Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana…

Mission accomplished! I saw six films in all, which is three times as many HIFF films as we’d seen in all previous years combined. That feeling of keeping my commitment felt rewarding in and of itself. Anne tagged along for four of those, while my son rode shotgun for another. That’s nowhere near as hyperactive as I get for my annual Oscar Quest movie marathons, but it’s an improvement.

Our intermittent Heartland history dates back to 2011, when we gave it a whirl as part of Anne’s birthday celebration. After an out-of-town jaunt around a state park, we returned to Indy and headed straight to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (its name at the time) for an afternoon showing of The Way, a contemplative drama in which Martin Sheen plays a grieving father who undertakes a long, spiritually charged walk through Europe to retrieve his son’s body and figuratively carry his baton forward. His real-life son Emilio Estevez directed and appeared briefly as his fictional son. His walking companions included Deborah Kara Unger (Fincher’s The Game, Cronenberg’s Crash), Yorick van Wageningen (who went on to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Escape Room) and, as a scene-stealing motormouth, Ireland’s own James Nesbitt (best known Stateside as Bofur from The Hobbit trilogy). We enjoyed the show, no complaints.

As a bonus, the showing included a very special Q&A with the father/son team of Estevez and Sheen in person, along with producer David Alexanian. I remember none of the questions, took no notes, and can’t recall ever sharing this tale online before. Anne posted about it on Facebook, but that’s it. Memory gaps like this are why I now strive to blog about everything we do that exceeds everyday routine existence.

Coincidentally our first Heartland film this year (outside the house, that is) took us back to the same museum, which was rechristened Newfields in 2017. Befitting an art museum, we found eye-catching sights along the way (no pun attempted).

That was last Sunday the 8th. Three days later came Kore-eda’s Monster at the Kan-Kan Cinema, an indie theater run by a nonprofit that opened during the pandemic. I’ve made the half-hour drive from home to their side of town for past Oscar Quests and really appreciated their service. The animated documentary Flee, Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, and the Nan Goldin protest memoir All the Beauty and Bloodshed each had exclusive engagements there and otherwise would’ve been unavailable to me during their respective Academy Awards seasons. All three films had played in the Kan-Kan’s tinier rooms; Monster gave me a chance to confirm they do indeed have screens that seat more than forty people — a few hundred, in fact, allowing them to host a fair turnout that Wednesday night. As further evidence their attendance figures are building, we had to park two blocks away because their tiny lot was 100% full.

The very next night was my longest drive of the festival. Whereas Newfields is nine easy miles from our house, the recently renovated Emagine Noblesville was a 35-mile road trip each way — far enough that I’d never heard of it. We don’t live on Indy’s well-to-do north side or in any upper-crust Hamilton County suburbs, as many Heartland members likely do, so none of these were convenient outings for us west-siders. But I really, really wanted to see Fancy Dance. The long journey was worth the mileage and time spent, even after adjusting for multiple interstate road construction projects, two wrong turns, and a baffling interchange with a long stretch where, Lord knows why, drivers wind up on the left side of the road for several hundred feet before switching back.

The Emagine parking lot was packed for the worldwide premiere of the new Taylor Swift film Stop Making Sense (Taylor’s Version), but I was fine with parking in the way-back. I was the first patron seated for the Lily Gladstone drama and may have been the youngest viewer in its small yet mighty audience. The Heartland representative assigned to introduce it was an artistic director whose name and face I recognized — he’d Liked the Instagrammed version of our lead photo earlier in the week, which so far is the only interaction I’ve had with any Heartland employees apart from their uniformly gracious ushers (one of whom took that pic of us). I resisted the urge to react visibly or go all parasocially cringey, but it’s hard to act nonchalant about the slightest real-human interactivity when 99% of your Insta-notifications come from bots that you wish would short-circuit and fry their evil programmers’ motherboards.

Our big finale (outside the house, that is) took place Friday the 13th at Living Room Theaters, which also opened during the pandemic and seems to be doing healthy business. Located in the trendy Mass Ave neighborhood downtown, we first/most recently visited them for a Heartland film last year. That time, we arrived with mere seconds to spare. This year we arrived early and relaxed beforehand in The Garage Food Hall across the street, a community space jam-packed with restaurants at varying levels of Flavortown exotica.

I’ve already shared what went wrong at the sold-out screening of A Disturbance in the Force, the largest Heartland audience we’d been in all week, which concluded memorably for all the wrong reasons. Also, of the four theaters’ collections of Heartland merchandise for sale, none of them carried HIFF shirts in my size. Their official site doesn’t seem to have a merch section for post-impulse-shopping, but maybe that’s a members-only privilege on a separate, top-secret page.

For completeness’ sake: our two virtual screenings each went off without a hitch. Heartland’s at-home options streamed through the Eventive app, which worked flawlessly with our Roku TV.

My final rankings of the six films I saw:

1. Monster
2. Fancy Dance
3. Jailhouse to Milhouse
4. Avenue of the Giants
5. The Promised Land
INCOMPLETE: A Disturbance in the Force

Every Heartland lineup has hundreds of films to choose from, impossible for anyone to see half of them, let alone all of them. I most regret missing Jeffrey Wright’s new film American Fiction, whose trailer just dropped this weekend and which looks exactly like the sort of satire I thrive on. (Offhand it reminds me thematically of Radha Blank’s razor-needled The Forty-Year Version and its mockery of Black “poverty porn”.) Alas, it was scheduled Saturday the 14th at 4:45 p.m. at the Emagine, which would’ve been another long road trip for an unfairly lousy time slot.

I’ve been mulling over the possibility of buying a membership for future use — partly for perks, partly to donate to The Cause — but we’ll see. Setting aside that one digital breakdown which rattled our confidence, the biggest drawback is it’s held every year around the same time as Anne’s birthday. This year we incorporated it into her festivities (among other activities), but moviegoing is more my thing than hers, and the idea of annual schedule conflicts isn’t heartwarming. (Fun shameful trivia: I went to see Fancy Dance on her birthday. Without her. We’ve already talked it out, but I cannot and will not keep doing that.) So, as I said, we’ll see.

This very special miniseries neither won friends nor influenced people, but we nonetheless appreciated the chance for deeper immersion in the Heartland experience.

Thanks for reading! Lord willing and time permitting, we’ll be back next year.