Iowa City’s storytelling history shines in 3rd Refocus Film Festival

The program booklet for the third annual Refocus Film Festival opens with a question: “How did we get here?” For Andrew Sherburne, executive director of FilmScene, the answer dates back to the “slightly more innocent and optimistic days of February 2020.”

That’s when Sherburne and FilmScene’s programming team met with Iowa City author Rachel Yoder to share their dreams of launching a festival that combines literature with film. Their hope was to screen the feature film adaptation of Yoder’s debut novel Nightbitch, a sharp-toothed story of a stay-at-home mom who may be turning into a dog.

Now, over four years later, that festival — named Refocus — is in its third year, and Nightbitch has completed its long journey from page to screen.

‘Opening night, bitch’

This year’s Refocus Film Festival kicked off Oct. 17 at the Englert Theatre, where hundreds of festival-goers gathered for the opening night screening.

Sherburne greeted the packed house, welcoming attendees to the four-day festival alongside Ben Delgado, FilmScene’s programming director. The pair thanked the festival’s many partners and participating local artists before introducing the film.

“It’s opening night, bitch,” Delgado said, in a moment of pun-induced whimsy.

Blending comedy, horror and family drama, Nightbitch stars Oscar nominee Amy Adams as an artist-turned-mother-turned-canine. Adams’ feral transformation was met with rabid enthusiasm from festival attendees, who responded to the movie by howling at the humor, gasping at the grotesque and even tearing up during the more tender moments.

Following the screening, Yoder took the stage for a Q&A with Emily Yoshida, writer for the Emmy-winning series Shōgun. Yoshida, who grew up in Iowa City, asked Yoder about the experience of writing her first novel and adapting it into a major motion picture.

“I started having this incredibly surreal experience of producers wanting to talk about turning the book into a film, which had never crossed my mind for various reasons. One, that it was called Nightbitch. Two, that it was about a mom turning into a dog. Three, that it was pretty internal. It didn’t strike me as a very cinematic book. So that was happening during the pandemic,” Yoder said. “And then, pretty soon after that, Marielle Heller came on.”

Yoder went on to praise the artistry with which director Marielle Heller approached the project, as well as her past work directing other adaptations, including the Oscar-nominated films Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

“Never in my wildest dreams when I started writing the book eight years ago, a very lonely mom alone in my house with my toddler, did I ever imagine that I would be here eight years later,” Yoder said. “I wanted the book to kind of create a community of women — of creative women. That was sort of my pie-in-the-sky dream… And so that has been one of the greatest gifts, I think, of this whole experience — hearing from other moms, talking about parenting, talking about art, talking about the tensions between the two. So I’m just incredibly grateful.”

‘The conversation between book and film’

While FilmScene, Iowa City’s nonprofit cinema organization, hosted the bulk of the Refocus screenings and events at its two locations, several nearby venues also participated. These included Daydreams Comics and the Iowa City Public Library, which also played host to several events for the Iowa City Book Festival, held over the same week.

According to Sherburne, that festival overlap is by design.

“Our audience has grown year-over-year for the first three years that we’ve been here, and the book festival is also seeing growth in their audiences,” Sherburne said. “This festival is about the conversation between book and film — and page and screen — and the relationship between art forms, and so it’s a natural opportunity to have those conversations at the same time and hopefully get people thinking about this art in a different way.”

Promoted as a “celebration of the art of adaptation,” the Refocus Film Festival exclusively screens movies that are adapted from other source material, including — and especially — works of literature. Sherburne cited the rich literary history of Iowa City — home to the world-famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop — as a key ingredient in the festival’s success.

“Refocus Film Festival couldn’t live anywhere else. It’s here because this is a city of literature,” Sherburne said. “It’s a curious city. It’s an engaged community. And so, thanks to our audiences, thanks to the incredible artistic legacy of Iowa City, this festival is able to stand on the shoulders of all that’s come before it.”

From Mars to Murphy: a century-spanning lineup

The 2024 Refocus lineup featured more than two dozen adaptations, including several major studio releases making their Iowa debut. Among these were the highly anticipated Colson Whitehead adaptation Nickel Boys and the Irish drama Small Things Like These, which stars Cillian Murphy in the follow-up to his Oscar-winning performance in Oppenheimer.

There were also a number of classic films at this year’s festival, including recent restorations of the Oscar-winning political drama All the King’s Men and Orson Welles’ disorienting adaptation of The Trial, Franz Kafka’s classic novel about a nightmarish bureaucracy.

The festival even screened a 100-year-old movie, Aelita: Queen of Mars. The film, which was released in the Soviet Union in 1924, is regarded as one of the earliest feature-length science fiction films and is complete with expressionistic sets, bizarre costumes and a star-crossed romance between a Martian and an Earthling.

Accomplished guitarist and composer Marc Ribot performed a live score to accompany the film. Ribot originally composed the jangling, electronic soundtrack in the ‘90s, when he was inspired to take on the project after first seeing Aelita: Queen of Mars. According to Ribot, the film’s images “looked the way I already sounded.”

Ribot fielded several questions in a Q&A following the screening, where he discussed the art of scoring a film.

“In film scoring, in general — and including live film scoring — I want to disappear. I want people to think they’re seeing what they’re, in fact, hearing,” Ribot said. “So you have a very important role in determining the meaning of the film, and that’s what I’m focused on when I perform music.”

Talking movies

In addition to watching movies, festival-goers had plenty of opportunities to talk movies. Refocus hosted numerous artist conversations and panel discussions, as well as poetry readings, art installations and other events open to the public.

A special edition of Filmspotting was one such event. Adam Kempenaar, co-founder of the long-running movie podcast, recorded a live episode alongside guest host Marya E. Gates, film critic for RogerEbert.com.

Expanding on the theme of motherhood introduced in the opening night screening of Nightbitch, Kempenaar and Gates shared their top five movies featuring “moms going through it.” Their list of mothers in distress included both classic and contemporary films like Rosemary’s Baby and Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Gates also participated in a conversation with fellow film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose decades-long career at the Chicago Reader earned him international recognition as an advocate for lesser-known, alternative films.

The discussion, moderated by Little Village writer Ariana Martinez, explored the evolving nature of film criticism and the role film critics serve for moviegoers.

“I think movies can really help people emotionally. That’s sort of how I try to write, like how could this movie maybe touch you? How can it change your life? How can it teach you about something?” Gates said. “I don’t like the binary of ‘good or bad.’”

“Saying that a film is good or bad is, by itself, meaningless. In order for it to make sense, you have to say, ‘Good or bad for what? Good or bad for whom?’” Rosenbaum explained. “Film critics should not have either the first word or the last word about a film. Basically, what a film critic does, if she or he is good, is expand the options of a public discussion. It’s a public discussion that begins before the critic comes along and continues after the critic leaves.”

‘An essential weekend of cinema’

Attendance numbers climbed to roughly 4,000 for all festival programming this year, according to Sherburne. Many attendees travelled across the state, while others trekked to Iowa City from across the country. One such festival-goer was Sabrina Yoder, sister of Nightbitch author Rachel Yoder, who traveled from Ohio to attend Refocus for the first time.

Sabrina said she appreciated the “small and intimate” atmosphere that Refocus offers, as well as the mix of new and restored films.

“I’ve enjoyed seeing all the diversity of the films here,” Sabrina Yoder said. “It’s been a really enjoyable and fun weekend, between the weather and the people and just seeing all these new and interesting films that I would probably not get to see otherwise.”

Unlike the 2023 Refocus Film Festival, which closed with a ceremony honoring filmmaker Werner Herzog, no Cinema Savant award was presented this year. However, Sherburne revealed that FilmScene will announce a 2024 award recipient by the end of the year.

It’s just one of the many year-round initiatives that Sherburne and the FilmScene programming team have in store. For Sherburne, his goal is to continue to spotlight storytellers and uplift Iowa as a “cinema state.”

“I hope it’s becoming an essential weekend of cinema in this state. And I think that one thing that we’re trying to do, perhaps, which is a little bit new, is really strengthen the connections between the state of Iowa and the broader film industry,” Sherburne said. “There are so many people working in the film industry that have roots or connections to Iowa City specifically and to this state. And so we want to be able to revitalize that connection.”

Though the projectors are still warm from a weekend of non-stop cinema, the Refocus crew is already looking ahead to 2025.

“This year’s festival, the planning began the week after last year’s festival,” Sherburne said with a laugh. “So we’ve got a meeting on the books next Friday.”

Refocus Film Festival and FilmScene are sponsors of Iowa Public Radio.

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