150 Films, Six Venues, and a Festival That Started on a Farm
Nashville is a music town that has quietly been running a film festival since Richard Nixon's first year in office. The 57th edition arrives September 24 through 30, and the lineup is now out.
What's playing
Nearly 150 films from around the world are on the schedule, spread across a run of venues that reads like a tour of the city's arts infrastructure: the Belcourt Theatre in Hillsboro Village, the National Museum of African American Music downtown, Regal Green Hills, Soho House and Hooky Entertainment, among others.
A few titles worth circling. Mike Leigh — the British director who has spent fifty years making films about ordinary people in kitchens and hallways — brings Tender Loving Care. A Talent for Murder, a meta-thriller starring Helen Mirren and Alden Ehrenreich, lands as one of the festival's bigger-name draws. Clean Hands, a drama about the drug crisis, comes from Nashville-based writer-director Jake Allyn, which makes it one of the hometown entries.
And then there is Songs From the Circle, getting its North American premiere here. The film follows the Grand Ole Opry's international debut at London's Royal Albert Hall — a Nashville institution playing a British one, screened back in Nashville. If a festival ever had a made-to-order opening-week story, that is it.
Tickets
VIP badges and ticket packages went on presale August 12. General public tickets open August 14. Anyone who has tried to walk up to a Belcourt screening during festival week knows the arithmetic: the marquee titles go first, and the small rooms go fastest.
🎟 See festival screenings and ticket details on our events calendar »
J3 Media may earn a commission from links on this page.
The part most people don't know
The festival did not begin in Nashville, and it did not begin in a theater. In 1969 a woman named Mary Jane Coleman started an independent film gathering on her farm in East Tennessee and named it after the creek that ran through the property: Sinking Creek. The idea was small and slightly utopian — show unglamorous independent work to a community of people sitting together, and see what happens.
What happened is that it outlasted nearly everything else. Coleman eventually moved the festival onto the Vanderbilt campus, where it spent years as a summertime fixture. It became the Nashville Independent Film Festival in 1998 and dropped “Independent” in 2003. Along the way it became the longest-running film festival in the American South and one of the oldest in the country.
It also has a habit of catching people early. Ken Burns screened work at Sinking Creek long before The Civil War made him a household name. So did John Lasseter, years ahead of Toy Story. Nobody in those rooms knew what they were watching at the time, which is more or less the whole argument for going to a festival instead of waiting for the streaming release.
Why it matters this year
Nashville's screen economy is not a side note anymore. Production has followed the music business here, the city has an entertainment office actively courting it, and a growing number of the films in this lineup were made by people who live within a short drive of the theaters showing them.
Nearly 150 films in seven days is more than any one person can see. That is the correct amount. Pick four, book them before the weekend, and let the rest of the week surprise you.
Planning a visit around it? See our month-by-month guide to the best time to visit Nashville.
