Marah Strauch and Bryce Leavitt’s SPACE COWBOY opens, Doug Pray’s LOUDER THAN GUNS is the Centerpiece selection, and Dawn Porter’s LUTHER: NEVER TOO MUCH gets the closing slot Steve James will receive the HSDFF Brent Renaud Career Achievement Award, and Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault will be the recipients of this year’s Impact Award.
The critically acclaimed Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival presented by Oaklawn announced the lineup of films and honorees for its 33rd edition, taking place October 18-26. Screenings will kick off at Oaklawn’s Event Center with the Opening Night presentation of Marah Strauch and Bryce Leavitt’s Space
Cowboy, followed by the world premiere of Centerpiece Selection, Doug Pray’s Louder Than Guns, and Dawn Porter’s Luther: Never Too Much screening on Closing Night.
Special presentations include the world premiere of Yoruba Richen and Brad Lichtenstein’s American Coup: Wilmington 1898; a 10 th Anniversary Retrospective Screening of Reel South Shorts; Ivan MacDonald, Ivy MacDonald, and Daniel Glick’s Bring Them Home, which launches the festival’s new Native/Indigenous Film Section; Sam Green In Process, in which acclaimed documentary filmmaker Sam Green, known for his innovative “live” documentaries, presents material from his latest project, Trees; a special 30 for 30 15 th Anniversary Panel celebrating the 15 th Anniversary of ESPN’s groundbreaking 30 for 30 documentary series; and HSDFF’s new salute to the art of the mockumentary and docudramas featuring Charles B. Pierce’s classic 1972 horror docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek. Following Opening Night at Oaklawn, all screenings will take place at The Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa before returning to Oaklawn for Closing Night.
Steve James will receive the HSDFF Brent Renaud Career Achievement Award, and Maisi Crow and Abbie Perrault will be the recipients of this year’s Impact Award.
In addition, the festival is following up on the successful launch last year of the HSDFF Filmmaker Forum, a filmmaker/ industry conference and convening, sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with an expanded edition to be held Oct. 20 – 22. The Forum, a major new annual convening of filmmakers and industry leaders from throughout the South and mid-South regions and from across the U.S., offers dynamic programming focused on the business, art and craft of documentary storytelling with a focus on public media, and a wider lens on the nonfiction ecosystem as a whole.
Other key events include a work in progress presentation by filmmaker Nathan Willis and Arkansas PBS featuring excerpts from a new film directed by Willis. The film documents the commissioning of new statues for the U.S. Capitol commemorating Arkansas heroes Johnny Cash and Daisy Bates. Also, timed with current events, is Politics on Film Day, which spotlights four documentaries about presidential elections and their repercussions.
A new festival partnership with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the National Park Service will bring CB’s Mobile Art Lab to Hot Springs on October 26 for a free, interactive art event. Another free HSDFF event is a special presentation by researcher Hollis Duncan on “The Arlington Hotel: Birth and Rebirth, 1864 – 1924,” presented with the Garland County Historical Society and Garland County Library.
In addition, the festival is partnering with Low Key Arts, a Hot Springs-based arts organization, on its highly successful Inception to Projection (I2P) program, a hands-on filmmaking program. HSDFF is excited to host the world premieres of six new films recently completed as part of I2P’s 8-week summer documentary filmmaking workshop.
Finally, HSDFF reprises last year’s highly popular Secret Screening by featuring a special new film from Japan.
HSDFF Executive Director, Ken Jacobson, said, “In our 33 rd year, we continue to celebrate the vibrant art of documentary, while also spotlighting the creative process itself by highlighting two exciting works in progress and the screening of new shorts from our Documentary Filmmaking Workshop. We are also honored, for the second year in in a row, to be the host of the Filmmaker Forum, a three-day filmmaker and industry conference focused on supporting filmmakers in the South and Mid-South region, generously supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as Reel South and PBS.
Jacobson continued, “In addition to our extraordinary Opening, Closing and Centerpiece films, all of which will have guests attending, we are also thrilled to honor one of the true documentary filmmaking stalwarts of our time, Steve James as our Career Achievement Award recipient. For this year’s Impact Award, we couldn’t be more pleased to honor two filmmakers, Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault, whose new documentary Zurawski v Texas is strikingly urgent, dealing with one of the critical issues being discussed during this election season. Finally, we break new ground for a documentary-focused film festival by looking at the art of the mockumentary and docudrama, via an Arkansas classic, The Legend of Boggy Creek.”
THE GALAS AND SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
Marah Strauch, and Bryce Leavitt’s Space Cowboy will start this year’s edition of HSDFF on Friday, October 18 with their thrilling look at the life of legendary skydiver and cinematographer Joe Jennings. Directors Marah Strauch and Bryce Leavitt, along with the film’s main protagonist Joe Jennings, will be present for the Opening Night Gala. This year’s Centerpiece selection, taking place Tuesday, October 22, is Doug Pray’s Louder Than Guns. The film follows Ketch Secor, founding member of the bluegrass band Old Crow Medicine Show, and radio journalist David Greene as they seek to bring people together to have an open conversation about gun violence in America following a 2023 mass school shooting in Secor’s home community of Nashville. Director Doug Pray, producer Ashley York, and the film’s main participants, Ketch Secor and radio journalist David Greene, will attend the screening. Dawn Porter’s Luther:
Never Too Much will close HSDFF on Saturday, October 26 with her highly engaging film about the legendary Grammy-winning superstar with a one-of-kind voice, Luther Vandross. Porter will attend the screening.
Making its world premiere at HSDFF, Yoruba Richen and Brad Lichtenstein’s extraordinary American Coup: Wilmington 1898 illuminates one of the most shocking incidents of white supremacy in American history in which an organized mob of white men in Wilmington, North Carolina terrorized the city’s black community and overthrew the city’s elected government causing reverberations for generations to come. Filmmakers Richen and Lichtenstein will attend along with two of the film’s main participants.
There will be a Special Presentation of Ivan MacDonald, Ivy MacDonald, and Daniel Glick’s gorgeous and poignant Bring Them Home, which follows the Blackfeet Nation’s preparations to reintroduce bison to their ancestral lands for the first time in a century. Director Ivy MacDonald will be present for the screening. Other Special Presentations include a retrospective screening and panel discussion of Robert Drew’s Crisis: Behind A Presidential Commitment (1963) held in conjunction with the Clinton Presidential Center’s current exhibit, “Commanding the Screen: The American Presidency in Film and Television,”
In celebration of its new ongoing series, “It’s All Real: A Salute to Mockumentaries, Docudramas and Other Not Quite Documentaries,” HSDFF will present a special retrospective screening of Arkansas indie filmmaker Charles B. Pierce’s classic 1972 horror docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek. A massive success at the time, the movie still retains its haunting grip on our collective imagination. Charles Pierce’s daughter Pamula Pierce, whose tireless efforts have led to a stunning restoration of the film, will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.
HSDFF HONOREES
Steve James will be on hand on Tuesday, October 22nd to participate in an on-stage conversation and clips reel, and to receive this year’s Brent Renaud Career Achievement Award. Director of 1994’s Hoop Dreams, considered by many to be the greatest documentary of all-time, acclaimed filmmaker Steve James has created an unparalleled body of work which also includes the Sundance award winner, Stevie; The Interrupters, which won an Emmy®, and Independent Spirit Award; Emmy® winner Life Itself; and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, which earned James a second Academy Award® nomination. James’ award-winning ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Luckiest Guy in the World was selected by IndieWire as one of the best documentaries of 2023.
The HSDFF Impact Award will be presented to Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault. The presentation will take place, along with a screening of their film Zurawski v Texas, on Saturday, October 19th. The film reveals the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s reversal by presenting the stories of women who faced life-threatening crises due to Texas’ harsh abortion laws. Director Abbie Perrault and Amanda Zurawski, one of the film’s main participants, will attend the screening.
Maisie Crow is a documentary filmmaker and photojournalist based in Texas. Her films have aired on HBO and Showtime. Her current film, Zurawski v Texas, which she directed and produced with Abbie Perrault, premiered at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. She previously directed and produced the 2021 documentary At the Ready. In 2018, her documentary, Jackson, received a News and Documentary Emmy award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary. In 2022, she was part of This American Life’s reporting team on the Peabody-winning episode “The Pink House at the Center of the World”.
Abbie Perrault is a Chicago-based, independent documentary filmmaker and journalist. Along with Crow, she directed and produced the 2024 documentary Zurawski v Texas, and previously produced the documentary At The Ready, impact produced the Emmy-award winning documentary Jackson, and has associate produced short documentaries for The Intercept.
ADDITIONAL FILM HIGHLIGHTS
Additional highlights among the impressive film lineup include a special Politics on Film Day featuring four extraordinary films: Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics, which finds the filmmaker revisiting the volatile, complex terrain of Brazilian presidential politics following her 2019 Academy Award-nominated masterpiece The Edge of Democracy. Matt Tyrnauer’s Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid focuses on political consultant James Carville, long
heralded as a strategic genius for masterminding Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign. The Last Republican about Representative Adam Kinzinger, who was a rising star in the Republican party, until his conscience got the better of him following the events of January 6 th , directed by Steve Pink, known for a decidedly not-documentary film, the comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. The fourth film is the 1963 cinema verité classic Crisis: Behind a
Presidential Commitment.
Shari & Lamb Chop celebrates the beloved ventriloquist and her famous partner-in-crime, who captivated audiences for five decades. Amy Nicholson’s Happy Campers is a joyful profile of a vibrant Virginian beachside community savoring their last summer together before their beloved trailer park is closed for redevelopment. Bridget Besaw and Par Parekh’s Rooted follows Germaine Jackson who transforms a vacant city lot in a food desert into a thriving urban farm.
As gentrification and outside pressures mount, she fights to keep the community’s vital source of fresh food operating. Nesa Azimi’s Driver follows Desiree Wood, who, after losing everything, reinvents herself as a long-haul truck driver and starts to advocate for fair conditions in a male-dominated field.