BENTONVILLE --Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope had to look up Bentonville on a map. The city at the heart of the new Bentonville Film Festival isn't exactly the first American metropolis that came to mind for the two Australians.
They did know of Arkansas, but only because the Clintons once called it home.
Bentonville became the husband-and-wife filmmaking duo's unlikely home this week when Now Add Honey, the film Butler wrote and Hope directed, became an official selection of the film festival.
They toured Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. They ate dinner at Table Mesa Bistro. They attended Thursday's panel with Robert De Niro, and they went to Arvest Ballpark in Springdale and had their first cheese steak sandwich.
Hope heard about the festival while running and simultaneously listening to an American podcast that contained an interview with film festival founders Trevor Drinkwater and Geena Davis. Hope's pace quickened on the way back to the house because he needed to tell his wife about the opportunity.
"This sounded like it was purpose-built for Robyn's work," he said.
Butler's work, and that of festival partner organization Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media, promotes female filmmakers. In the status quo, men make more movies, according to research from the institute. Male actors also generally have more prominent roles than female counterparts.
That doesn't make sense considering women buy more movie tickets than men do, Butler said. There's no reason those roles can't be flipped. Women enjoy films made by men. Men can enjoy films made by women, if there were more of them to choose from, she said.
Butler, featured prominently on the long-running Australian comedy series called Neighbors, works with Hope via their production company, Gristmill. Their feature-length debut, Now Add Honey, will be released Nov. 5 in their home country. It made its public debut Wednesday night in Bentonville. The film focuses on the life of a suburban housewife, played by Butler, whose life is turned upside down when her sister's pop idol daughter, Honey, comes to stay with her. In the process, it focuses on several themes, such as a woman's aging process and the oversexualization of young girls.
"There are very specific female things," Butler said.
Even so, "this isn't a film for women. This is a film for everyone," Hope said.
Still, women responded most acutely to Wednesday's debut. More than one female audience member came up to hug Butler after the screening, and another brought her flowers.
Filmmaker Janet Grillo came to Bentonville along with her movie Jack of the Red Hearts, a narrative that played here Wednesday and debuted earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival. The movie tells the story of a teen who cons her way into a caretaker's role for an autistic child.
Though fictional, the topic of autism is special to Grillo, as her 21-year-old son is on the autism spectrum.
She attended Friday's screening of the documentary Autism in Love at the Victory Theater in downtown Rogers. The documentary looks at the seemingly incongruous idea of someone who struggles to make personal connections falling in love.
Film festivals bring in titles or ideas from outside of the mainstream, and that helps everyone, Grillo said. A film festival "is a place we all come to share our stories," she said.
Grillo, who is based in New York City, congratulated the festival, saying it provided a place between the coasts to share those kind of stories.
"It expands the range," she said. "These are stories that are passionate or personal. You have to seek these out, or have them brought to you."
The festival brought many titles to the area, along with many of the filmmakers or actresses involved with their production.
Diversity projects, and not just films featuring women, also played a role in the film selection process. Manuelito Wheeler told an audience of less than a dozen about his project to create the first-ever movie dubbed into the Navajo language.
The action-packed Star Wars: A New Hope from 1977 earned the distinction, in part, because the space western shares some of the native philosophies and because the action sequences required less translation, Wheeler said. It's strange seeing the opening crawl come across in a foreign language, but there are similarities, too. Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, still shoots first.
Hope, the director of Now Add Honey, just visited Los Angeles. He said Bentonville pleasantly surprised him, adding he was "absolutely gobsmacked" by the hospitality Northwest Arkansas residents have shown him and Butler.
"It's a chance to meet people we would otherwise never meet," he said.
And see movies and hear stories they might otherwise never experience.
NW News on 05/09/2015