IFFBoston returns with annual spring feast for movie buffs

“When I read about it, I thought, ‘I don't know if I have the energy to sit through a movie about somebody dying of cancer,” admits Independent Film Festival Boston Executive Director Brian Tamm. We’re talking about this year’s opening night film “Come See Me in the Good Light,” which kicks off IFFBoston’s 22nd annual spring feast for movie buffs on Wednesday, April 23 at the Somerville Theatre. The eight-day extravaganza stretches across Greater Boston’s most beautiful independent movie theaters, with this year’s lineup showcasing 39 features and 12 shorts packages selected by Program Director Nancy Campbell to unspool at the Somerville and the Brattle Theatre before closing out at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Wednesday, April 30.

Director Ryan White’s fifth documentary to play at IFFBoston follows Colorado Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson and her partner Meg struggling with a difficult diagnosis. It might sound a little heavy for opening night festivities, but Tamm insists otherwise. “It's about two poets, and they have a beautiful way of talking about the experience that is life-affirming and uplifting,” he says. “It’s very much about the need to live in the moment and to appreciate every moment that you have. They come to these incredible realizations about love and gender and it seems to really clarify their thinking in a way I found inspiring and moving. It’s a sad and joyful movie at the same time.”

Campbell interrupts with a knowing smile, “I feel like I had to force you to sit down and watch it though.”

Indeed, that’s part of their rationale for slotting “Come See Me in the Good Light” as the opening night film, knowing that a lot of folks might have otherwise passed were it not given such a strong vote of confidence from the festival. (This critic must sheepishly admit I probably would have been one of them.) In a movie year without any big-name, buzzy breakouts from the Sundance or South by Southwest film festivals, IFFBoston’s lineup is relying more on documentaries and foreign language films and less on marquee stars. Having been able to preview a dozen or so of this year’s offerings, I’ve found the scrappy lineup characteristically excellent, even though some of the topics might sound like tough sells. “I feel like we’ve got a pretty strong 22-year track record with people,” says Tamm. “You probably already know by now if you trust our recommendations.”

Personally, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about “Predators” (Thursday, April 24 at the Somerville). Filmmaker David Osit is a survivor of child sexual abuse who grew up obsessed with NBC’s sleazy “Dateline” spinoff “To Catch a Predator,” finding the program both empowering and retraumatizing. This uncommonly thoughtful documentary probes the tragic history of the show and the attraction of these sordid stories, focusing on the shared humanity that is lost when the ugliest aspects of society are packaged for our entertainment. Host Chris Hansen comes off as the most disgusting person onscreen, and that’s saying something for a movie full of child molesters.

The sharpest piece of criticism I’ve seen in some time, “Zodiac Killer Project” (Sunday, April 27 at the Brattle) offers a pointed deconstruction of the true crime craze. When filmmaker Charlie Shackleton was unable to secure the rights to a ‘70s conspiracy theorist’s paperback about the Bay Area’s most notorious killing spree, he decided to instead sit down and talk us through the movie he would have made, illustrating it with an endless stream of clips from Netflix documentaries illuminating every tacky trope and hackneyed technique of the insidiously popular genre. You’ll never look at one of those cheapie murder docs the same way again.

Tamm likes how these two films speak to each other, especially urging anyone who works in media to come see them both. “At some point, we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing here? Is it helping? Why do we watch these things that aren’t helping us?”

“Caught By the Tides” (Sunday, April 27 at the Brattle) is director Jia Zhangke’s follow up to his masterful 2019 “Ash is Purest White.” He and longtime muse Zhao Tao have cannily combined new material with unused footage and deleted scenes from their previous collaborations to create a romance that spans 23 years across China’s capitalist revolution, the characters traversing a country no longer recognizable even to itself. But the festival’s most nerve-wracking movie has got to be “April” (Saturday, April 26 at the Somerville), director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s disconcertingly still character study about a Georgian OB-GYN secretly performing unsanctioned abortions in the country’s deeply religious rural villages. There’s a scene where her car gets stuck in the mud that’s so patiently unnerving I wanted to scream.

Sometimes a movie pushes all your particular buttons, which was the case with “Happyend” (Sunday, April 27 at the Brattle). Directed by Neo Sora — son of the legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto — this cautionary coming-of-age tale takes place in the near future, on the edge of a climate catastrophe, as Japan slips into fascism while waiting for a devastating earthquake that’s supposed to arrive any day now. But what’s remarkable is that all this apocalyptic stuff simmers in the background of a typical teen story, following two class clowns through their high school shenanigans as one best friend begins to outgrow the other. It’s sort of like if “Superbad” took place during the end of the world.

You can see a neat passing of the torch in IFFBoston’s scheduling of the documentary “Michel Gondry: Do It Yourself” (Friday, April 25 at the Brattle) right before the local premiere of Albert Birney’s “Obex” (Friday, April 25 at the Brattle). Gondry popularized a lovingly handcrafted style that continues today through Birney’s endearingly lo-fi, thrift shop aesthetic that festival goers will remember from previous IFFBoston highlights “Sylvio” and “Strawberry Mansion.” Birney’s latest follows an agoraphobic programmer down the rabbit hole of a 1980s computer game. The adventure takes him into a medieval, 8-bit netherworld that plays out like “Eraserhead” by way of “Tron.”

The festival is known for its music documentaries, so it makes sense that this year’s Centerpiece Film is “Pavements” (Saturday, April 26 at the Brattle), a cleverly inscrutable and slightly snotty portrait of the ‘90s most cleverly inscrutable and slightly snotty indie band. Director Alex Ross Perry, whose caustic backstage grunge drama “Her Smell” rocked IFFBoston in 2019, is the perfect man for the job, spinning a regular talking heads doc off into a snarky deconstruction of the genre by simultaneously chronicling the productions of a phony Pavement biopic and a fake Pavement jukebox musical. It’s a sharp-elbowed movie that conjures the same sensation I often get while listening to the band, like there’s a part of the joke here that I’m not in on. The oddity of “Pavements” makes the festival’s other rock doc “Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt” (Saturday, April 26 at the Somerville) seem like the evening’s more conventional viewing option. But only by default.

“Rebel With a Clause” (Monday, April 28 at the Somerville) follows bestselling author and grammar guru Ellen Jovin across the country as she sets up a folding table on sidewalks in 50 states to answer language and syntax questions from people on the street. I should probably go see this one just to make my editor’s life easier. “Cracking the Code: Phil Sharp and the Biotech Revolution” (Monday, April 28 at the Somerville) is about the MIT scientist and Nobel laureate's discovery of RNA splicing. Campbell says she programmed the films together because “maybe people who study stuff actually know things and we should listen to them? That seems to have fallen by the wayside these days.”

Writer-director Peter Horgan’s “How to Rob” won the Narrative Feature Audience Award at the 2022 festival. He’s back with another gritty crime drama set in the North End featuring a fine performance from IFFBoston mainstay Joshua Koopman. “Chooch” screens as part of the Dartmouth Shorts package (Sunday, April 27 and Monday, April 28 at the Somerville.) Koopman also executive produced “Stolen Kingdom” (Sunday, April 27 at the Somerville), an eye-opening documentary about the urban explorers who go spelunking through abandoned theme parks, and what happened when an old, 600-pound EPCOT animatronic went missing. It’s a fun movie if you love Disney World, and maybe even more fun for those of us who hate it.

Neal Suresh Mulani’s “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” was the funniest film I saw at the 2022 festival. The Belmont native returns this year with the scathing “Rat!”, which plays in the Fairfield Shorts package (Thursday, April 24 and Sunday, April 27). The scabrously funny home invasion thriller stars Mulani as a saucy music critic who angers the wrong fanbase after going viral with a nasty pan of a queerbaiting himbo’s latest single. The masked, faceless mob that comes after him is the worst-case scenario for any working reviewer. As someone who has written unkind things about comic book movies, let’s just say I could relate.

The festival closes with an astonishing debut from writer-director Eva Victor, who in “Sorry, Baby” (Wednesday, April 30 at the Coolidge) stars a college professor still reeling from a sexual assault by her thesis advisor. Shot in Ipswich, the movie is told out of order, with her jumbled, numbed recovery finding odd outlets and leading to strange social encounters. Much like the opening night selection, this is a tough sell in synopsis, but the film itself is far more graceful and expansive — and dare I say, way funnier — than you would expect from the logline. “Sorry, Baby” announces the arrival of a unique voice, and is exactly the kind of film we go to festivals like IFFBoston to discover.

Independent Film Festival Boston runs from Wednesday, April 23 through Wednesday, April 30.