This year’s Over-the-Rhine Film Festival (March 6-8) features several major art/indie films you wouldn’t be surprised to see at a higher-profile international festival. Like Sundance, for instance.
This upgrade represents an evolution for the event, which was once known as the Cincinnati ReelAbilities Film Festival because it was focused on films primarily about people with disabilities and their challenges. Some might have considered that a “niche festival.”
The OTR Film Festival succeeded ReelAbilities in 2018. Both have been managed by LADD, the Cincinnati nonprofit that, according to its website, “provides the dignity of adulthood through housing, health and wellness, day programs, employment and advocacy.” This year’s festival has 33 total “blocks,” separate events that can be a single feature film, a package of shorts, or special events. The festival took 2024 off as it transitioned from a fall event to a spring event.
Since the first OTRFF, and especially since tt stern-enzi became artistic director for the pandemic-affected 2020 installment, there’s been a careful broadening of offerings. For instance, this year’s festival presents Dahomey, (March 8 at the Contemporary Arts Center), a mysteriously spiritual account of a Paris museum’s return of artwork to its homeland in Benin. Once a West African kingdom, Dahomey became a French colony from 1894 to 1960 until the nation’s name was changed to Benin.
Director Mati Diop’s documentary is so in touch with the significance of the repatriation of precious art that she even lets the ancient artwork talk about how it feels making such a historic move. The film premiered at 2024’s Berlin International Film Festival and won the top prize, the Golden Bear. Sight and Sound, the British magazine that lists the 50 best films of each year, placed Dahomey at No. 4. The OTR Film Festival is giving the film its first theatrical screening in Cincinnati.
And then there is Westermann: Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea (3 p.m. March 8 at the CAC) about the sculptor H.C. Westermann, who’d been influenced by his time as a U.S. Marine during World War II and the brutal Korean War. He also painted. While not well-known by the general public (he fits the term “an artist’s artist”), he is collected by top museums and has had such admirers in the art/architecture worlds as Ed Ruscha and Frank Gehry. In this 2024 documentary by Leslie Buchbinder, Ed Harris reads from the artist’s letters.
There are also a couple of buzzy films of widespread general interest. One is Copa 71, a British documentary about the dramatic 1971 women’s soccer World Cup in Mexico that premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Besides its thrilling sports story, the film also looks at how soccer has benefited from the growth of women’s professional sports over the past few decades. It’s getting what appears to be its first Cincinnati theatrical screening at Over-the-Rhine’s Union Hall on March 8.
King of Them All: The Story of (Cincinnati’s) King Records, which local filmmaker Yemi Oyediran has been working on for several years, is being screened March 7 at Woodward Theater. Big things are hoped for this film, especially since there have been efforts for decades now to turn the old record company’s Evanston home into some kind of museum or memorial.
The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) made it one of the first recipients of its Open Call for Emerging Filmmakers. Besides money, “Projects receiving PBS funding will be eligible for distribution across select PBS platforms (linear or digital), which will be determined at PBS’s discretion,” according to the system’s website. This presentation will have a concert-like atmosphere: After the 72-minute film has been screened, there will be a King Records Dance Party with DJ April Reign at the Woodward. While all festival screenings allow people to pay on a sliding scale, the festival has set a requested price of $15 for the film and $25 for the party.
The festival’s opening night film festivities, which begin at 5:30 p.m. March 6 at Music Hall’s Ballroom, feature Color Book, a new film about a father and his son who has Down syndrome traveling across metropolitan Atlanta to see their first baseball game since their wife/mother died.
To stern-enzi, this festival—all Cincinnati film festivals, really—can benefit from pursuing ambitious programming to grow. “I don’t think we see ourselves as just being a niche festival, in large part because when LADD decided to break from ReelAbilities they learned they were already reaching the people they supported, the disability community,” he explains. “We were hitting the biggest sweet spot we can, but how can we move beyond that?”
The answer, he believes, was to find a way to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion in programming. In short, the OTR Film Festival shouldn’t offer films just about people with disabilities, which are important, but also ones about other marginalized groups with different social and cultural backgrounds.
So, stern-enzi says, he’s also “looking at the LGBTQ community and different faith groups, trying to make sure they have the opportunity to share their multitude of stories. It just made sense we can have a festival that finds ways to bring all these voices and groups together to celebrate, and if you do that you’re not really a niche festival anymore. You have been able to combine groups and in some ways maybe help to define a new normal or new mainstream and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Get more information on the film festival blocks and buy tickets here.
It’s Academy Awards Time
The 97th Academy Awards occur on Sunday, March 2, starting at 7 p.m. It’s been an exceeding strong year in terms of quality; I’ve seen eight of the 10 Best Picture nominees, and they all have sizeable strengths. (I haven’t yet seen Wicked or The Substance.) The other Best Picture nominees are Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part xx, Emilia Perez, I’m Still Here, and Nickel Boys.
In a way, what’s happened to the Oscars in recent years mirrors the imaginative changes that have helped revive Major League Baseball. Both, faced with declining interest and falling credibility as a legitimate national entertainment, have embraced changes to boost excitement by improving quality.
For the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, that’s meant increasing its number of members, broadening and diversifying membership, and boosting awareness of several categories via playoff-like “short lists.” Those lists incrementally (and publicly) narrow down nominees in 10 categories, including Documentary Feature, Original Score, International Feature, and Short Films. This seems to have prompted Academy voters to pay more attention to such “secondary” categories, resulting in better (and better-distributed) nominee films. And that’s increased public interest in them.
For instance, in the Brazilian movie I’m Still Here, Fernanda Torres plays a woman whose husband has been kidnapped by agents of a right-wing government in the 1970s. (It’s based on a true story.) The film, an art house hit, has been nominated not only in the International Feature category but also for Best Picture. And Torres is up for Best Actress!
How long before all the categories will go through short-list runoffs?
Of the best picture nominees, I liked The Brutalist best. See all the nominees here.
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