himself for a murder. In his eyes, though, he’s just looking for his missing hammer.
The chaotic romp was inspired in part by director Christian Meier’s love for small towns and his upbringing in Forsyth County.
“I love that bizarre small-town lore, and I really wanted to capture that and put it into a story where everybody knows each other, and they all have their little urban legends and myths,” Meier said.
Meiers and Echols, who started Trash Mouth Productions alongside Edi Tingle and Tylere Brown, said they started the company to be inclusive and non-hierarchical.
“Trash Mouth in its entirety was started because we wanted to give people that chance,” Echols said. “Especially in Atlanta where a lot of the stuff that is made is either that big budget stuff, like Tyler Perry or Marvel, we wanted to give people a chance they never had before.”
“The Murder on Cape Melancholy” used a lot of first-time filmmakers.
“A lot of us are new to film, like film is relatively new here in Atlanta,” Meiers said. “So a lot of people want the opportunity to work on something good.”
Rather than wait around they grabbed a group of people, many who had only spoken a few lines on camera before and put together a 25-minute pilot starring all their friends on a $7,500 budget. They shot around Georgia in various homes to save money, and took input from anybody involved — and made it all the way to Atlanta Film Festival where 7,500 works were submitted.
“We were really, really excited that we got in because I wanted it to premiere at home,” Meiers said. “It was a really big deal for us.”
Trash Mouth Productions may be tucked into one Atlanta’s “pockets” of creativity, but the filmmakers are part of a greater shift in the statewide film industry. A 2023 study by Georgia State University’ Creative Medias Immersive Institute found Georgia has the fastest-growing film industry in the nation — the $4.4 billion industry has created billions of dollars in additional investments.
“We’re no longer losing artists who come up in their careers and have to leave to go pursue opportunities,” Escobar said.
In the past 13 years, Escobar’s “why” for putting on the festival has shifted. Originally, it was just to keep the Atlanta Film Society up and running, but as the nonprofit and industry at large have grown more successful, fear has calmed.
“It’s not about just staying alive, but now its about trying to make the organization thrive,” Escobar said.
There are still some roadblocks: the 2023 strikes put on by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild halted production for over 100 days. Escobar said they’re still feeling the impacts.
In previous years the festival spanned to iconic Atlanta spots like Dad’s Garage, the Rialto Theatre and the Carter Center. The physical footprint has shrunk to the Tara and the Plaza to keep costs low.
“I’m sad that we’re not able to be at those venues again this year, not because they wouldn’t have, it’s because they’ve all been incredible partners and very generous,” Escobar said. “We just have frankly felt the toll of the strike.”
But Escobar is looking forward to opening the theater doors and welcoming people in, particularly to see an expansive roster of independent films that can be “complex to market.”
He spotlit international features like “Boka Chica,” a Dominican coming-of-age story, documentaries like “Happy Campers” about a trailer park on the Virginia Coast, “Naked Ambition” about pin-up model turned pin-up photographer Bunny Yeager and rural southern drama “A Song for Imogene.”
“It’s for, you know, for people who, you know, who want something interesting and want something challenging and something different,” Escobar said.
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