Looking back at another Fargo Film Festival

Last week’s 9th annual Fargo Film Festival has passed into history as another successful showcase of emerging filmmakers, student work, and off-beat independent productions. Once again, the festival showed a strong preference for documentaries, and this year also had a large and interesting selection of animated films, both short and feature-length.

Movies started Tuesday night and ran all morning, afternoon, and evening from Wednesday through Saturday. This year my class schedule allowed me to attend only the Friday and Saturday sessions, but most of the award-winners were conveniently scheduled during that time.

My personal choice for “Best of Fest” would have been the Best Documentary Feature winner, “Able Raises Cain.” This fascinating and highly entertaining biographical portrait of professional hoaxer Alan Abel was made by his daughter Jenny and her boyfriend Jeff Hockett. Alan Abel himself, the colorful and always engaging subject of the movie, was present to address the audience and also mingled freely with festival-goers at Saturday’s luncheon and pre-party dinner, sharing stories of his multi-faceted career.

Easily the most interesting documentary for film and movie theatre buffs was Bryce Jarrett’s feature-length “Small Town Silver Screen,” a South Dakota-made look at the phenomenon of small town movie houses. It covers their heyday during the 1930s-60s, their gradual disappearance during the 1970s-80s, and a limited but hopeful resurgence in the 1990s-2000s as many communities refurbish the abandoned buildings and try to find practical ways to bring big-screen movies back to their towns in the wake of multiplex competition from larger nearby cities.

“River,” a Canadian relationship drama, rightfully won festival awards for its two leading actors, and also won Best Narrative Feature. Director Mark Wihak (who was present at the festival) used a nontraditional approach for fictional stories, first discussing the characters and major plot points with his actors, then allowing them to improvise all their dialogue and even determine the direction of the ending.

My personal choice for Best Narrative Feature would have been Bill Plympton’s engrossingly dark and distinctively off-beat “Idiots and Angels.” However, being an animated feature, perhaps it didn’t qualify in that division. The story of a disreputable loser who one day sprouts wings that force him to right moral wrongs he sees is told entirely through the imagery, music and sound effects—with no dialogue. Its animation was also much more impressive than that in “I Am So Proud of You,” the odd but interesting Best Animation winner by Don Hertzfeld.

Plympton did win the award for Best Music Video for his interesting animated interpretation of a song by the Dutch band Parson Brown, titled “Mexican Standoff.”

Run Wrake’s “Rabbit,” which received Honorable Mention for animation, was another darkly disturbing but perversely hilarious movie that was as good as or better than Hertzfeld’s film.

Micah Ranum’s “Harvest Moon,” winner of Best Student Narrative Short, was a great blend of moody domestic drama, crime thriller, horror film, and dark comedy. A young couple having a marital spat suddenly find their home invaded by some violent teenage burglars, but the nasty teens discover they’ve definitely picked the wrong house to rob.

The Best Narrative Short winner was the Spanish-made “Las Gafas,” by Alberto Martin, who was present to answer questions. It is an enjoyable existential comedy of two men assigned to search for Woody Allen’s glasses in a desert, very much reminiscent of Samuel Beckett and absurdist theatre.

As always, the festival presented a wide variety of movies from around the world, with something for discriminating audiences of nearly any taste. This year it was held entirely at the Fargo Theatre instead of having a second venue, and as a result did not have repeat screenings of the winners as in past years. The Fargo Theatre’s new screening room annex is expected to be completed within the next month, and will permit dual-screen presentations again at next year’s fest.