It’s not often that a film festival and book festival join forces, but that is just the case in Iowa City where the Refocus Film Festival, which celebrates films adapted from other mediums, and the Iowa City Book Festival just wrapped. I was delighted to attend both as a guest this past week, where I got my fill of movies, books, art, music, conversation, sunshine, diner food, and so much more.
I had never been to Iowa before, but as a former Comp Lit major, I knew about the city’s mighty literary legacy. In 2008, Iowa City was named a UNESCO City of Literature, the third city overall to receive the designation and the first in the Americas. Along with the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, whose faculty and graduates have won a few dozen Pulitzer Prizes and has included eight U.S. Poet Laureates, the city is home to 11 literary presses, a myriad of bookstores including Prairie Lights, and the Center for the Book, which is dedicated to teaching bookmaking, preservation, and more. Walking around downtown, near the University of Iowa main campus, the city’s dedication to literature, and art in general, is deeply felt. Illustrated plaques with quotes from great books line the sidewalk, and murals depicting everything from literary scenes to woodland creatures to robots and cowboys are around every corner.
At the heart of this downtown is two fixtures: the Ped Mall and the Chauncey. The former includes small boutiques and eateries, as well as a pickleball court, a playground, a movie theater, and the Iowa City Public Library. Just down the street is the Chauncey, one of the most unique and successful mixed-use buildings I’ve ever seen. Somehow, it’s an outdoor park, movie theater, bowling alley, arcade, restaurant, coffee shop, art gallery, hotel, and office building. Yet it all feels organic, and during the festival, it became a true social hub, with festival goers and guests mingling throughout.
It’s at these two locations where the Refocus Film Film Festival holds most of its screenings in the movie theaters run by the Film Scene. Founded in 2013 with just one screen, the Film Scene is a nonprofit cinema that now maintains three screens in the Chauncey, three additional screens in the Ped Mall, and holds outdoor summer screenings next door at the Chauncey Swan Park. The cinema also collaborates with the Bijou Film Board, the University of Iowa’s nonprofit, student-run film organization which has screened independent, foreign, and classic cinema to students for free for over fifty years.
The idea for the Refocus Film Festival actually came about when “Nightbitch,” the debut novel of Iowa City local Rachel Yoder, was set to be adapted into a film in 2020. It took four years and the first two editions of the film festival for that original vision to come to fruition. A packed audience filled the Englert Theatre on opening night to see the film version of “Nightbitch,” directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams. In her rousing introduction, Yoder welcomed the crowd, saying, “The most magical thing in the world might be seeing all the nightbitches of Iowa City in one place. 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 years later with the entire pack in the house. We’re all here. We made it here together.” After the film ended, Yoder was joined by Iowa City native, former film critic, and current TV writer Emily Yoshida for a Q&A, where the two discussed the project’s many Iowa City-centric easter eggs.
One of the most enlightening parts of their discussion centered on the artwork of local artist Lee Running, whose intricate sculptures are made from the bones and sinews of deceased animals. A series of Running’s sculptures, made from deer bones, tanned deer hide, gold leaf, cast iron, and more, were on display in the atrium of the Chauncey throughout the festival, as were replicas of the paintings featured in the film. In fact, integrating local artists into the program is a big part of what makes the Refocus Film Festival so unique. Before each of the festival’s 30+ films and events, there are live performances by local musicians, slideshows of local artwork, and even short experimental films. Each artist is compensated for their work by the festival, but Venmo donations were also encouraged. Among my favorite acts that I saw were the experimental videos of Sandra Dyas, local rockers Silver Alexander (Marc Falk and Seth Petchers), and bowling-shirt-clad jazz duo Saul Lubraroff and Andy Parrott.
Throughout the four days I attended the festival, I watched fifteen films in total, although four were re-watched. Seeing “Nightbitch” with Yoder’s hometown crowd was a wonderful experience, especially with the “raw meat” sugar cookies that were offered at the afterparty. A second watch of RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” adapted from the novel by Colson Whitehead, has affirmed that film as one of the year’s best films. I could feel the audience holding their breath during the film’s final moments – ten seconds of silence over a pitch-black screen. I also rewatched Brazilian director Catapreta’s “Dona Beatriz Ñsîmba Vita,” a surreal animated reinterpretation of the life of a 17th-century Congolese heroine, which I first saw at Sundance, and Leos Carax’s exemplary filmic essay “C’est pas moi,” which premiered at Cannes. They were part of an inventive shorts block that also included Adebukola Bodunrin’s “We Are Not Alone,” an atmospheric two-hander about isolation and the power of connection that was adapted from a short comic, and Nehal Vyas’s “Amma ki katha,” which remixes Indian myth and history in a poetic, yet funky lo-fi manner.
The festival’s goal is to highlight adaptations from various sources, not just written works. This can be seen in films like Daisuke Miyazaki’s “Plastic,” adapted from a concept album. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make any screenings of that film. Still, I felt this same ethos in Kamal Aljafari’s “A Fidai Film,” which uses found footage of Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, sometimes recreating photographs and film footage from the archive of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, most of which was seized by the IDF in 1982. For a people whose culture is often on the brink of being destroyed in every manner possible, Aljafari’s film is an experimental reclamation of culture and time and life itself.
Other highlights of the festival for me were “Small Things Like These,” in which Cillian Murphy continues to prove himself one of the most vulnerable and emotive actors of his generation. I also really loved the sapphic double feature program of Tomás Paula Marques’s “Dildotectónica” and Matías Piñeiro’s “You Burn Me,” both of which find inspiration in the historical women who pushed against the constraints society puts on women’s pleasure. They paired nicely with one of the festival’s retrospective offerings: Janus’ new 4K restoration of Catherine Breillat’s controversial debut feature film “A Real Young Girl,” which she adapted from her own semi-autobiographical novel. In their introduction, Bijou Film Board programming director Ben Romero described the film as some “secret third thing” between art and pornography. Breillat’s film is as funny as it is transgressive while being painfully honest about the many pleasures – and perils – of female adolescence.
In addition to the festival’s many film options, they also hosted book signings, author-led discussions, coffee klatches, and more, many of which are held in collaboration with the Iowa City Book Festival. I had a blast joining podcaster and University of Iowa professor Adam Kempenaar for an episode of Filmspotting Live, where we got emotional discussing our top five “Moms Going Through It” movies, a topic inspired by the opening night film. You’ll be able to listen to the whole episode closer to when Heller’s film opens later this year, but for now, I’ll share that I may have cried in public as the clip I chose from “Everything Everywhere All at Once” ended.
The next day, I joined self-described cult writer Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Iowa City Senior Center for a talk moderated by Ariana Martinez, a writer for the city’s alt-weekly Little Village. One shocking revelation for me came when Rosenbaum shared that two different university press publishers turned down his most recent book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader, before Hat and Beard Press came to the rescue. Along with Martinez’s insight queries, I also particularly enjoyed a question from the audience about whether we ever look back at an old review and want to revise it. I regularly revisit movies and often reconsider what I think of them as I age, but I’ve never gone back and changed a review (you can’t really do that with YouTube reviews, where so many of my early ones live). It made me think of A.O. Scott’s assertion that, “the job of the critic is to be wrong.” In response to another question, Rosenbaum shared another view that I agree with: “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.”
What I will take away from my four days at the Refocus Film Festival and Iowa City Book Festival is the sense of community that both festivals, as well as the Film Scene and Bijou, have fostered in the city. What I learned in my conversation with festival goers and the staff alike is that Iowa City is a place whose citizenry lives for art in all its forms. Thankfully, they live in a city that nurtures both its artists and the places where art meets everyday life. Over the long weekend I felt nourished, body and soul.