Kansas City Underground’s free film festival offers weird, profound, silly, and scary movies for all
Courtesy Kansas City Underground Film Festival
The fourteen-strong programming team at the Kansas City Underground Film Festival spent 214 hours watching 463 features, shorts and documentaries for this year’s event. From Sept. 11-19, you’ll be able to check out the fruits of their (and several talented filmmakers’) labor.
“The big thing we focus on is the idea of vision. We want to know that the thing we’re seeing was made by someone who had a point of view and they’re trying to get that across,” the festival’s co-founder, Willy Evans, says. “We want to show movies that aren’t copying a certain kind of other movie. You have an idea you’re trying to communicate, and this art form is the thing that does that for you.”
For the last six years, KCUFF has gathered surprising, profound, funny, frightening and experimental low-budget films from filmmakers around the globe and presented them for free to Kansas City audiences at the Charlotte Street Foundation. For Evans and the all-volunteer team, it’s a labor of love.
“I think we get better at it every year. We’ve formed more connections, we’ve met lots of people, and had people referred to us by other filmmakers,” he says. “That alone makes the program better because we have cool people who know other cool people and they tell each other about us.”
This year’s slate has something for everyone, from mumblecore comedies to genre-defying documentaries, and bizarre short films to ambitious three-hour cinematic journeys.
“There’s no hard set rules to any of it,” Evans says. “We’re not trying to shut anyone out.”
Courtesy Kansas City Underground Film Festival
One centerpiece of this year’s KCUFF lineup is Hunky Jesus, a documentary about San Francisco’s Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBTQ activist group whose members dress in drag as nuns and throw an annual Easter party for the public featuring the titular “Hunky Jesus” pageant. The Kansas City chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will be in attendance at the screening on Saturday, Sept. 19.
Another doc highlight: True/False film festival hit Tropical Park, an experimental documentary about two siblings — a recently-out trans woman and her conservative brother — meeting for the first time in years. “Tropical Park is gonna be an absolute banger,” Evans asserts. “That one’s a slam dunk home run movie.”
If you prefer your fiction-nonfiction hybrid movies in a horror flavor, there’s Foreign Objects, a fictional ghost story about a missing woman that uses Super 8 home movies, daytime TV and interviews to tell its tale. “It reminds me of the work that was part of this big horror moment of the YouTube generation of filmmakers (like Obsession’s Curry Barker and The Backrooms’ Kane Parsons), but tied to actual found footage and analog horror,” Evans says. “It’s just a really really creative movie that’s finding a unique, engaging and heart pounding way to tell this very simple story.”
Courtesy Kansas City Underground Film Festival
Another highlight is Toronto Apartment, an absurd comedy recommended for fans of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, about a hapless unemployed guy who covers rent by leasing his apartment by the hour to various community groups, artists, and randos. The short film Life’s a Mitch feels like a mashup of Casper Kelly’s viral classic Too Many Cooks and Steven Kostanski’s cult hit Psycho Goreman. The latter is part of KCUFF’s late-night showcase on Sept. 12. “It’s one of the best blocks,” Evans says. “The first Saturday of the fest at 9:30 is where we put all our weirdest stuff.”
For the truly adventurous, Evans recommends We Are Inside. At three hours long, the documentary about a woman who returns to Lebanon to care for her aging father and finds camaraderie with his poetry group, is the longest film at the fest.
“It’s one of the most profound cinematic experiences I think I’ve had all year,” Evans says. “We know there’s a niche audience that will have an exceptional experience with this and will walk away transformed, even if it’s not going to be a big audience. We’re happy with that tradeoff.”
Overall, Evans says, he encourages potential audiences to push their boundaries, pick a programming block and give it a try.
After all, the whole thing is totally free.
“I think the word ‘underground’ might scare some people, like maybe they think we’ll do some kind of audience participation of Sleep No More haunted house thing. But really all you do is just come and sit in a chair,” Evans says. “You may not like it, and that’s ok! But you’ll probably have a nice time and want to come back.”
The Kansas City Underground Film Festival runs Sept. 11-19 at the Charlotte Street Foundation, at 3333 Wyoming St. You can check out this year’s program and reserve tickets online.
Courtesy Kansas City Underground Film Festival
