The New/Next Film Festival is here to stay

It’s Thursday night in Baltimore, and a crowd is making a beeline from The Charles Theatre to the New/Next Film Festival’s opening night party across the street at Metro Baltimore. In contrast to the quiet autumn chill outside, the gaggle of directors, actors, and local film enthusiasts standing shoulder to shoulder in the sweaty venue are catching up like long-lost friends as DJ Amy Reid spins an electronic dance soundtrack to the evening. 

A palpable excitement runs through the packed venue, the current of emotional electricity that permeates a room when everyone’s just watched an excellent movie. They’re all talking about “OBEX,” the first screening of a festival lineup that includes full-length features, long and short-form documentaries, and even a screening of the beautifully absurd 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie “Commando,” introduced by comedian Stavros Halkias. Taking over The Charles for a four-day weekend, this year’s New/Next Film Festival kicked off on Oct. 2 and ran through the evening of Oct. 5.

Presented by Baltimore Public Media and organized by film programmer Eric Allen Hatch and WTMD’s Sam Sessa, the first New/Next Film Festival in 2023 was an uncertain experiment. 

The Maryland Film Festival was on hiatus that year, which inspired an idea from Baltimore musician Dan Deacon. What if Sessa, who organizes events like WTMD’s First Thursday Festival concerts, organized a film festival? Deacon suggested that Hatch, former film programmer for the Maryland Film Festival and co-owner of Beyond Video, could handle programming for the event.

“And that’s how the partnership works,” Sessa recalled.

The inaugural festival drew roughly 3,000 attendees and, just over two years later, New/Next is here to stay. Organizers announced Thursday that the festival will return next year. “I can tell you that every year, it has gotten bigger and more complicated,” Sessa said in a phone call on Oct. 3.“And every year, I go into it thinking it’s going to be easy, and every year it somehow gets a little bit more complicated.” 

“OBEX,” directed and co-written by Baltimore local Albert Birney, is the kind of unusual film that’s right at home at New/Next. The feature is a lo-fi horror-fantasy-adventure ’80s piece that follows lanky loner Conor Marsh (Birney) as he enters an otherworldly computer game to rescue his adorable dog Sandy (played by Birney’s dog, Dorothy, who wore a tuxedo to the New/Next premiere on Oct. 2) from the clutches of an evil demon. Imagine if David Lynch was coerced into directing an adaptation of “The Legend of Zelda” instead of “Dune,” and you’re halfway there. While the trippy visuals of “OBEX,” (like dreamy sequences of an Oldsmobile cruising down a pitch-black highway or a cathedral full of sinister cicada-men) are striking and often invitingly eerie, Birney’s film is grounded early on by tender scenes shared between Conor and Sandy as they watch TV on the couch. The result is a strange, heartfelt movie that feels handcrafted and perfectly Baltimore. 

“I’ve shown some of my other films over the years at The Charles, and it feels great every time,” Birney told Baltimore Beat the next day. “I was actually a little bit more nervous last night than I was when it premiered at Sundance [film festival], just because [that] feels like some kind of fantasy or dream, whereas playing at the Charles in front of all your friends and family is very much connected to my reality and day-to-day life.” Any nervousness from the filmmaker wasn’t apparent when he introduced the film on Oct. 2, even as “OBEX” co-star Dorothy went rogue and wandered the aisles of The Charles’ main auditorium hunting for dropped popcorn. 

The sheer volume of films New/Next screened over four days is staggering: 36 feature length films and over 100 shorts play at the Charles, and the event draws submissions from around the world. “We’re lucky that the buzz of the festival has traveled far and wide,” Hatch said. “Filmmakers are coming to attend because they’ve heard that it’s such a cornucopia of great work and great experiences and an opportunity to meet so many other peers.” 

Directors can share and learn from each other at New/Next — a benefit made apparent during the festival’s 14 blocks of short films. A collection of eight shorts screened the evening of Oct. 3, for example, offered profound glimpses of struggle and womanhood: A teenage ballerina navigates a messy lost virginity in Yael Grunseit’s “A Big Hug”; a woman battles an uncooperative menstrual cycle in Flora Nolan’s “Period Piece”; and a mother-daughter duo wait for a bus — and an uncertain future — on a frigid winter night in Leah Doz’s tense and revelatory “Strangers.”

New/Next’s full-length films offer their own surprises. 

New York-based director Connor Sen Warnick’s “Characters Disappearing” is less conventional and more like sifting through a box of old family photos, a series of snapshots of Manhattan’s Chinatown in 1971. Inspired by Taiwanese New Wave cinema of the 1980s, Warnick’s camera follows a pair of young revolutionaries’ slowly dissolving romance as shocking but all-too-familiar racialized violence lurks in the shadows. In a post-film Q&A, Warnick told the audience that the film was partly an attempt to capture the largely unrecorded history of left-wing organizing in Chinatown. 

If “Characters Disappearing” is a work of fiction with the spirit of a documentary, Xander Robin’s often hilarious “The Python Hunt” is a documentary that looks and feels almost too outrageous to be real. Cinematographers David Bolen and Matt Clegg’s inventive, often psychedelic shots of the Florida Everglades — alive with animals and usually lit only by flashlight — are the perfect backdrop for the film’s subjects: a cast of misfits drawn together for an annual contest to hunt and kill the most Burmese pythons for a $10,000 cash prize. 

The contestants include a philosophical nature writer-turned-guide, a bloodthirsty Arizona widow, a crunchy San Francisco science teacher amid an identity crisis, and a disgruntled former python hunter desperate to reconnect with his teenage daughter. They battle boredom and their personal demons as they prowl the swamp night after night. Like all good documentaries, “The Python Hunt” is about more than a hunt to bag and kill big snakes. Robin’s film ponders ecological collapse, cruelty, and the mysteries of human nature. 

The festival’s closing night film, Suzannah Herbert’s “Natchez,” depicts a war of words between dueling tour guides in the former cotton kingdom of Natchez, Mississippi. The documentary — executive produced by Baltimore-based filmmaker and frequent Spike Lee collaborator Sam Pollard — grapples with a single question: Who gets to tell the story of America?

Over the course of 86 minutes, “Natchez” digs into the ugly, often disturbing reality masked by a sanitized world of immaculate plantation manors and smiling Southern belles. Herbert and cinematographer Noah Collier capture a rich humanity within their subjects, often in surprising places. “Natchez’s” most impressive moment follows van-driving tour guide the Rev. Tracy Collins as he delivers a passionate history lesson to group after group of elderly white tourists. Rev’s speech is pieced together over multiple days, takes, and tour groups. Thanks to clever editing, it’s a powerful reminder that his crusade to share the real history of his hometown is a battle with no end in sight.

Sunday evening, during the closing night party at Metro Baltimore, there’s a distinctly different vibe. As DJ Mills spins “Breakdown” by Parliament, a happy but more subdued crowd simmers. Maybe it’s the heavy subject matter of “Natchez” or a last-day-of-summer-camp comedown, but the filmmakers seem bummed that New/Next has ended. But on flights, trains, car rides, and solitary walks home, the seeds of films yet to be made will soon take root. 

“OBEX” opens in select theaters nationwide on January 9.