Beaufort, South Carolina, has an undisputed place in filmmaking history. The coastal town served as a backdrop in classics like Forrest Gump, The Big Chill, and The Prince of Tides. But it’s also part of the industry’s future through the annual Beaufort International Film Festival, a six-day affair that has become one of the region’s top showcases of independent films. Next week, from February 18 to 23, veteran and aspiring filmmakers from the South and far beyond will come to town to screen their work in front of some 20,000 festivalgoers.
Every morning starting at 9:00 a.m., a slate of documentaries, short films, animated works, and comedies will start rolling in the 450-capacity South Carolina Arts Center. “The atmosphere is just electric,” says Ron Tucker, who has directed the festivities—and conducted a post-screening question-and-answer session with each filmmaker—for the past nineteen years. Of 514 entries, fifty-six films made the cut this year.
There is a comedy that takes place in a graveyard, a documentary about an Italian cook, an animated film telling a Lowcountry ghost story of a lighthouse keeper and his daughter, and a dispensation of wisdom from a group of elderly men who meet for breakfast in a Beaufort cafe. “We chose films that are story-driven and that make an impact,” Tucker says. “We want the audience to stand up and cheer, to laugh or cry or get so angry they want to take action.” At the festival’s conclusion, an advisory panel that includes South Carolinians Andie McDowell and Julie Dash will announce the winners in a slew of categories, while the audience selects the best overall film and best comedy.
Below, find seven of the films Tucker is most excited about this year—and get tickets to the festival here.
Breakfast in Beaufort: Journeys Through Time
Ray Smith directs this close-to-home, hourish-long film. The stars? Eleven men, aged from the late eighties to one hundred, who meet every Wednesday morning at Beaufort’s own Blackstone’s Cafe. There they share insight from nearly 1,000 years lived between them. As the trailer says: “Listen to your elders; you just might learn something.” Though tickets to this screening are sold out, Tucker is working on getting the film shown on SCETV, South Carolina’s public educational broadcast network.
Wakanyeja Kin Wana Ku Pi (The Children Are Coming Home)
In this short film set in South Dakota, director Andy Wakeman explores Mato Paha (“bear mountain”) in present-day Bear Butte State Park, a sacred place to Lakota Nation. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S. government took control of the Black Hills, and the Lakota lost access to it—until last year, when a nonprofit called the Cheyenne River Youth Project purchased land adjacent to Bear Butte.
A Final Landing on Iwo Jima
In February of 1945, U.S. Marines invaded Iwo Jima, Japan, during World War II. This film tells the story of a veteran wounded there who revisits the site, alongside the story of the son of a Marine tracing his father’s footsteps in the war—all narrated by CBS sports commentator Jim Nantz.
Neither Donkey Nor Horse
Robin Wang directs this short film set during the outbreak of the 1910 Manchurian Plague. It follows a young Chinese doctor educated in the United Kingdom who must reckon with Eastern and Western medicine to explore his groundbreaking theory of the disease. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and has already been named the winner of the 2024 Student Academy Award.
Silver Sizzle
This short film, which already won Best Comedy at the Nyack International Film Festival in New York, is a witty look at finding love later in life, when a cemetery caretaker takes two recent widowers under his wing to meet widows frequenting the same graveyard.
Silent Life: The Story of the Lady in Black
For over seventy years, a lady dressed in black visits the tomb of silent movie star Rudolph Valentino on the anniversary of his passing, bringing a single red rose. In this feature film, which showed at Moscow, Houston, and Rhode Island festivals in 2023, director Vladislav Alex Kozlov explores the story of the last love of Valentino’s life—and his mysterious death in her apartment in 1926.
I’m Still Here
During the period between 1947 and 1967, Black-owned homes on Birmingham’s Center Street were repeatedly bombed to the point that the neighborhood gained the name “Dynamite Hill.” I’m Still Here traces the story of three Black residents who lived through this tumultuous time and stayed in the city afterward to forge hope and resilience during the Civil Rights Movement.
