Sonic Cinema

Normally, this post would have come much closer to the end of the virtual part of the 2025 Atlanta Film Festival. But work and personal matters have intervened in a way I did not anticipate. In May, we underwent a significant amount of renovations at our house, and that’s required a lot of my personal time away from work in terms of moving stuff around and going through stuff at the house. On top of that, somewhere in the move my desktop computer decided to die on me, so the podcast will have to wait until I can get a new computer. But, there’s still a lot to share from the last week of the festival.

I’ve written and spoken before about how the festival has seemed to embrace genre and more experimental films over just independent dramas and comedies. This year, it took until Wednesday for me to really feel that, but when it hit, it changed my feelings about this year’s festival a lot. That doesn’t mean that everything landed with me in the back half of the festival, but movies like Caroline Rumley’s “Eponymous”– a documentary about her in-law’s fascinating family legacy, Alexander Ullom’s “It Ends”– about a friend trip that becomes a never-ending ride to Hell, and especially Zak Hilditch’s “We Bury the Dead”– a film about zombies and grief, really helped reshape what had felt like an otherwise disappointing Atlanta Film Festival at the time.

What does it mean for a film festival to be disappointing? I think one must grade film festival experiences on a curve. For me, the 2025 Atlanta Film Festival didn’t pop the way previous years did when it comes to a great collection of films that resonated with me. Yes, there are going to be a number of the selections this year that land on my end-of-year lists, but there wasn’t really a film like “Hundreds of Beavers” or “Curtis” or “Afterlife” that really blew me away, although the three films mentioned above, Tadashi Nakamura’s “Third Act” and David Fortune’s “Color Book” all made lasting impressions, be it for the story they told, or the way they told their story. There were a great number of films- especially documentaries- that were just fine rather than uniquely special. And in the short film blocks, there were not really a lot of stand out entries, although one entry, Kiera Faber’s “The Garden Sees Fire”, led to fascinating ruminations, and a rich connection with the filmmaker in our interview (to be heard in the podcast episode) that both of us hope to continue in the future.