Indie Memphis Film Festival: Here are 22 things to do at the 22nd annual event

Last year, the Indie Memphis Film Festival turned 21.

That was a significant number. Twenty-one represents an official recognition of adulthood. It's something to celebrate.

Does that mean the 22nd annual Indie Memphis Film Festival —  which begins Wednesday and continues through Nov. 4 (or Nov. 7, if you include the three days of festival encores) — is less of a milestone?

Not according to spiritually centered New Age numerologists and interpreters of "angel numbers," who have dubbed 22 the "Master Builder Number" — a number that, according to one website, "provides the power to achieve almost impossible things."

Sounds like a good omen for a festival that celebrates the power of art. It also sounds like a peg for our own exercise in numbering: a list of 22 things to see or do during this year's 22nd Indie Memphis festival.

Actually, this list could be twice, three times or four times as long. So take it as a guide, and then explore on your own. But you can't go wrong with any of these 22. 

WEDNESDAY

1. The festival's status as a singular showcase for work by women of color begins on Day One with an opening-night movie that also is the event's highest-profile film: "Harriet," from actress ("School Daze," "Candyman") turned director ("Eve's Bayou") Kasi Lemmons. Screening at 6:30 p.m. at a new festival venue, the Crosstown Theater, the film is a biographical drama that stars Cynthia Erivo as slave-turned- freedom fighter Harriet Tubman.

2. The future of Memphis filmmaking will be on display when "Harriet" is followed at 9:30 p.m. at the Crosstown Theater by — in what has become an opening-night tradition — the week's first installment of shorts in the "Hometowner Narrative Shorts Competition," featuring six new films ranging from nine to 23 minutes in length. After this, look for anything with "Hometowner" in the title or description to see what local artists are doing with moving pictures.

THURSDAY 

3. Even without a calendar you might intuit from the Indie Memphis lineup that Thursday is Halloween. At 4:30 p.m. at the Hattiloo Theatre, director Xavier Burgin hosts the local screening debut of his Shudder network documentary "Horror Noire," which examines the history of black participation in the horror genre — a history that reached an apex of sorts in 1972 with "Blacula" (6:30 p.m., Playhouse on the Square), starring William Marshall as an African prince transformed into a vampire by Count Dracula, who is revealed to be a metaphorical as well as literal bloodsucker: He's a slave trader. Next up is "In Fabric" (9 p.m., Playhouse) from art-horror auteur Peter Strickland ("Berberian Sound Studio"), in which a London woman (Marianne-Jean Baptiste) is possessed by a blood-red dress.

FRIDAY

4. Directors Isabelle Dupuis and Tim Geraghty will be on hand for their film "The Unicorn" (10:40 a.m., Studio on the Square), a documentary about "psychedelic" outsider musician Peter Grudzien, credited with recording the first openly gay country album, in 1974.

5. A swansong of a cinematic memoir from an elfin genius whose generous spirit and deceptively casual mastery make the work of many of her male contemporaries seem vain, grandiose and anxious, "Varda by Agnès" (3:40 p.m., Studio on the Square) is the final film from France's Agnès Varda, who died March 29 at the age of 90.

6. If the vampire movie "Only Lovers Left Alive" is Jim Jarmusch looking in a mirror, its six-years-later complement, the zombie movie "The Dead Don't Die," is Jarmusch looking out a window — and not exactly liking what he sees. At least that's my interpretation, but Jarmusch will get to speak for himself when — in a major coup for the festival — he makes his Indie Memphis debut while screening his most recent feature, "The Dead Don't Die" (6:20 p.m., Playhouse on the Square), which numbers Adam Driver, Bill Murray, Selena Gomez and Tom Waits among its cast of living and undead.

The movie will be followed by a public conversation between Jarmusch and The New Yorker's Richard Brody, one of the country's most perceptive and independent-minded film critics. The Jarmuschian proximity continues with a revival of the director's haunted and haunting "Mystery Train" (6:30 p.m. Saturday, Playhouse on the Square), which 30 years after its debut remains probably the greatest feature film ever shot in Memphis — an outsider's love letter to a beautifully decaying Downtown that is as magical as an environment in a Miyazaki film (one attendant spirit, Rufus Thomas, even speaks Japanese). Jarmusch will introduce the movie.

7. With "Atlantics" (6:30 p.m., Hattiloo), Mati Diop became the first black female director to have a film in competition for the Cannes Film Festival's highest prize, the Palme d'Or. A supernatural romance set in a suburb of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, this is one of the most acclaimed films on the schedule.

8. Indie Memphis this year is saluting vanguard New York independent filmmaker Sara Driver, who will be in town for a chronological survey of all four of her feature films, from 1981's "You Are Not I" (7 p.m., Studio on the Square) to the new documentary, "Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat" (1:30 p.m. Sunday, Studio on the Square). Driver will attend the screenings; she also has chosen two favorite films from the past for Indie Memphis to screen, the horror masterpieces "Cat People" (1942; 11 a.m. Saturday, Studio on the Square) and, from Japan, "Kuroneko" (1968; 11:40 p.m. Saturday, Studio on the Square). The bad news is that "You Are Not I" puts her in direct time-slot competition with her longtime professional and personal partner, Jim Jarmusch. (In fact, Driver appears in "The Dead Don't Die"  as "Female Coffee Zombie.")

9. In another new Indie Memphis tradition, Cooper between Union and Overton Square will be blocked to traffic and converted to a "block party" for the weekend. A highlight will be an 8:30 p.m. release party for the album "Stuntarious IV," a showcase for artists on the Unapologetic record label founded by music maestro IMAKEMADBEATS. Performers set to appear include C Major, Cameron Bethany and PreauXX.

10. Seven years after their collaboration on the harrowing "Very Extremely Dangerous," Irish director Paul Duane and Memphis producer Robert Gordon (who will be in attendance) have re-teamed for "Best Before Death" (9:30 p.m., Studio on the Square), a documentary that follows ex-pop star Bill Drummond as he travels the world and confounds the locals with his particular brand of free public performance art (for example, he bakes cakes to give away to strangers who live within a circle he's drawn on a map). What does he do it for? That is the question.

11. "Brett Kavanaugh Is Ruining My Sex Life." That's the title of one of the 10 weird, experimental and even scary short films compiled for this year's block of "After Dark Shorts" (11:50 p.m., TheatreWorks).

SATURDAY

12. "It's one of the best movies you will ever see. It will save your soul." A friend recently shared this opinion of "Say Amen, Somebody," which she saw during its original theatrical run in 1983, before the gospel music documentary essentially disappeared for decades before being restored recently by Milestone Films, with support from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. To make this 1 p.m. show at Playhouse on the Square especially memorable, the movie will be accompanied by a performance by Memphis' Sensational Barnes Brothers, whose recent album, "Nobody's Fault But My Own," represents deep soul gospel at its finest.

13. Meticulously constructed from previously unseen footage, the concert documentary "Memphis '69" (2 p.m., Ballet Memphis) — which screened earlier this year at a packed Crosstown Theater — chronicles the 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival at the Overton Park Shell; among the late greats who take the stage are Rufus Thomas, John D. Loudermilk and a cackling Furry Lewis.

14. Few movies have arrived at Indie Memphis with as much festival buzz and as many critical hosannas as Céline Sciamma's 19th-century romance "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" (3:30 p.m., Playhouse on the Square).

SUNDAY 

15. Memphis filmmaker and author Jamey Hatley is among those who will participate in a panel discussion on "Black Speculative Fiction on Film" (1:30 p.m., Circuit Playhouse); the panelists will examine the uses and appeal of science fiction, fantasy and Afro-Futurism in everything from music (Sun Ra) to the Marvel Cinematic Universe ("Black Panther"). Several other "Indie Talks" are scheduled for the weekend, most of which will match thoughtful film critics and filmmakers (Hunter Harris, K. Austin Collins and Mike Ryan, to name a few) with provocative topics ("Class Diversity" and "Lust" among them).

16. Will Penny Hardaway be in attendance? That's unclear, but he'll be on the screen for sure when Indie Memphis revives "Blue Chips" (4 p.m., Studio on the Square), a 1994 basketball drama with Hardaway, Shaquille O'Neal and Nick Nolte (as the coach), directed by William ("The Exorcist") Friedkin.

17. Memphis-born filmmaker Ira Sachs returns to host the local debut of his latest feature, "Frankie" (4:15 p.m., Playhouse on the Square), which finds Isabelle Huppert heading an all-star ensemble (Brendan Gleeson, Marisa Tomei, Greg Kinnear) in a multi-generational drama set in fairy tale-lovely Portugal. Expect a generous post-movie question-and-answer session.

18. Building on the focus on cinematography that festival programmer Miriam Bale initiated last year (guests included Ashley Connor, shooter of "Madeline's Madeline," and longtime Barry Jenkins collaborator James Laxton), Indie Memphis this year is hosting Sean Price Williams, a New York-based director of photography whose filmography includes such significant indie work as "Good Time," "Thirst Street" and "Christmas, Again" (starring former Memphian Kentucker Audley), all of which can be seen during the fest. Williams is scheduled to attend the screenings of his films, and at 5:30 p.m. he'll be in Circuit Playhouse for a public talk with critic Nick Pinkerton.

19. Lil Buck, the internationally recognized master of the uniquely Memphis street-born style of terpsichorean self-expression known as "jookin," will host the Bluff City debut of "Lil Buck: Real Swan" (7 p.m., Playhouse on the Square), a documentary that examines the dancer's elevation from hometown phenom to global celebrity.

20. Brad Ellis and Allen C. Gardner have been making movies together since they were teens at Houston High School in Germantown, and though Gardner now lives in Los Angeles, they're still at it: "Cold Feet" (7 p.m., Studio on the Square) is a horror-comedy about buddies who face snipers outside and ghosts inside when they rent the wrong house for a bachelor party. The co-directors will host the screening.

21. Music Video Party! - 9 p.m., Black Lodge, 405 N. Cooper. Expect videos from Impala, Sweet Knives, NOTS, the late John Kilzer and many, many more. As featured artist Al Kapone would say: "Oh boy!"

MOVIES:Black Lodge is back: Famed Memphis movie rental store reopens

MONDAY

22. Directed by Indie Memphis veteran Destin Daniel Cretton — whose earlier film "Short Term 12" was presented at the festival in 2013 by one of its stars, the now uber-hot and oh-so-cool Lakeith Stanfield — "Just Mercy" (7 p.m., Paradiso) is a fact-based legal drama that stars Michael B. Jordan as a lawyer who defends a black man (Jamie Foxx) accused of murdering a white woman.

And don't forget that Tuesday through Thursday will offer encores nightly, as such films as "Mystery Train," "Best Before Death" and "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" are repeated at the Malco Powerhouse and Ridgeway theaters.

Tickets to most screenings are $10 each. Festival passes range from $100 to $250. For advance tickets and more information, visit indiememphis.com. The festival's presenting sponsor is Duncan-Williams Inc.