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Written by Pete Timmermann Saturday, 26 November 2005 11:57

Sure, there are some gems in redneck dialogue to be found elsewhere in the program, and some of the films have funny titles or topics—such as “Pretty Ladies, Fast Horses,” an alarming short documentary about cowgirls, or “Two or Three Things I Know About Ohio,” which is about bait, or yet another film about a phenomenon known as “tractor square dancing,” which, among other things, features the only socially acceptable time for a redneck to dress in drag—but still, while these films sound kitschily interesting, they are far more fun in theory than in practice.

SELECTIONS FROM THE 2005 RURAL ROUTE FILM FESTIVAL (Rural Route Films, NR)

Being a film festival buff, I always like it when remote festivals tour their best findings around America, such as the way the Ann Arbor Film Festival often does, showcasing the best in new experimental cinema. One touring film festival program I had never come across before is the Rural Route Film Festival, which originates as a festival of films either by or about rural America (as its title implies) that runs first in New York City.

The format is the same as other familiar touring festival programs (the festival compiles a 90- to 120-minute program of its best short films), but what differentiates the Rural Route package is that it has a much lower standard of quality than other festival programs. In this particular case, the program is 111 minutes long and is made up of roughly a dozen films, and of these films, only one—the three-minute-long “The Endangered P-Money Bird”—stands out as being worth seeing. One of the more touted shorts in the program is a Bonnie “Prince” Billy music video, but the video in question is for theGreatest Palace Music version of “Agnes, Queen of Sorrow,” which has been widely available on both the Internet and the single for some time now.

Sure, there are some gems in redneck dialogue to be found elsewhere in the program (one of my favorites is when a woman with a pet rooster says, “I’d really like to think that I would have the nerve to actually humanely end an animal’s life and honor it by eating its delicious flesh”), and some of the films have funny titles or topics—such as “Pretty Ladies, Fast Horses,” an alarming short documentary about cowgirls, or “Two or Three Things I Know About Ohio,” which is about bait, or yet another film about a phenomenon known as “tractor square dancing,” which, among other things, features the only socially acceptable time for a redneck to dress in drag—but still, while these films sound kitschily interesting, they are far more fun in theory than in practice.

The whole kitsch factor is another upsetting feature of this program. The majority of the films seem to have been made in earnest by or about the lives of rural Americans; indeed, such is the mission statement for the festival as a whole. But the fact that it is being screened on the campus of a university in the middle of St. Louis implies that its ideal audience will come to laugh at the films’ central characters, not with them.