Cucalorus Fest wraps 5 days of film, performance

The 24th Cucalorus Festival came to an end Sunday after five days of film screenings, performances and the Cucalorus Connect business conference -- approximately 200 total events in all. Official attendance numbers won't be in for a few days yet, but anecdotally, most of the events drew robust crowds.

But while the smart, fun-loving, sometimes edgy vibe was similar to years past, Cucalorus 24 stood out by having most of its major events be performances as opposed to the films that drove the fest for more than two decades. From the opening night concert with indie rock vets Superchunk; another opening night performance, Dance-a-Lorus, which has been blending film and dance for more than a decade; and the closing "musical conversation" with Grammy-winner Rhiannon Giddens about the Wilmington coup of 1898, this is the year that performance found equal footing with film at Cucalorus.

Not that film took a back seat or anything, and it was heartening to see that many of the movie success stories were local, including "8 Slices," a philosophical drama shot in Holden Beach and "Abigail Falls," a romantic drama shot partially in Wilmington.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington's Film Studies program got into the act as well, thanks to the impressive feature documentary "Dead in the Water," which was made by recent UNCW graduates, including the director Lizzie Bankowski. "Dead in the Water" chronicles, in part, how the rise of factory farming in Southeastern North Carolina has negatively impacted the lives of some rural residents.

But wanting to avoid the feeling of "doom and gloom," Bankowski said during an audience Q&A after the screening of her film Friday at Thalian Hall, "Dead in the Water" also focuses on examples of sustainable farming in the area, including the Humble Roots farm.

Examples of the quirky Cucalorus spirit were everywhere in abundance, including before the screening of "Dead in the Water," when Sheila Garrigan, who bills herself as "the mime who talks," introduced the film with a hypnotic, fish-and-water-inspired movement piece. Even before a Cucalorus Connect discussion about how artificial intelligence is changing the gig economy, longtime Cucalorus emcee Matt Malloy, who hosted the very first Cucalorus at the old Water Street Restaurant back in 1994, did a bit about how he was some kind of human robot to the befuddlement of the straitlaced Connect crowd.

On Sunday afternoon, Grammy-winner Giddens took the stage for one of the festival’s most anticipated performances, singing popular songs from 1898, the year of Wilmington’s white supremacist coup. Alongside John Jeremiah Sullivan, an 1898 researcher and visiting writer at UNCW, and Wilmington-based author Clyde Edgerton, Giddens alternated between a banjo, octave violin and her own vocal range. Among the selections were black string band songs like those that would have been played at The Manhattan Park, a dance hall in Wilmington’s Northside where a number of 1898 murders happened.

The performance closed with a hymn that a magazine reporter in 1898 had reported hearing being sung from the swamps outside Wilmington, where black families hid during the coup. Giddens is working on a full musical about the massacre.

“A lot of good has been lost in the erasure of this history, a lot of good,” she told the audience. “And we have to reclaim that.”

Reporter Cammie Bellamy contributed material to this story. Contact John Staton at 910-343-2343 or John.Staton@StarNewsOnline.com.