Indie Memphis Film Festival on 'pause' in 2025: Everything we know about why & what's next
John Beifuss- The Indie Memphis Film Festival will not take place in 2025.
- The festival has faced increasing instability, similar to other arts organizations, amid funding pressure and a changing cultural environment.
- The organization aims to find creative solutions and explore new strategies to support filmmakers, sponsors and audiences in the future.
In what organizers describe as a "pause" rather than a conclusion, the Indie Memphis Film Festival will not take place in 2025.
"This is something that we absolutely were trying not to do," said Kimel Fryer, Indie Memphis executive director. "This is the first time that we have paused."
Fryer said the halt of this year's festival along with the cessation of programming for 2025 in general was necessary, to enable the financially struggling arts nonprofit to "strategically realign," to build support and "come back stronger in the future."
The move comes at a time of increasing instability for arts organizations, which are facing funding pressure from Washington on down amid a cultural environment that seems increasingly hostile to efforts to encourage "an intersectional and racially equitable" arts community, in the words of the Indie Memphis mission statement.
Last year, in a similar cost-cutting move, Indie Memphis scaled back the 2024 festival, eliminating days and venues. The truncated fest was a success but the organization nonetheless has been operating on a deficit, with much of its roughly $500,000 annual budget provided by grants, sponsorships and other donations.
In 2023, expenses topped revenue in by $273,305, according to that year's tax statement, even though that year's festival attracted 10,704 ticket-holders and netted a record $54,226 in ticket sales.
Indie Memphis announced the news Friday morning in a post on Facebook.
"Indie Memphis is pausing all programming, including our annual film festival, as we explore strategies to support our mission and long-term sustainability," the post stated.
"I think every festival across the nation is facing similar challenges, unless they have a really big endowment," said Fryer, citing the recent decision by the Sundance Film Festival to relocate to Boulder, Colorado, after almost a half-century in Utah. "We have to find ways to be creative."
Indie Memphis is "not necessarily going to look the way it has in the past,” said board president Kenn Gibbs, manager of software engineering at Memphis-based Green Mountain, a supply-chain logistics company. "We're working on strategies right now."
Tracing its origins to a student-led mini-festival in 1998, Indie Memphis evolved through the years from a cultural footnote into a major organization with robust programming and a days-longwinter festival that was a highlight of the local arts calendar.
Notable filmmakers who attended the festival included Jim Jarmusch, Whit Stillman, John Sayles, Boots Riley, Abel Ferrara, comic actor Chris Elliott and Memphis directors Craig Brewer and Ira Sachs. Sean Baker, who this year won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, for "Anora," was the opening-night guest at the 2021 festival with "Red Rocket," his last movie before "Anora."
Meanwhile, the festival emphasized the work of local, or "Hometowner," filmmakers, typically programming shorts and features by young talents who hoped to follow in the successful footsteps of Brewer and Sachs.
The organization also provided grants and hosted fellowships to encourage beginning filmmakers. For example, writer-director Raven Jackson wrote her acclaimed debut feature, "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," which The New Yorker named one of the five best movies of 2023, after being selected in 2019 as the recipient of an Indie Memphis Black Filmmaker Residency for Screenwriting. Jackson was chosen for the residency by Barry Jenkins, Oscar-winning director of "Moonlight" and the current "Mufasa: The Lion King."
"We're not about to shut down," Fryer said. However, she said slashes to arts funding in Washington, the possible elimination of anticipated National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the echoes of such cuts on the state level contributed to an "uncertainty" that had been building since the pandemic, which seemed to accelerate a cultural devaluation of the filmgoing experience.
"We have been trying to find our footing since COVID," Fryer said.
Due to the precautions of the pandemic, the 2020 festival was a "virtual" event, with the exception of some outdoor screenings.
The 2021 festival was a hybrid of online and in-person screenings, but the number of available seats in each venue was reduced by half to conform with social-distancing protocols. In 2022, however, the festival returned to its regular schedule.
Fryer said the current financial "uncertainty" means the organization needs to prepare "long term rather than short term." To attempt to organize a 2025 festival would be counterproductive.
"We have to determine what is the best way to support our filmmakers, our sponsors, our audience," she said.