Light From Light

n the occasion of last year’s Big Ears Festival, an annual showcase of film and music in Knoxville, Tennessee, writer-director Paul Harrill curated “A Sense of Place,” a program of American independent films grounded in regional idiosyncrasies and often realized on the micro-budget level—a lineage that his own work very much falls within. Selections included now-classic titles such as Herk Harvey’s Utah-shot (1962) and Eagle Pennell’s lo-fi, Austin-set (1978), the latter of which Robert Redford once cited as his inspiration for starting the Sundance Institute. It might seem appropriate, then, that Harrill’s new feature premiered at Sundance earlier this year, nearly two decades after his short won the festival’s Jury Prize in 2001. And yet, as hardly requires mentioning, the kind of American independents championed by the festival