By Jillian Manning It’s back: After a two-year pandemic hiatus, the Traverse City Film Festival returns to northern Michigan July 26 through July 31. While much remains the same about the festival we know and love, change is also in the air. A New Face We talked to TCFF’s new festival director, Johanna Evans, as she was driving through Canada en route to Traverse City for her month-long stay Up North. (And we were sure to offer up recommendations for our favorite pizza joints and gave our sagest advice on summertime traffic.) Evans is a film veteran, with experience as the film programming and operations manager for the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College; as an analyst working with Disney to dive into the metadata of their film catalog; and as a sales associate with Eventive, helping festivals, cinemas, and art centers in the virtual world. It was in the latter that she made her Traverse City connection. “I had a sales meeting with Michael [Moore],” she recalls. “I was trying to try to pitch him on [Eventive] software. He was
trying to think about whether they were going to do some more virtual programming, maybe do a movie night. And based on that meeting alone, six months later, he called me up and asked me if I wanted to run the festival. It was not exactly April 1, but it was very close. So there was a little part of me that thought, ‘Is this an April Fool’s joke?’” Although TCFF is new to Evans, she sees strong parallels between the festival and the program she headed up at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth. “I had 10 years of running a program that had a very similar ethos to Traverse City Film Fest. Our tagline for our program at the Hopkins was ‘Great Movies Every Weekend.’ So coming to TCFF with ‘Just Great Movies,’ I felt really at home here,” she says. But planning the 2022 event has not been without its challenges. Movie theaters and film festivals have been slow to return to their pre-pandemic attendance numbers, a reality that forced the TCFF team to be “extremely cautious” with their budgeting this year. Unlike other festivals, TCFF doesn’t sell passes months in advance, but instead relies heavily on single-ticket sales, compounding the challenge of predicting just how many people will be in seats this week. Evans says
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that attendance is “kind of a question mark” until the week or two immediately preceding the event. “We are reading the tea leaves about how other festivals are doing,” Evans explains. “Even though our local audience is showing great enthusiasm, the numbers across the country for festivals are showing that attendance is about half of what it was in 2019.” A New Format Working under the assumption of audience numbers being cut in half, the TCFF team also halved the usual slate of films from its usual 100+ to slightly more than 40. “We’ve scaled down the festival proportionately with what we’re seeing with other festivals around the country. There’s also fewer films to choose from, because not as many were made in the pandemic. So we really felt strongly about just showing the best of the best selection of these masterpieces from the pandemic era that never got seen on the big screen,” Evans says. If you haven’t already gotten your tickets, here are some of the top recommendations: Evans’ first pick is TCFF’s opening night feature, The American Dream and Other
Fairy Tales. “It’s a documentary made by Abigail Disney examining her family’s company and then expanding from there to comment on late-stage capitalism more broadly. What I like about the film is that it really addresses this sense of cognitive dissonance that we all collectively have about the American dream,” Evans says. Next up is God’s Country, starring Thandiwe Newton as a Black professor dealing with two hunters trespassing on her land. Evans calls the film a “slow burn, character-driven thriller” that tackles issues around race and gun control. Last but not least on her list is First Cow, a film she saw at the Telluride Film Festival back in 2019. “I have been striving ever since to get to share it with another audience,” she says. “It’s a wonderful, different portrait of masculinity about these two fur trappers who figure out that they can actually make more money by selling donuts.” Long-time volunteer and Milliken Auditorium venue manager Miles Kennedy seconds the First Cow pick and also adds Nosferatu (a silent film about vampires celebrating its 100th anniversary and paired with live musical accompaniment) and The Professor and the Madman, which stars Mel
