Beau Menetre, co-founder of the Tryon International Film Festival, along with Scott and Gayle Lane, attended Art House Convergence, a precursor conference to the Sundance Film Festival.   

The trio were among approximately 620 delegates attending the festival which ran from Jan. 16-19 in Midway, Utah.   

Keynote speeches, panel sessions, networking, and film screenings were the order of the day while cinema operators and film festival representatives learned more about the growing trends in the industry.       

An ancestor of the Art House Film genre is “Cinéma pur,” a loosely defined, more philosophical and thought provoking film category from the more familiar, mass distributed commercial film types. 

Art House Film is not a new genre, but a style of story development that dates back to the start of motion picture composition. Since its inception, motion pictures have been divided into two varietals: major motion picture films, with huge budgets and rapid story development — and the indie films category with slowly absorbed and perhaps a more cerebral form of storytelling employing a looser chain between cause and effect. 

Famous examples of Art House films include D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916) and Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), a revolutionary propaganda film designed to challenge common political theories through broad-brush cerebral conveyance.

Tryon has already received a taste of Art House genre, whether we were aware of it or not, with the screenings of Nischal Poudyal’s touching “Lama La,” Andrew Huggins’ short film, “Four Pies” and Steven Esteb’s deeply intense “HATE CRIME.” 

Each film required a higher degree of philosophical afterthought in order to derive the maximum meaning of the film.

This is not to assume one film genre is any better than another, but only to consider that the audience’s appetite is open to a wider choice of films. 

Not only did Menetre and the Lanes learn about Art House genre and the industry within it, they also extolled the virtues of the town of Tryon, our audience base and the ever expanding Tryon International Film Festival.

– article submitted by Kirk Gollwitzer