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Coming soon: the Hardacre Film Festival

08-03-2009 | Movies

By Loren Keller

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For organizers and filmmakers alike, much of the Hardacre Film Festival’s appeal lies in its venue: downtown Tipton’s historic Hardacre Theater.

Chicago filmmaker Dan Lamoureux, whose documentary “Nerdcore for Life” screens at this weekend’s festival, says the art-deco masterpiece — a one-time opera house that has been in constant use since 1917 — was quick to capture his attention.

“It looks like a true old-school, Midwestern theater, like the kind my grandparents would have gone to on a Friday night in 1950,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’d like my movie to show in a place like that.’”

Festival director Will Valet says the venue was one of the reasons he decided to move to Tipton in 2001.

“To be able to walk with my kids a block away from my house and take them to a setting like that to see a film is really special to me,” he says. “It’s a piece of the past and really something that you don’t see anymore. It’s unusual for a small town.”

Hosting a film festival is also something uncommon for most towns of just 3,000 people, though the Hardacre Festival, started in 1997, can lay claim to being the oldest film festival in Iowa.

“We have the venue, and I think that was why it first started,” says Valet, a publications editor at ACT who has volunteered for the festival since 2004 and took over as its director this year. “If you have a theater, why not fill it with this unique event?”

This weekend, from 6 p.m. to midnight Friday and 9 a.m. to midnight Saturday, the festival will screen 29 films, including three feature-length narratives, six documentaries, seven animated films and more than a dozen shorts. Click here for the full schedule.

The selections were culled from about 140 submissions from across the globe. Valet says the 10-member jury looked for a mix of quality and entertainment value in choosing which films to show.

“Because an independent film doesn’t have the budget like the ‘Transformers’ sequel has, it has to be more creative in the way it presents its story and the way it entertains,” he says. “I’ve been amazed with the ways filmmakers are able to take their limited resources and make something just completely dazzling out of it.”

The festival’s director of programming, Tommy Haines of Iowa City, says serving on the festival’s jury for the past three years has helped him as a filmmaker.

“The films that make it are really good films, but you also see a lot of films that have shortcomings,” says Haines, whose 2008 documentary “Pond Hockey” has screened at festivals in Minneapolis and Rhode Island. “The main issue is they run too long and they don’t look at transitions and pacing as much as they should. It teaches you to go back and check your work, see if you can cut things out. It’s actually a blessing in disguise getting some films that have flaws.”

Among the standout films this year are “Sita Sings the Blues,” a feature-length animated film created entirely by Illinois native Nina Paley that draws on the epic Indian legend of Ramayana to tell “the greatest breakup story ever told.” The Hardacre festival has named it best narrative feature; critic Roger Ebert calls it “astonishingly original.”

Named runner-up in the best narrative feature category is a breakup film of a different sort: “Breaking Upwards,” a film about a young couple from New York who try to strategize their breakup over the course of a year.

Winner of the festival’s best documentary award is “Pride of Lions,” a film about the Sierra Leone’s struggle to recover from a brutal 11-year civil war. Runner-up in the category is “Out in the Silence,” a documentary about the timely topic of gay marriage that chronicles how the filmmaker’s marriage announcement in his hometown newspaper leads to controversy and a plea for help for a tormented gay teen.

The festival has also named winners in the categories of best short film, best student film, best animated film, best experimental film and best Iowa filmmaker. A complete list is posted here.

The festival’s offerings are sure to present a cinematic mix unlike any you’ll find at the local multiplex — and in many cases the filmmakers will be on hand to answer questions after their work is presented.

Director/producer Lamoureux’s “Nerdcore for Life” screens at 10:15 p.m. Friday. Lamoureux plans to attend and discuss the seven months of research he put into his project and the two years of filming rappers such as MC Lars and Beefy, who focus on such nerdy subjects as video games and computers.

“It’s so bizarre, it demands an explanation,” Lamoureux says. “Nerdcore really took off while we were filming. It went from like 10 people to hundreds of rappers and thousands of fans, so we got really lucky. It exploded right in front of us.”