“The Birth of Shiny Star Baby”
Since its founding in 2016, the Defy Film Festival has become a summertime tradition for Nashville’s experimental film and video art fanatics. The fest returns to East Nashville this Friday and Saturday, bringing a predictably heady mix of horror, thriller, drama and comedy — as well as several uncategorizable films that range from inventive to surprising to supremely strange. This fourth iteration of the fest includes 71 shorts, four features and two parties. Add in post-screening Q&As with filmmakers, food and drinks by Frothy Monkey, and bottomless beer cups, and your weekend is mostly spoken for.
Nashville artist Sam Dunson’s “The Birth of Shiny Star Baby” traces its beginnings back to local artist David Hellams’ Crappy Magic collaborative art video project. Dunson’s frenetic stop-motion/puppetry/digital-effects extravaganza finds his Star Baby on a psychedelic journey that relates the origin story of the eponymous wee one — who hatches from an egg placed in a toy microwave before surviving a close call with Cookie Monster. Dunson’s emergence as a video artist after years of establishing himself as one of Nashville’s best painters signals a dynamic new chapter in his brave and bold career. “The Birth of Shiny Star Baby” screens in the Experimental Block on Friday, Aug. 23, at 6:30 p.m.
Hellams manned the camera and handled the editing for Jon Sewell’s “Prostitution in Nashville,” which screens in the Documentary Block on Saturday, Aug. 24, at 12:30 p.m. The Wedgewood-Houston art scenesters’ collaboration combines thoughtful lensing and artful cutting to capture Sewell’s case for legalized prostitution and protections for sex workers in Nashville — a proposal Sewell spelled out at a Metro Council public comment session in October. Sewell is a two-time Nashville mayoral candidate, and “Prostitution in Nashville” offers a filmic distillation of his political-theater-as-performance-art approach to culture jamming.
Belgium-based writer-director Roel Goyens’ short film “Kopschuif” will make its world premiere at Defy Fest when it opens the Horror Block on Saturday, Aug. 24, at 3 p.m. “Kopschuif” is a collaboration between Goyens and the social-artistic theater company Tartaren. The company’s website explains that many of its members are “people living in a poverty situation, with an ethnically-culturally diverse background or with special psychological, intellectual or physical competences.” These actors’ real-life experiences with mental illness are grist for the mill in this disturbing story about an institutionalized man named Bas, who is isolated in the silent world of his own delusions. Intense performances, skanky production design, beautiful photography and inventive effects all help to heighten the feelings of claustrophobic paranoia here.
“White Guys Solve Sexism”
The short films Comedy Block at 4:45 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 24, takes a meta turn with “White Guys Solve Sexism.” Director Christopher Guerrero pictures the fallout of the Harvey Weinstein scandal with admirably exuberant ennui as two clueless movie bros try to come to grips with the fact that every film they love is now tainted by sexism. The over-the-top performances by Kyle Helf, Leah Lamarr and Max Bumgarten are the core of this funny film. The snappy scripting, and the visual gag of a True Detective-style evidence board connecting Weinstein’s films with pushpins and colored string, also score laughs. This is a movie that could’ve been too self-serious — that’s death for a comedy film. Instead, it mostly plays for laughs, and it gets extra points for invoking the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory to create ridiculous connections between Weinstein and the Berenstain Bears.
In Gdynia Film School’s “New Bronx,” hip-hop, basketball and young love all collide in the “New Bronx” industrial section of Gdansk, Poland. Natalia is a tomboyish teenager who likes to wear cutoff jeans and shoot hoops. She develops a crush on a popular neighborhood boy who’s involved with a comparably glamorous mean girl. It’s a bit of John Hughes under smokestacks, then it takes a sharp turn into revenge-movie territory. This film-school project boasts some very good acting, along with imaginative cinematography and editing, that seamlessly weave the girls’ phone camera obsessions right into the mix. “New Bronx” screens in the Thriller Block on Saturday, Aug. 24, at 6:45 p.m.
Josh Weissbach’s “For All Audiences” is a quintessentially experimental film that completely does away with plot, characters and dialogue to interrogate both film history and the material of film itself. “For All Audiences” starts with the familiar green screen that announces, “THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR ALL AUDIENCES.” Weissbach totally subverts that little jolt of excitement that movie lovers feel for a new trailer by delivering almost two-and-a-half minutes of scratched and filthy frames, chromatic and cracked emulsions, a split-second Tommy Lee Jones cameo, noise and blasts of music, an atom bomb explosion, and an ethereal closeup of Cate Blanchett. For me, this film is the Defy fest’s raison d’être. “For All Audiences” kicks off the Experimental Block on Saturday, Aug. 24, at 9:15 p.m. — get there on time, because this block will be introduced by yours truly.
