From the producers of Little Miss Sunshine, THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON is a modern Mark Twain style adventure that tells the story of Zak (Gottsagen), a young man with Down syndrome, who runs away from a residential nursing home to follow his dream of attending the professional wrestling school of his idol, The Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church). A strange turn of events pairs him on the road with Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), a small time outlaw on the run, who becomes Zak’s unlikely coach and ally. Together they wind through deltas, elude capture, drink whisky, find God, catch fish, and convince Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), a kind nursing home employee charged with Zak’s return, to join them on their journey. The Peanut Butter Falcon is a joyous and uplifting folk story that celebrates the friendship of three unexpectedly kindred spirits.

Screened as part of our Global Shorts Program, which begins at 11:45am. This screening will be followed by a video Q&A with the filmmakers!

In this award-winning short-animated documentary, which received an animation spotlight at Sundance 2019, Akiko Takakura, one of the last remaining survivors of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, tells her life story. In this visually and emotional stunning story, she describes how, amidst the terror and nightmares, she found a rare moment of closeness with her father.

Akiko Takakura is one of only 10 people within a radius of 500 meters from ground zero to have survived the atomic bomb blast. While her colleague and friend Satomi Usami died from burns and a broken back, Ms. Takakura survived the catastrophe by sheer luck. She remembers extraordinary details and is able to bring them to life in her stories. The scenes described in the script are based solely on her experiences. Today, Ms. Takakura is 92 years old and lives in Hiroshima with her family where she is under their care.

Script: Andre Hörmann
Directors: Andre Hörmann and Anna SAMO
Art and Animation: Anna SAMO
Music: Daniel Regenberg
Sound: Christoph de la Chevallerie
Producers: Andre Hörmann and Christian Vizi

Germany | 15 min | Japanese with English or German subtitles

Join us after the screening for a live interview with artist, musician, and filmmaker Lonnie Holley.

Acclaimed artist Lonnie Holley’s film I Snuck Off The Slave Ship premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2019. It was created with Cyrus Moussavi, Brittany Nugent and Matt Arnett, and features cameo appearances by gospel singer and pianist Theotis Taylor and the Edeliegba Senior Dance Ensemble. The film accompaniment of Holley’s song of the same name from the 2018 album MITH, was shot around his hometown in Atlanta, GA, and is the artist’s directorial debut. “Temporal talismans” guide Holley through the Black American experience — but his freedom quest always seems to get trapped in the same point of discontinuum: the 4th of July, birthdate of the self-replicating slave ship, ‘America’. Built from the scraps of his life and hard sci-fi alterna-realities, the short film is an assemblage of Holley’s encounters with the slave ship ‘America’ and a testament to imagination as resistance.

US | 20 min

Presented by Flatiron Writers Room: The process of adaptation almost always affects the original storyline whether it began its life as a book, a film, a magazine article, a podcast or a song. Join us for an enlightening discussion on the principles and best practices for maintaining a story’s roots while adapting it into a new format.

The musical pairing of a lifetime: Five-time Grammy winner Victor Wooten (Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, and a solo artist) joins bestselling author Daniel Levitin (“This Is Your Brain on Music”) to perform together a range of music, originals, and songs you may have heard before. They’ll also share stories about music, spirituality, creativity, and neuroscience.

Jocelyn Edelstein’s premiere, feature length documentary, celebrates the potent language of dance, friendship and perseverance. Believe the Beat is a tender rites of passage tale that follows a crew of Brazilian street dancers. As they take their dance from city park to global stage, an independent filmmaker discovers the challenge and promise of digital storytelling.

Believe the Beat was an official selection for the Hip Hop Film Festival (in New York), the Oregon Independent Film Festival, The Portland Film Festival, The Women’s Film Festival (In Philly), the Film Art Dance Film Festival (a national tour for high schools) and the Rio Hip Hop Festival. Believe the Beat was a finalist for Best Documentary at the Hip Hop Film Festival and Portland Film Festival and winner of Best Art Documentary at the Oregon Independent Film Festival.
Q&A after the screening with filmmaker Jocelyn Edelstein (Urban Body Project) and producer Zak Kilberg moderated by Amber Victoria.
US | 79 min | English & Portuguese (subtitled)

Our follow-up to 2018’s “Women in Media” panel, ELEVATE WOMEN moves the conversation about gender equality in the field forward into actionable best practices. Join this important discussion about all the myriad ways we can support women in the quest for equality, both in our communities and in our work.

Featuring Irene Romero, Alli Marshall, and Kate Maloney

Moderator: Nadia Salamanca

“Cutting-edge documentary … An exciting look at one such group of self-appointed fact finders … A John Le Carré spy movie” – Variety

Bellingcat – Truth In A Post-Truth Worldfollows the revolutionary rise of the “citizen investigative journalist” collective known as Bellingcat, a group of online researchers dedicated to exposing the truth of impenetrable news stories from around the world – from the MH17 disaster to the Syrian Civil War to the mysterious poisoning of a Russian spy in the United Kingdom. From his Leicester home, de facto leader Eliot and his team of truth-seekers put newspapers, networks and governments to the test.

Bellingcat uses cutting-edge digital techniques and crowdsourcing to create a faster, more innovative approach than traditional research journalism. For the first time, Bellingcat researchers in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the United States have given exclusive access to filmmaker Hans Pool, allowing him to follow the group on their path to demonstrate the power of open source investigation.

Bellingcat’s impact is examined through the lens of their current investigations, as well as the high-profile conflicts they’ve previously reported. In the three years since its inception, Bellingcat has produced a remarkable amount of breaking news while gaining a reputation for trailblazing journalism. When the International Criminal Court issued a landmark arrest warrant based on social media evidence, it was Bellingcat that proceeded to work on the case. Just last year, Dutch member Christiaan Triebert was awarded the European Press Prize for innovative journalism for his reporting on the failed Turkish coup.

In a web of propaganda disguised as truth, what drives Bellingcat forward? With governments growing less reliable by the day and traditional newspapers declining in both relevance and reach – how does Bellingcat, dismissed by some critics as an assortment of self-funded “armchair researchers”, have the ability to force powerful world leaders to the international courts where they are held accountable for their crimes? What does their success say about how our world has changed in the face of this century’s paradigm shifting developments in government, technology and social media?

Written, directed & Camera by Hans Pool
Producers: Femke Wolting, Bruno Felix
Executive Producer: Nick Fraser

The Netherlands | 88 min

Music has such a powerful impact on us in a myriad of ways; from acting as a universal language, to helping with memory loss to coping through hard times. This is a discussion about different ways to incorporate music to make our lives better.

Featuring Daniel Levitin, Shameika Rhymes, Ehren Cruz, Matt Arnes, and Jocelyn Edelstein

Moderated by Fred Bronson

Presented by Connect Beyond Festival and the Buncombe County Public Libraries.

Join movie producer Jason Lust (Peter Rabbit, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day) for a special story time event that celebrates the connection between literacy and reading to children, and explores the connection between books and movies! We’ll read from the book Peter Rabbit and also watch scenes from the movie. After that, Jason will share about his work, making books into movies.

After the reading, Jason will be joined by non-profit film education expert Ellen Steloff of the non-profit Rabbit Hole. They will be available to talk to both kids and adults about the power of sharing our stories, as a way to learn about other people’s lives.

We are pleased to present Sundance-winner Josh Tickell and Big Picture Ranch’s upcoming feature documentary, in this exclusive work-in-progress audience test screening for select area college students & Connect Beyond guests. Featuring Q&A with creative team*, an interactive social/political action experience hosted by SameSide, and live filming.

The Revolution Generationis a manifesto for today’s youth on the societal forces that have shaped and held back their generation, and how they can deploy their unique strengths to revolutionize systems that have exploited or failed them. Today half of the people on planet Earth are under the age of 35 – this is more people than were alive in 1950. Theirs is the most connected, educated and technologically savvy generation ever. Yet the hardships they face threaten to culminate in a perfect storm of economic, political and environmental crisis. This documentary explores the sweeping changes that lead to the world that young people are inheriting and paints a picture of how this generation is awakening to confront both the US political crisis and the global environmental crisis. The basis for the word “revolution” is the Latin word “revolutio,” which means “to turn around.” This is the film shows young viewers how to “turn their world around” for good.

*Attending the Q&A will be Josh Tickell (producer, co-director, and author of companion book), co-director Mikki Willis, producer Nadia Salamanca & EP Zak Kilberg. Moderator: Ashley Cooper.

Directed by Josh Tickell, Rebecca Harrell Tickell, and Mikki Willis
Produced by Rebecca Harrell Tickell, Josh Tickell, and Nadia Salamanca
Executive produced by Andrea Van Beuren & Zak Kilberg

US | 81 min

For his new book Wherever the Sound Takes You: Heroics and Heartbreak in Music Making, David Rowell set out on a long search to explore the essence of music’s meaning. Through portraits of a vast spectrum of players, he tries to understand their connection to their chosen instrument, what they’ve put themselves through for their music, and what they feel when they play. Rowell, a journalist at The Washington Post, was born and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina. For this reading, he will be accompanied by Bob Funck, a singer-songwriter in Durham, North Carolina who plays an eclectic brew of Americana folk-rock. His debut album, “Waiting for The Rain” came out in 2015, and he is the co-founder of NC Songsmiths, a collective of premiere songwriters from North Carolina. Rowell and Funck grew up together, and the final chapter of Whenever the Sound Takes You centers around Funck’s first solo tour.

Technology has afforded us the ability to connect people and mobilize more quickly than ever before. While more and more social and political movements have gone viral in a matter of hours or days, not all have had the level of success in achieving goals or maintaining longevity. This will be a discussion about some of the movements that have been successful and some that have not and ways to start your own revolution online.

Featuring Scott Goodstein, Jessica Villatoro, Joseph Hudak, and Shaye Moessner

Moderator: Sara Benoit

Don’t Get Trouble in Your Mind: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Story is a documentary portrait of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an African-American string band from Raleigh, North Carolina, and their mentor, fiddler Joe Thompson (1919—2012). The film captures how three musicians from the hip-hop generation embraced a 19th Century genre and took it to new heights, winning a Grammy in 2010. The story of the band’s meteoric rise, from busking on the street to playing major festivals is punctuated and informed by the history of the banjo’s origins in Africa, and the untold story of how blacks and whites collaborated to create the earliest forms of American popular music. Filmmaker John Whitehead followed the band from their coming together through their breakup, making for an emotionally satisfying journey as well as a spectacular musical one.

Join Filmmaker John Whitehead after the screening for an audience Q&A!

Featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson.

Directed and Produced by John Whitehead

US | 83 min

Award winning author, Tim Z. Hernandez, offers this engaging performance based on his book “All They Will Call You,” which chronicles his ongoing search for the lives and stories behind one of the most compelling protest songs of the 20th century, Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees), written by Woody Guthrie but made popular by Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, and countless others. On Jan 28, 1948, twenty-eight Mexican citizens were being deported from Oakland to the Mexican border, when the government-chartered plane crashed and killed everyone aboard, including the crew and immigration officer. Media, at the time, only published the names of the American crew but omitted the names of the Mexican passengers, referring to them only as “deportees.” Guthrie’s lyrics were an attempt to restore the dignity of those anonymous passengers, whose remains were buried in California’s largest unmarked mass grave—an injustice that was swept under the rug for seventy years, until now. Using the song’s lyrics as inspiration, and his own family’s background as farm laborers, Hernandez takes us on an engaging performance, blending storytelling, video/ audio recordings, and live music, where he recreates the incident and brings to life touching portraits of the people who perished in that fatal crash. Hernandez will also be joined by guest musician, Johnny Irion for this special presentation.

Calling all filmmakers! Outside of the industry hubs of LA and NYC, it can be difficult for budding filmmakers to learn about the business of making films. Connect Beyond Festival aims to bring industry resources — like this group of Producers — to our local community. In this open-ended Q&A discussion, you’ll have a chance to ask those burning questions about the film and television industry from a panel of knowledgeable and experienced experts, who all have strong track records in Producing narrative features, documentary, and television.

Misinformation; Stretching the truth; Alt facts; Distortion; Fabrication. It can be hard to distinguish fact from fiction in the onslaught of information we’re bombarded with everyday. We’ll talk about how to spot fake news, how to check your sources, and how marketing and advertising influences the information we receive daily.

Cat Fly is an Asheville-based, non-profit film festival that highlights and supports up-and-coming indie film artists.

Since 2017, we have cultivated a spirited & gender-inclusive collective of dedicated, homegrown filmmakers who span across the Southeast.

Cat Fly was created by filmmakers, for filmmakers to help connect and build a dynamic community of talented & passionate future collaborators. All the films we will have selected represent a spirited & gender-inclusive collective of dedicated, homegrown filmmakers from Asheville and the Southeast.

Film selections:

1. CRIMETIME – 5 mins

Three wannabe thieves practice robbing a bank.

Greenville, SC based, Gunner Willis is an actor/director with awards from any festival his mom attended. He’s trying his very best.

2. FAKE EMMA – 5 mins

“Fake Emma” follows a young artist mentally preparing for her gallery opening as she deals with her personified depression: a warped, controlling version of herself.

Asheville, NC based, Kira Bursky is a vagabonding storyteller with an insatiable hunger for magic.

3. SIDES – 5 mins

The story of two friends on opposite sides of the Civil War.

Trustfall Productions, Asheville, NC based.

4. HYPODONTIA – 2 mins

A young girl’s dental check up provides some interesting information.

Asheville, NC based, the ‘Horror Queen’ of AVL, Jennifer Trudrung runs Nightfrizz productions.

5. THAT SMELL – 11 mins

A young man with a passion for pleasant aromas is lured into the underground world of book sniffing.

Nashville, TN based, an Elevator Boxer Film.

6. THIS IS MY FAVORITE MURAL – 11 mins

An amateur German female filmmaker becomes infatuated with a tire shop mural.

Michael Arcos, raised in Miami, FL, began his film career editing on VHS and has been working in film and video for over a decade.

7. LADIES MOST DEJECT – 15 mins

A teenage girl from the Appalachian mountains struggles to protect her siblings from an addict mother.

Originally from Lynchburg, Virginia, Marty Elcan is a DGA director with over 25 years of production experience. Soundtrack by Rising Appalachia.

8. WHISTLE DOWN WIND – 14 mins

“Whistle Down Wind” takes place in a tiny mountain town in Western North Carolina. Our story centers two young women, Alex and Janie, who have been best friends since childhood but are now caught in a secret relationship.

Written and Directed by Andie Morgenlander, Julia Christgau, both based in Asheville, NC.

9. DONNY AND CLIVE – Two dimwitted criminals decide to rob a house.

Chris and Lowe McKee are brothers and award winning independent filmmakers originally from Western North Carolina.

Whistle Down Wind takes place in a tiny mountain town in Western North Carolina. Our story centers two young women, Alex and Janie, who have been best friends since childhood but are now caught in a secret relationship. Alex is cheating on her high-school sweetheart, and Janie is becoming increasingly restless with the intolerant nature of her hometown. Our film finds them at a crossroads, the boiling point of their complicated but beautiful relationship.

15 minutes

Directed By: Julia Christgau & Andie Morgenlander

Andie Morgenlander is an actor, writer and producer of both short and feature length narrative films. She has her Bachelor of Arts from Louisiana State University in theatre performance and is represented by JTA Talent Inc. Over the past 10 years, Andie has costume designed, produced and acted in a cosmic array of pieces ranging from one-act plays to independent feature films.

Andie co-wrote, executive produced and acted in the independent feature “Luke & Jo” which is currently on the festival circuit. It has played at Tryon International Film Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival, locally in North Carolina, and most recently won “Best Narrative Feature” at Full Bloom Film Festival.  Her award-winning short film “Polished” has shown at numerous film festivals including Longleaf and Cat Fly Film Festival. It recently won “Best Experimental Short” at the Austin Micro-Short Film festival and “Best Actress” at the Georgia Shorts Film Festival.

Clashing Viewpoints can often become a catalyst for an unexpected (and unifying) Third Option… If an effort is made to look deeper than the opposing sides of the debate. Join us for this discussion of how intense public debate can and has lead to things getting better for everybody, and how to utilize the tools of mediation and creativity to arrive at not just compromise, but a win-win situation.

Featuring Mikki Willis, Sol Tryon, Ben Rekhi, Virginia Prescott, and moderated by Charles Eisenstein

This Work-in-Progress short version of the upcoming feature-length documentary will be screened during the Clashing Viewpoints panel, presented by director Ben Rekhi and producer Sol Tryon.

Since the 2016 election, Americans have segregated themselves into two warring camps with views so hardline it makes civil discourse nearly impossible. Some are calling it a “soft civil war.” But there is a movement of people who are working tirelessly to bridge these divides. “The Reunited States” is a feature documentary that profiles people who are actively promoting depolarization and communication across the country. Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, has become an activist speaking out against the racial divide and the need for difficult conversations to acknowledge our differences. Greg Orman ran for governor of Kansas as an Independent in 2018, challenging people’s expectations about the need for a third political party to break partisan gridlock. Steven Olikara founded the Millennial Action Project with the belief that our founding fathers were in their 20s and 30s, so it’s up to younger generations to step up and evolve it now. These uniters persist in their journey because they believe it’s not only our duty to do so, but that the future of our democracy depends on it.

15 minutes

Directed by Ben Rekhi
Produced by Sol Tryon

PRESENTED BY OXFORD AMERICAN

A conversational concert hosted by Winston-Salem native and Grammy-nominated music historian, Jonathan Kirby. Having spent decades traversing the Old North State in search of records, relics, and stories relating to North Carolina’s decentralized music scene of yore, Kirby will take us on a time-machine tour of Western North Carolina’s outsider music scene, taking attendees on a journey from the points of discovery and into the present day via off-the-cuff conversations and live performances with a hand-picked ensemble of underground greats from the hills and hollers of Appalachia.

Bob Boilen, host of NPR All Songs Considered and NPR Tiny Desk Concert, will lead a fireside chat with Fantastic Negrito plus Ryan O’Keefe & Daniel Shearin (River Whyless). The live conversations, based on Boilen’s book “Your Song Changed My Life,” will provide an intimate look into the minds of these cutting-edge musicians plus acoustic performances.

North Carolina Premiere. Nominated for the Palme D’Or and winner of the Best Soundtrack/Composer Award at Cannes 2018, Leto (translation: The Summer) has enjoyed a wildly successful festival tour since then with much critical acclaim.

Leningrad, one summer in the early eighties. Smuggling LP’s by Lou Reed and David Bowie, the underground rock scene is boiling ahead of the Perestroika. Mike and his beautiful wife Natasha meet with young Viktor Tsoï. Together with friends, they will change the destiny of rock’n’roll in the Soviet Union.

Director Kirill Serebrennikov was unable to accept our invitation to join us at Connect Beyond Festival, due to his house arrest in Russia. He wrote this statement of intent in 2017, before shooting the film (the stipulations of his house arrest do not allow him to make any further declarations): “My goal is to make a film about people who are happy, who are enjoying total artistic freedom despite the government’s oppression. They were making music, and could not envision any other mode of creation. Anything else would have gone against their nature. I can easily identify with them, understand their motivations, the obstacles in their way … Despite these heavily politicised times, we are creating theatre that is modern, antiestablishment, that can be seen as a movement. And most importantly, this movement is alive. We are breathing life into a culture that is unacceptable to the powers-in-place, to our government’s cultural directives, in exactly the same way that Leningrad in 1983 was neither the time nor the place for rock culture in the USSR. I will make this film both for and about a generation who views freedom as a personal choice, and the only possible one. My goal is to capture and highlight the true value of this freedom.”

Directed by: Kirill Serebrennikov
Produced by: Ilya Stewart, Murad Osmann, Pavel Buria, Mikhail Finogenov
Starring Teo Yoo, Roma Zver, & Irina Starshenbaum
Screening sponsored by Gunpowder & Sky

Russia | 128 min | B&W with color | Russian with English subtitles

Presented in collaboration with Come Hear NC, a campaign of the NC Department of Natural & Cultural Resources

A blend of artists from North Carolina playing originals and artists from around the country paying tribute to NC musicians- Saturday night marquis event – in partnership with the NC Arts Council.

Featured artists include Amanda Anne Platt, Christopher Paul Stelling, Brie Capone, Julia Christgau, Rissi Palmer, Johnny Irion, Lonnie Holley, Josh Blake, Ryan O’Keefe and Daniel Shearin (River Whyless), Jamar Woods, Marisa Blake and an All-Star Asheville backing band.

Directed by David Bruckner (V/H/S, Southbound), THE RITUAL first premiered at TIFF 2018 before being picked up for distribution by Netflix and becoming an instant cult classic. The film was awarded the British Independent Film Award for Best Effects.

Featured #CBTP2018 Event: Intimate film screening of The Ritual featuring the film’s director David Bruckner and music composer Ben Lovett.

Based on the critically acclaimed book by Adam Nevill, a group of college friends reunite for a trip to the forest, but encounter a menacing presence in the woods that’s stalking them.

Directed by David Bruckner
Composer: Ben Lovett