Rome, Georgia doesn't look like a town that needs a red carpet. It has the rivers and the clocktower and a Broad Street lined with old brick that has seen a hundred years of Saturday afternoons, and for four days last week it had thousands of people walking that street with lanyards around their necks and schedules queued up in their festival app. The 23rd Rome International Film Festival ran November 5 through 8, and it was a true convergence of film, art, craft, and collaboration.
Filmmakers, actors, writers, animators, students, and folks who just love a good story all ended up in the same few blocks at the same time. RIFF director Seth Ingram likes to call it the Telluride of the South (he isn't wrong), and it helps that the whole thing is walkable. You can walk out of a screening at the historic DeSoto Theatre, grab a coffee, and make a Q&A at the City Auditorium before your cup goes cold, and you'll probably pass somebody you just watched on screen along the way.
The names on the marquee
The festival opened Thursday night at the DeSoto with The Accountant, Ray McKinnon's Georgia-made short that won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2001. Twenty-five years later, McKinnon was back in front of a Georgia crowd to talk about it. (If you've never seen it, go find it. Walton Goggins is in it, and he is exactly as wonderfully strange as you'd hope.)
Friday, for me, belonged to a documentary I still can't shake. How to Feed a Dictator, Andrew Neel's film built on Witold Szabłowski's book, sits down with the private chefs who cooked for Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and Kim Jong-il. It lays the violence and the torture and the servitude right alongside stories from families who so clearly loved these men, and alongside plate after plate of gorgeous gourmet food. It was a whole experience. (It might deserve a piece of its own. Stay tuned.)
Saturday was Danny McBride's day. Jared and Jerusha Hess, the minds behind Napoleon Dynamite, screened their 2015 comedy Don Verdean (McBride is in it), and Jerusha premiered her new short, Your Daughter Clytnyann, starring Edi Patterson and Tony Hale.
Then McBride took the stage himself, first for a screening of The Righteous Gemstones and an onstage conversation, then for the award. The Statesboro-born creator of The Righteous Gemstones, Eastbound & Down, and Vice Principals received the 2026 Flannery O'Connor Award for Storytelling. He's the sixth person to get it and the first one born in Georgia, and he joins Billy Bob Thornton, Ethan and Maya Hawke, Tim Blake Nelson, and last year's honoree Jerusha Hess (who nominated him).
I love that pairing. McBride has a new book out, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, a collection of short stories, and he has said plainly that he loves flawed, broken people. That's Flannery all day long. It's the South, too. We are complicated people who tell complicated stories, and watching a Georgia crowd claim one of its own for doing exactly that was a fine way to spend a Saturday night.
The work underneath
Before the festival, Seth said he hoped people would come for McBride or McKinnon or the Hesses and leave talking about a filmmaker they'd never heard of.
The features this year included Adam Minarovich's Once Upon a Time in Macon, Kyra Elise Gardner's Slay (starring and co-written by Jimmi Simpson), and the closing-night feature Frogtown from Costa Karalis. The international shorts program brought work from France, Israel, Ireland, Poland, the Netherlands, Canada, and the UK. The Enduring Youngbloods block gave student filmmakers a real screen and a real audience, and Sunday's Red Clay Rumble was a whole afternoon of films made right here in Georgia.
This year's jury included French Stewart, Vanessa Stewart, Ethan Embry, Lisa Ferrell, and Sunny Mabrey.
Sunday night the festival closed with Rome Remembers Dolly, a tribute concert with Whiskey Revival as the house band and singers from all over Northwest Georgia, with part of the ticket sales going to Dolly's Imagination Library. It was the first fall festival season since we lost her in August, and of course Rome sent her off with a song.
Our side of the table
Now for the part I've been grinning about all week. This was my first time interviewing on site, my first time recording on location, and (confession) my first podcast episode, period. I am usually behind the scenes, so going into this I had one goal: I didn't want any of it to feel like a press junket. I wanted it to feel like coffee with friends, the kind where somebody starts telling you a story and you forget the recorder is running. From what people told us afterward, I think we hit the mark.
We had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with French and Vanessa Stewart over the weekend, and those conversations are coming your way in future installments of The Blue Mountain Review and the Dante's New South podcast. Y'all, they were a delight. French and Vanessa are a true power couple, and they still call themselves a mom-and-pop business, which tickled me, because this industry is about as far from mom-and-pop as it gets. They gave us a real glimpse at what it takes to keep the creative work, the craft, and the family all going at once in a business this wild. I can't wait for you to hear it.
I came home tired, with a phone full of voice memos and a head full of other people's stories. Rome gave everybody a seat at the table this year.
We just brought the conversation.