Charlotte Film Festival roars back with surprises

The 2015 Charlotte Film Festival starts Friday with a severed leg and ends a week later with gnawed bones. In between those two odd moments come hearts broken and restored, laughs from the belly, heads full of dreams and people with helping hands. You might say the whole is greater than the sum of its body parts.

That whole fills a hole: The CFF started in 2005, seemed to be growing healthily, peaked around 2010 and then disappeared a few years ago. More specialized events took over the market, from the Charlotte Jewish Film Festival to the Gay Charlotte Film Festival to Joedance.

But the class of 2010, eager to prove that America’s 17th-largest city could sustain an all-purpose fest, held a reunion of many of the directors. They recruited new volunteers – nobody gets paid in this deal – new donors and new locations: The newly renovated Carolina Cinemas at Monroe and North Sardis roads and Ayrsley Grand, off Tryon Street near Interstate 485.

Program director Jay Morong led a crew that went through roughly 250 submissions and chose about five dozen feature narratives, documentaries and shorts. (He also went after feature films that hadn’t gotten theatrical runs in Charlotte.)

Festival director Jennifer Bratyanski helped create Charlotte Cinema Arts, a 501(c)3 organization that now devotes itself to the fest but may add nonprofit events. Communications director Brandon Falls spread the word, from a hefty presence on social media to an appearance at the Fourth of July celebration uptown.

The result kicks off this weekend with “Finders Keepers,” the bizarre documentary about two guys from Western North Carolina who fought over an amputated limb. The drama played out in Maiden in 2007, when Shannon Whisnant bought a grill at auction and found part of John Wood’s leg inside. They fought for ownership and changed each other’s lives, and this film tells how and why.

The final screening, “Bone Tomahawk” – which will be shown for the second time anywhere on Oct. 3 – stars Kurt Russell as the leader of four men in the Old West who try to rescue captives of cannibalistic cave dwellers.

“Our slogan is ‘Discover Different,’ ” says Morong. “Almost all our movies are not for everybody, but we’ll have something (in the mix) for anybody. It’s a buffet: You go to see the movie you know you’re going to like, and you pick another film you wouldn’t ordinarily see.”

Sometimes a distributor would wait to see how a potentially salable film did at bigger fests and withhold the rights too long to be useful. Sometimes Morong had to wrangle: He negotiated for six months to open with “Finders Keepers.”

Sometimes he asked at precisely the right moment: He obtained the rights to “Embrace of the Serpent” before the Colombian film became a Toronto International Film Festival hit this month. It’s about friendship between an Amazonian shaman and two scientists who spend 40 years traveling through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant.

The festival’s revival was spontaneous, says Falls. Bratyanski finished her Ph.D. in American history three years ago and began to round up old comrades in early 2014. They decided to keep the festival in the first week of autumn, says Falls, “because Charlotteans should always do two things in September: Eat Greek food at the beginning and see independent films at the end.”

Everyone involved realized how much they’d missed doing this, and how much they’d been missed: The fest’s Facebook page has garnered more than 2,100 “likes.” So how will success be measured?

“The success of a nonprofit isn’t always measured by ticket sales,” says Morong. “To me, it means paying your bills and, at the end, hearing people say, ‘Hey, let’s do it again.’ And we will do it again next year.”

This story was originally published September 23, 2015 at 9:32 AM with the headline "Charlotte Film Festival roars back with surprises."