Indie Film Guide: The Jazz Loft, RG Miller, and Thelma & Louise

Indie Film Guide: 4/8 – 4/21

4/8, 9, 10: My Neighbor Totoro; Palace Theatre 1:25 - 3:40 - 6:25 - 8:40 - (10:50p) (no 10:50 on Sunday)

4/10: The Jazz Loft; WJF/Tallgrass; WAM 2:00

4/15: Double Digits; FischHaus, Harvester Arts, Tallgrass; FischHaus 8:00

4/16: RG Miller Marathon; Fisch Haus, Harvester, Tallgrass; Fisch Haus 11:00 am

4/19: Filmmaker workshop with RG Miller at Harvester; 5:00

4/21: Thelma and Louise; Orpheum; 7:00

The Wichita Jazz Festival kicks off Sunday with a screening of the new documentary The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith, which looks at the efforts of Wichita-born photojournalist W. Eugene Smith to chronicle the events and musicians at the Jazz Loft in New York City in the 1950s and ‘60s. Smith took thousands of hours of audio recordings and tens of thousands of photos of artists during the bebop era, including names as big as Thelonious Monk, and this is the first movie to use this massive archive. The Jazz Loft is presented along with the Tallgrass Film Association and will play Sunday at 2:00 at the Wichita Art Museum.

Next week, from the 15^th through the 19^th, Fisch Haus and Harvester Arts will be celebrating the first winner of their Neighborhood Superstar award, local hyper-independent filmmaker RG Miller, who was profiled in a documentary at last year’s Tallgrass Film Festival called Double Digits. They’ll team up with Tallgrass to show that documentary at Fisch Haus on the evening of the 15^th, and then the next day, the 16^th, they’ll have a marathon of Miller’s own films, beginning at 11:00, also at the Fisch Haus, followed by a filmmaker workshop with Miller himself at Harvester Arts on the evening of Tuesday, the 19^th.

And finally, the Orpheum Theatre is showing a 25^th anniversary screening of Ridley Scott’s massively successful Thelma and Louise, which won an Oscar for its screenplay and nominations for both its leads, Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, along with a director nomination for Scott. Thelma and Louise will play at 7:00 on the night of Thursday, the 21^st at the Orpheum.