The Heartland International Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Dennis West

The twenty-eighth edition of the annual Heartland International Film Festival (HIFF) unspooled without hitches October 10–20, 2019 in Indianapolis, Indiana. The festival’s mission statement stresses a commitment “to inspire filmmakers and audience members through the transformative power of film;” and the programming showcases new and recent fiction and nonfiction works that “inspire and uplift, educate and inform, or shift audiences’ perspectives on the world…films that do more than entertain.” A few judiciously selected soon-to-be-released Hollywood productions fit with this mission statement. Indeed, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (TriStar)—Tom Hanks’s rendition of children’s entertainer Mister Rogers—opened the festival; and the death row legal drama Just Mercy (Warner Bros.) closed it. Nonetheless, festival programmers tended to prioritize recent Independent filmmaking from around the world. 

Heartland is known as a filmmakers’ festival thanks to the warm hospitality extended to them as well as the many opportunities offered to network with other cineastes and to dialogue formally and informally with moviegoers. A powerful incentive for participating filmmakers are the hefty cash prizes offered, which totaled approximately $60,000 this year. According to festival publicity, Heartland has bestowed the breathtaking sum of $3.5 million on filmmakers since its founding in the early 1990s, a figure reportedly unsurpassed by other film festivals in North America. 

HIFF is an up-and-coming and progressive film festival that in recent years has sought to strengthen its programming and ally itself with progressive causes. This year, for instance, Heartland signed onto the 5050x2020 Parity Pledge guaranteeing that beginning in 2020 at least half of the festival lineup will be directed or co-directed by women. In this year’s edition, women directed or co-directed forty-three percent of festival offerings. 

Another major step HIFF has taken in recent years to upgrade programming is the inclusion of a selection of international Oscar contenders—a total of twenty fiction and non-fiction features in this year’s edition. This selection of films represented, in my opinion, the strongest program in the festival in aesthetic terms. The best of these features that I caught up with was Korean director/co-screenwriter Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which had captured the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. This narratively twisty and genre-bending film takes wing as black comedy and social satire only to darkly degenerate into horror as the household battle between upper class and lower class descends to the netherworld. The cash prize awarded for the best work in this program went to Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, a depiction of an aging filmmaker’s declining artistic powers in which frequent Almodóvar collaborator Antonio Banderas memorably plays, presumably, some version of the director’s alter ego. 

A highlight of this year’s programming, for this critic, was the sociopolitically urgent documentary feature For Sama, which was co-directed by the twenty-something Syrian Waad al-Kateab and the British Edward Watts. This film, an audience favorite, swept two important awards: the Grand Prize for Best Documentary Feature and the Richard D. Propes Social Impact Documentary Award. Co-director Watts attended the festival; and, in an informative question and answer session, clarified that, after personally shooting for five years on location in rebel-held, besieged Aleppo during the Syrian conflict, the anti-Assad filmmaker al-Kateab then arrived safely in London and handed over 500 hours of actuality video footage that she had shot, handheld, frequently at great personal risk. According to Watts, it took two years to shape this material into a ninety-six-minute documentary feature with a riveting storyline: the trials and tribulations of al-Kateab—a recently married young woman, a new mother, and a noncombatant—in an extremely dangerous and ever shifting war zone. I would venture to guess that seldom in the history of cinema has the female civilian experience of war been captured with the degree of intensity and urgency that is routine in For Sama. 

The twenty-eighth edition of Heartland showcased approximately two hundred features in different competitive and noncompetitive programs. Many of these films had already been circulating on the international festival circuit, though a respectable number of U. S. and world premieres were included. Space limitations allow me to allude only briefly to a few of these prize- winning works.

U. S. independent cinema stood front and center in festival programming. In the American narrative feature competition of directorial debuts, Matt Ratner proved a two-time winner with Standing Up, Falling Down, which captured the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize as well as the Humor and Humanity Award. In this poignant homecoming comedy, Ratner shows a sure hand directing his actors as he explores the unusual relationship between an aging, lonely, eccentric, alcoholic, but nevertheless engaging dermatologist (Billy Crystal) and a millennial stand-up comedian (Ben Schwartz), who must now shake off his aimlessness and recalibrate his life in bedrock America after failing to achieve success in the Los Angeles comedy scene. 

One of the finest American documentary features on offer was writer/director/editor Julie Sokolow’s Barefoot: The Mark Baumer Story, which played as a world premiere. The thirty-three year old Baumer, a passionately—and boisterously—committed environmental activist, political gadfly, avant-garde writer, and plant-based vegan, hiked barefoot one hundred days across America to draw attention to global warming and related issues before tragically and almost inevitably being run over and killed by—what else?—an errant SUV. Baumer was a nonstop social-media diarist, and Sokolow has skillfully edited his self-recorded videos—and additional material—into a moving portrait that deservedly captured the Best Documentary Premiere Prize. 

The festival’s lucrative Jimmy Stewart Legacy Award went to screenwriter-director Brett Fallentine’s documentary feature Fire on the Hill, which examines the decades-old traditions of the riding culture and the public horse stables located on “The Hill” in South Central Los Angeles. Fallentine follows the life trajectories of three contemporary inner-city cowboys—all African-Americans—who, inspired by the alluring lifestyles associated with The Hill, have used the stables as a rodeo training ground or simply as a peaceful retreat to escape the poverty and gang violence plaguing much of Compton and South Central Los Angeles. Fallentine and three of the film’s subjects attended the festival to enthusiastic public acclaim—perhaps due in part to the director’s folksy public rhetoric, including his story about discovering the subject matter of his documentary when travelling around L. A. and by chance coming upon a trail of horse shit that, intrigued, he then followed to its source, The Hill. 

HIFF offered archival screenings of classic films celebrating significant anniversaries: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, celebrating sixty years; John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, a half century; and the Indiana town-vs.-gown comedy Breaking Away, forty years. Movie celebrities graced the festival, such as famed British cineaste Michael Apted, who appeared on stage to accept a lifetime achievement award. In addition, his latest feature, 63 Up—the ninth installment in his renowned Up documentary series—screened out of competition. The Indianapolis-born star Brendan Fraser, a Canadian-U. S. citizen, attended the festival to much fanfare; and several of his most important films were screened, such as Gods and Monsters (1998). Scheduling complications prevented me from attending an alluring special event: Cultural Journey: Germany, offered up eight new features from that country including the U. S. premiere of writer/director Nora Fingscheidt’s controversial social drama System Crasher, which garnered the Best Narrative Premiere Prize. 

While in recent years HIFF has sought to expand its international offerings, it has nevertheless not abandoned its “Back Home Again in Indiana” mission. The competitive Indiana Spotlight selection showcased eight films “with ties to the Hoosier state.” This year’s slate ranged from the conventional made-for-TV documentary The Revolutionist: Eugene V. Debs (co-directors Kim Jacobs and Kyle Travers)—a recounting of the life of the great Indiana born-and-bred socialist—to the creatively ambitious but narratively entangled epic thriller Whelm (director/writer Skyler Lawson), which is partially inspired by the imagined exploits of the baddest Hoosier bank robber, John Dillinger, who generated blood-stained headlines during the Great Depression. 

This critic wishes HIFF all the best in its renewed efforts to bring the crème de la crème of transformative Hoosier, national, and international filmmaking to audiences in the Crossroads of America. And, speaking of crossroads, may the mayor of Indianapolis urgently see to the installation of sidewalks, crosswalks, and warning lights at the forbidding, hugely multilane intersection separating the festival’s principal hotel from its principal screening venue—so that next year’s festival-going pedestrians may better avoid an untimely end and live to see another movie.

For more information on the Heartland International Film Festival, visit here.

Dennis West is a Cineaste contributing editor.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1