How the Rhode Island Film Festival Is “Writing a New Narrative”

Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the United States, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going big on film. 

More than 300 films screened at the 42nd Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, which took place in Providence from Aug. 6-11 — a diverse slate of narrative features, documentaries and short films representing 51 countries across the globe. The festival, one of 10 international fests that serve as official qualifiers for the Academy Awards’ live-action, animated and documentary short categories, received over 7,000 submissions this year. 

For executive director Shawn M. Quirk, who has been with the festival for 13 years, RIIFF has a two-pronged approach to serving filmmakers both in Rhode Island and beyond its borders. “It’s really about building this global community, as well as helping our local filmmakers who need that access,” Quirk tells THR.

“I love the idea of us being a global film [destination],” adds Quirk. “Rhode Island, when it was founded as a colony, saw itself as a little country — they were always trying to be a little independent from everyone else.”

Among the festival’s lineup include its three official Academy submissions: the live-action short Hearts of Stone, directed by Tom Van Avermaet; the animated short And Granny Would Dance, directed by Maryam Mohajer; and the doc short Eternal Father, directed by Omer Sami. Those three short films will join an impressive list of RIIFF submissions. Since 1998, 87 films that premiered at RIIFF have earned Academy Awards nominations, and 14 RIIFF submissions have won an Oscar in the shorts categories. (The fest also serves as a qualifier for the BAFTAs, the Canadian Screen Awards, and Spain’s Goya Awards.)

While RIIFF has always been “a short film haven,” Quirk stresses its commitment to feature filmmaking. This year saw the world premiere of Chakib Taleb Bendiab’s crime drama Algiers, which took the prize for best feature and is the first Algerian feature to win an award at a major American film festival. 

Other feature standouts include the sci-fi comedy Alien Country from directors Renny Grames and Boston McConnaughey, which won the grand prize for best comedy; festival darling Extremely Unique Dynamic, a meta stoner comedy starring Harrison Xu and Ivan Leung (who co-directed with Katherine Dudas) that won the Alternative Spirit Award; and Bad Faith from director Stephen George Ujlaki, the best documentary winner that examines Christian nationalism’s rise in the United States from the founding of the Moral Majority to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Another highlight was the repertory screening of Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space, the cult director’s 2019 H.P. Lovecraft adaptation starring Nicolas Cage (and his first feature after being infamously fired from The Island of Dr. Moreau). Stanley appeared in person to announce his next project: another adaptation from the catalog of the horror master (and Providence native), this time an ambitious two-part adaptation of The Dunwich Horror.

Programming a regional festival in the digital age does raise a big question: When there’s so much content available to stream at home — and there’s the notion that moviegoers are less likely to see films in theaters than before the pandemic — what can a film festival deliver to potential audiences? But Quirk doesn’t see streaming as a threat. In fact, he theorizes that the access to a broader catalog of programming has made audiences hungrier for what the festival can offer them. “They’re watching TV shows from all over the world,” says Quirk. “I think their taste has become more nuanced. Ten years ago people might have said, ‘I don’t like reading so many subtitles.’ But I don’t hear that anymore.” 

And it’s an opportunity to serve RIIFF’s audiences with cinematic visions of the world they have yet to encounter. “I feel there’s too much emphasis sometimes on trying to meet the audience,” says Quirk. “You can really provoke the audience, and they’re really happy to go along with you.” 

The festival puts that into practice when selecting the lineup of films. “I don’t think it’s so much a problem of, is this film gonna fit with our audience? It’s more a question of finding a great film and the audience will need it. There’s a lot of films that people are dying to see. They just don’t even know what those films are.”

This year’s fest also celebrated its founder, George T Marshall, who died in 2022. A professor of film at both the University of Rhode Island and Roger Williams University, Marshall launched the non-profit Flickers, the Newport Film Society & Arts Collaborative, in 1981. It was in his memory that RIIFF launched the George T. Marshall Production Grant, an annual $10,000 prize given to two RIIFF alumni filmmakers seeking funding for a new project. 

Tiffany Kimmel was one of the inaugural recipients, whose stop-motion animated TV series pilot Civil Service is in development with Nihil Declarandum Productions. The other was Reshad Kulenovic, whose feature film Selma is in development with support from the Bosnian National Film Fund, BH Telecom and Tallinn ScriptPool and will star rising Balkan actor Muhamed Hadžović.

The grant is just one of Quirk’s ambitions for RIIFF’s future — the Rhode Island native also wants to see the festival grow a development and production arm, similar to Sundance’s various labs and fellowships. “We’re writing a new narrative,” says Quirk. “We want to become a vanguard festival that is a reflection of the world of today.”