The Maryland Film Festival is unpretentious in manner, young in years – it started operations in 1999 – and short in duration, lasting just five days. Yet it deserves attention and applause for several reasons.
I admit to a certain prejudice in its favor, since the event is held in Baltimore, a city with an interesting film culture – think Barry Levinson, John Waters, Matthew Porterfield, David Simon – and most of the screening venues are a few minutes' walk from where I live. Looking beyond my own interests, though, the festival is admirable in many respects. To begin with, there's no question about its interest in artistically challenging filmmakers on the order of Tsai Ming-liang, whose early feature Rebels of the Neon God (1992) and visually superb Stray Dogs (2013) energized recent programs, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has been represented by his masterpiece Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) as well as Syndromes and a Century (2006) and the intriguing Cemetery of Splendor (2015), a high point of the 2016 festival.
Another merit is the annual pleasure of seeing the Alloy Orchestra accompany a silent feature – in 2016 it was Marcel L'Herbier's almost-great fantasy L'Inhumaine (1924), also available on a Flicker Alley Blu-ray with both the Alloy music and an alternative score – and of finding out what Waters, the city's most visible cinematic luminary, has chosen to show in the time slot reserved for him each year. John's selections have ranged from the edgy (Lodge Kerrigan's 1995 Clean, Shaven) to the odd (Joseph Losey's 1968 Boom!) to the topical (Paul Greengrass's 2006 United 93) to the mediocre (Patric Chiha's 2009 Domain) to the ordinary, which is where I place his most recent choice, Terence Davies's 2011 The Deep Blue Sea, an unmemorable drama from a generally fine filmmaker. But who's complaining? Waters's eclecticism is perhaps his most engaging trait.
A broader reason for my interest in the MFF is its honorable place in the community of regional film festivals, the modestly scaled, idiosyncratically programmed events that make up in unpredictability and bravado what they lack in the ability to lay hands on top-shelf productions being snapped up by larger, richer festivals. Making the most of its five-day time span, the MFF shows around fifty features and seventy-five shorts each year, many framed by filmmaker introductions and Q&A sessions. Some screenings are attended by mere handfuls of people (see Tsai and Weerasethakul, above), but these are central to the festival experience for that very reason.
MFF director Jed Dietz has made short films into a trademark, programming lots of them in thematically arranged groups; while I don't share his enthusiasm for presenting shorts rather than a well-chosen feature in the important opening-night slot, this is the kind of unorthodox programming that would make a high-profile festival very nervous. I have a lot of loyalty to the New York Film Festival, where I served on the selection committee for a long time, but the MFF regularly gets away with choices more experimental than much of what we did at Lincoln Center in my day.
A few years ago my critical colleague Richard Brody made his first visit to the MFF and promptly told his New Yorker readers that during his stay, “the center of cinematic gravity…shifted from wherever you'd usually look for it (Hollywood, New York, Paris) to Baltimore,” where the spotlight was aimed at “independent filmmakers whose aesthetic displays as much independence of thought as do their mode of production and…their attitude toward the cinema itself.” In sum, Brody wrote, the MFF gave evidence that “something new and extreme is afoot in the American movie scene.” Brody now travels south each year at festival time, and while his dispatches obviously focus on the MFF itself, they attest the worthiness of regional festivals in general.
My esteem for the MFF obviously doesn't apply to all of the films it shows. Selections that disappointed me this year included Ben Wheatley's oddly flat adaptation of J.G. Ballard's oddly flat 1975 novel High-Rise (2015), and Anna Biller's candy-colored supernatural whimsy The Love Witch (2016), although I ran into plenty of argument from admirers of the latter. I wish there were more intellectual heft in David Feige's Untouchable (2016), a documentary look at the paranoia and irrationality that make American sex-offender laws such a counterproductive, opportunistic mess, and there's a tad too much whimsy in Penny Lane's Nuts! (2016), which chronicles the life and times of an American dreamer who used a bizarre remedy for impotence as an entryway into medicine, politics, and radio.
But there were also great pleasures in the 2016 program. Amy Geller and Allie Humenuk's documentary The Guys Next Door (2016) generates terrific charm with its depiction of two married gay men and the close female friend who gave birth to their children. Sherng-Lee Huang and Livia Ungur's marvelously uncategorizable Hotel Dallas (2016) pairs an account of Romania's reception of the original Dallas television soap (CBS, 1978–91) with quasi-surrealist takes on capitalism, materialism, and related topics.
How Heavy This Hammer (2015), a Canadian drama written and directed by Kazik Radwanski, presents an original and uncompromising portrait of an exceedingly unhappy family man, and qualifies as a quintessential MFF picture, with few other festival appearances to its credit apart from the crowded Toronto and Berlin events. Anna Rose Holmer's remarkable The Fits (2015), an enigmatic study of an African-American girl caught in circumstances at once commonplace and outlandish, is another strikingly imaginative work. And very special mention goes to the last film of Chantal Akerman's illustrious career, the richly emotional documentary No Home Movie (2015), an examination of life, love, and family centered on Akerman's aging mother.
I don't claim that the Maryland Film Festival is the best regional festival of them all, but I do assert that the MFF and similar events are essential to the health of present-day cinema. It is a truism that independent filmmaking plays a crucial role in contemporary culture, and independent festival programming is a vital part of that activity. Just as patronizing independent bookstores has become a habit with many independent-minded readers, attending local film festivals should be regular practice for those who care about the wellbeing of the moving-image arts.