A screening of “Spider Mites of Jesus: The Dirtwoman Documentary” at the Byrd Theatre during a previous Richmond International Film Festival (Photo by Jerry Williams)
Screening more than 190 short and feature films from 20 countries and presenting over 30 musical performances, the 12th annual Richmond International Film Festival returns Sept. 26-Oct. 1. Heather Waters, founder and producer of RIFF, exclaims, “I never intended to start a festival!” And yet, a dozen years in, the event continues to grow, with offerings at venues stretching from BTM Movieland at Boulevard Square to the Byrd Theatre, retirement community Westminster Canterbury, Pocahontas State Park, and stages and screens in between.
RIFF is a few festivals in one, comprised of panel discussions, meet-and-greets, world cinema, art exhibitions, and music of many varieties. An annual event such as this is ultimately a summary of what’s happening — now — locally and globally.
Waters says she didn’t expect the widespread popularity and continual expansion of the event. “If you’d come to me 15 years ago and said I’d be running this whole film and music festival, I’d have thought you were crazy.”
RIFF involves a yearlong process of curating submissions and contending with myriad details, including recruiting a squad of volunteers, to make the week of varied occasions work. The event has experienced some cycles, starting out in the often frozen grit of February; then came the pandemic, which shifted the series of presentations to a more congenial autumnal week. The selections run the gamut from narrative and documentary shorts to music videos, from experiments and animations to samples of episodic shows.
Ibibio Sound Machine were among the lineup at a previous Richmond International Film Festival, which also serves as a showcase for musicians. (Photo by Joey Wharton)
Amid the whirl is a collaboration with the first daylong, 15-band lineup of the HeartStrings Music Festival on Friday, Sept. 29, at Richmond’s Hardywood Park Craft Brewery. Featured performers include Jon Russell of The Head and the Heart, Jason Farlow of The Last Real Circus, and Abe Abraham, a co-writer for The Lumineers.
The HeartStrings project raises awareness of, and funds for, nonprofit groups involved with helping the unhoused and providing mental health support.
“HeartStrings dovetails perfectly with our mission,” Waters says. “And it’s the first time we’ve really undertaken this kind of partnership.”
And then there is the ambitious Global Visionary Summit, convening at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture on Sunday, Oct. 1, an amalgam of discussions about environmental sustainability, equity, and also ideation and technology. (AI will enter into that one.)
This component of the festival includes representatives from the embassies of several countries, an exhibition of art and an interactive dance performance titled “Who Let the Dogs Out?” led by the Washington, D.C.-based Polish/Swedish choreographer Lidia Wos.
A documentary film showing in conjunction with the daylong summit is “Powering Puerto Rico,” which introduces us to Northeastern University professor Eugene Smotkin, who, while contending with his wife’s health difficulties, invents a way to return electricity to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico with the help of hybrid car batteries and solar panels.
Complementing the summit and presented on Sept. 26 at Pocahontas State Park in Chesterfield County are two documentaries, “Conserving Carter’s Creek,” showing how the Tides Inn on Virginia’s Northern Neck undertook restoration of nearby wetlands, and “Not on This Land,” concerning a group of citizen activists and their more than six-year struggle to prevent the advance of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, preventing environmental disruption of the Black and Indigenous communities in its path.
Meanwhile, Wednesday, Sept. 27, at The Poe Museum in Shockoe Bottom, is an evening of short live-action and animated films, including an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the 30-minute animation “The Cloaked Realm: The Knight and the Queen,” which is right up Poe’s alley (he analyzed a purported automaton, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player”). The story uses a fairy tale of 1899 to consider whether a machine can think. (Again, can you say “AI”?)
None of these things were remotely near what Waters thought she was starting a dozen years ago. As she points out, the same day she founded RIFF, she also put into motion the related Media Industry Xchange and an industry conference called the FLOW Collective. The intent was, and is, to bring together from around the world and under one online roof, filmmakers, production talent and financial backing to get narrative and documentary films made through independent means and distribute these efforts through a streaming service.
“The technology has caught up to us, and I think the timing couldn’t be better,” Waters says. The web component received the expertise of Waters’ brother Matt and his spouse, Kate.
Further, MIX is teamed up with attorneys Justin Laughter and Christopher Gatewood of Threshold Counsel, which specializes in startups and intellectual property. They are also behind equity financing through Round Here.
“We were thinking about similar things but at opposite ends,” Waters explains. “They built this backend but hadn’t used it much.” Funds enter the MIX to get films financed and greenlighted.
“What’ll happen with the MIX doesn’t exist right now,” Waters says, adding, “but we want to make that kind of difference — to show what’s possible.”
Since the festival is involved with current cultural trends, the recent strikes of film and television actors and writers is bound to come up at a couple of panels. “They’re on the front lines doing battle for several industries. It’s not only about entertainment,” Waters reflects on the strikes, “it’s about equity and fairness. So it’s important to support independent artists who aren’t huge corporations.”
Films with a regional connection through talent or location include the 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 28, Byrd Theatre premiere of Hannah Hoover’s short “Slingshot.” Hoover, a Richmond native involved in Virginia films, transplanted a decade ago to Los Angeles and turned the background of her husband, Michael Roddy, into a narrative in which he portrays a private investigator. Following a devastating divorce, the PI is after his own gambling-addicted father, played by Chris Mulkey, and there is, Hoover notes, a “quirky appearance” by actor Dana Sparks. “Slingshot” is the lead-in for a dramedy involving divorce and a scheme to avoid alimony, Jhett Tolentino and Mike Ang’s “Asian Persuasion.”
At BTM Movieland at 6:45 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 30, a documentary short, “1872: Forward: Foreworld,” delves into the origin story of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, aka Virginia Tech. The institution arose on the former site of the Smithfield Plantation.
Actor Annie McElroy from Stanardsville, a 2018 graduate in theater performance from Virginia Commonwealth University, appears as Anne Burr in “The Problem of the Hero” at the Byrd Theatre at 3:50 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 1. The film takes place across decades and involves Orson Welles, Richard Wright and Paul Green, their story interwoven with themes of race, class and politics.
“I’ll unashamedly say that the arts are saving the world right now,” Waters says. “This world has gotten so volatile and so divided that one of the last safe places to observe and converse is in either creating arts or appreciating the arts. When those worlds can come together at RIFF and other festivals, that’s where the magic happens.”
The Richmond International Film Festival takes place Sept. 26-Oct. 1 (with an encore screening Oct. 2 at Westminster Canterbury) at venues across the city and beyond. View the event schedule here.
