With weekday time constraints out of the way, day three of the Savoy Lumière featured a packed schedule with four feature-length and 12 short films.
The first screening of the day, beginning at a relaxed 11 a.m., was a selection of animated short films and short films featuring kids. Highlights included “Autophagy,” an offbeat but beautifully haunting claymation short representing a town’s struggle as a waterborne disease slowly transforms its residents into octopuses, and “Calico,” about a young girl with vitiligo who frees a talking goldfish from her principal’s office.
Next, the festival showed “Free Leonard Peltier,” a documentary about the titular activist of the American Indian Movement, convicted and imprisoned for the 1975 shooting of two FBI agents. Peltier recently had his sentence commuted, and the documentary explores the full history of the incident, including the controversial and widely disputed trial.
After the documentary’s screening, viewers were treated to a brief clip from Peltier himself, speaking from his home on Turtle Mountain Reservation, North Dakota. Peltier specifically addressed movie theater audiences.
“I hope you enjoyed (the movie) as much as you can,” Peltier said. “I know it was pretty rough in some areas, but sometimes you have to shock the audience to be able to get them to act, and that was one of our intentions.”
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The third screening, accompanied by one of the festival’s characteristic director Q&As, was “The Premiere,” a film about a movie screening that goes horribly wrong. The popcorn machine breaks, the movie file won’t play properly and the screening is continually pushed back, leading to extensive audience complaints.
Luckily, no such incidents affected the screening at the Savoy 16, where audiences found the movie hilarious. However, according to director Jon Silver, other screenings were at times plagued by moments that paralleled the film.
“We had a screening last weekend where it was canceled because the projector broke,” Silver said, to laughs from the audience. “Nothing’s perfect, you know? It’s just very much life imitating art and art imitating life.”
The next film, “AJ Goes to the Dog Park,” imitated life in a way that was “unabashedly absurdist, whimsical, quirky, silly, and cartoonish,” according to its description in the program. Following an ordinary man named AJ as he tries to save his favorite dog park, the film is one continuous laugh, from purposefully low-budget special effects to the extremely serious delivery of very unserious moments.
“I’d been working in the animation industry for about a decade at that point, and I was just feeling a little restless,” said writer and director Toby Jones in a Zoom interview mirrored on the theater’s big screen. “Like, ‘Oh, I kind of want to make something without those guardrails, and make something just for ourselves.’ It doesn’t follow any … isn’t required to follow any conventional rules.”
“The Other People,” a suspense thriller, closed the night with a quiet 8:30 p.m. screening. The film tells the story of troubled 8-year-old girl Abby, her father and his new wife Rachel, who grapples with saving both her marriage and Abby as their home is plagued by evil.
The Savoy Lumière continues Sunday and Monday at the Savoy 16 + IMAX.
