Film Fest Knox 2026

Set in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2002, Mouse is “at once a coming-of-age story and a film about grief with emotional depths as vast as its scope is modest,” writes Keith Phipps at the Reveal. Mouse “has an almost miraculous ability to lace what might otherwise be unbearably sad scenes with humor. It’s hard to feel overwhelmed with heaviness, no matter how serious the moment, after a cut to a smiling kid tap-dancing to ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’ Yet for all the care put into the script and direction via an understated but strong visual sense and careful pacing, this is an actors’ film with two extraordinary performances” from Kupferer and Sophie Okonedo, who plays Callie’s mother.

This year’s Film Fest Knox kicks off tomorrow evening with its Elev8or Pitch Live Competition, inviting prospective teams to deliver a one-minute pitch for a feature and an eight-minute proof-of-concept short. Over the following four days, there will be workshops, parties, and screenings in four main strands: Currents, a selection of highlights from the year’s top festivals; Made in Tennessee, a showcase of local work, including Paula Kay Hornick’s debut feature, My Mayfly; Revival, featuring recent restorations and rediscoveries; and the festival’s centerpiece, the American Regional Cinema Competition, a five-film program spotlighting work being made outside of Los Angeles and New York.

On Saturday evening, the festival will present its James Agee Prize to Tim Blake Nelson, who has three films in the program. Adapting his own play for his first feature as a director, Eye of God (1997), Nelson cast Martha Plimpton as a waitress who marries a man she knows only through the letters they’ve been exchanging. He’s a prisoner who swears he’s found religion. “The premise of Eye of God would’ve made one hell of a B picture in the 1940s,” suggest programmers Darren Hughes and Paul Harrill, “a rough-hewn potboiler starring Robert Mitchum and Gene Tierney, maybe. But in the hands of Tim Blake Nelson, the material is more Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams than Fritz Lang or Billy Wilder.”

When Nelson’s latest feature, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, premiered in Toronto, the Los Angeles Times’ Joshua Rothkopf called it a “triple-tragic prison movie, which deserves to find the uncompromising audience that can roll with its turns.” Amanda Seyfried stars as Karen, who teaches creative writing at a maximum security prison, and Scoot McNairy plays Wilson, a student who’s falling for her. To reveal what makes Wilson Shedd an unexpectedly timely film would be to spoil the movie, but if you can take it, the Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon recently spoke with Nelson about a recent nightmarish incident: “I was not surprised by what happened,” said Nelson, “and I did not feel vindicated.”

Nelson produced and stars in The Leader as Marshall Applewhite, who, with Bonnie Lu Nettles (Vera Farmiga), cofounded Heaven’s Gate, the quasi-religious sect whose thirty-nine members committed collective suicide in 1997. “The Leader, as a dramatic experience, is creepy as hell,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, “but as written and directed by Michael Gallagher, it’s also authentic and sharply told, and it’s inquiring about the right things—namely, why would people descend to this, and what, if anything, does it have to say about us?” This is “a fright film of the soul, or of what’s left of it once you give yourself over to an ‘ideal’ of life that’s really a form of death.”

Between the Lines: Films by Nicolás Pereda, a series running at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London through December 17, will wrap with the UK premiere of Everything Else Is Noise, which screens in Knoxville on Sunday. Three women, all of them cellists, gather in an apartment where one of them will be interviewed by a two-person documentary crew. It will not go smoothly.

“Clashes between culture, craft, perception, and ego are the film’s droll MO,” writes Alexander Mooney for Reverse Shot. “Pereda frames a fleeting farce, and its cramped locale, in widescreen, his figures spread through horizontal space and left with a dearth of literal and figurative headroom. Within this narrow aperture, they have little room to think or breathe. Far less conceptually and tonally constricted than his previous efforts, however, Everything Else Is Noise flits through its seventy-one minutes with ease, insight, and low-key humor.”