Tallahassee Film Festival will feature 'Welcome to Jay' and other films from the Panhandle
The festival will show more than 50 films in and around downtown Tallahassee this Labor Day weekend.

Scenes from the Florida Panhandle will hit the big screen this weekend at the Tallahassee Film Festival.
“We have a lot of local interest, and a lot of local filmmakers that share their work at our festival,” said Chris Faupel, the festival’s creative director. “It's important that we are able to do that for this region.”
More than 50 independent film screenings will take place during the two-day festival, which runs Saturday through Sunday. The festival will give people the opportunity to see films that they otherwise wouldn’t see anywhere else. “If it’s streaming, we generally aren’t going to show it,” said Steve Dollar, the festival’s artistic director. “The idea is to give people films they haven’t seen.”
Most of the festival takes place downtown at the IMAX and Vivid Sky Theaters inside the Challenger Learning Center, located at 200 S. Duval St. Screenings will also take place inside Cap City Video Lounge, located at 675 Industrial Dr. in Railroad Square.
Tickets cost $10 per showing and can be purchased at the theater where the film is screening or at the box office in the Challenger Learning Center. Festival-goers can also buy a $50 festival pass for access to any showing.
Some films will make their first public appearance, while others have been shown at other festivals within the last year. The only exception is a special release of the 1984 modern classic film “Paris, Texas,” which the festival will show in 4k digital cinema, Dollar said.
Several films have local ties, including a true-crime and historical documentary about racism in a town near Pensacola, several short films about the Tallahassee area, a documentary about an alternative spiritual group in California by a local director and nature documentaries set in the Big Bend region.
“We’ve got beautifully-photographed nature films that reflect very much on the place we live here,” Dollar said. “To be able to get some things here that we've gotten,” he added, “has been pretty impressive.”
“Welcome to Jay” aims to inspire dialogue about racism
“Welcome to Jay” is a true crime and historical documentary set in the small town of Jay in Santa Rosa County.
“It's a story about the area and the history of the area, past and present, that I think they'll find emotionally resonant and interesting.”
The film, which premieres at the festival, tells the story of the murder of Gus Benjamin, a Black teenager, by Robert Floyd, a young white man. Morgan, who spent 13 years working on the documentary, filmed Floyd’s trial in 2011 and interviewed family members of both men, the town’s mayor at the time of the shooting and other key figures. “There's twists and turns,” he said. “If you read about the case in the media, and you think you know what happened, you're going to be surprised.”
The documentary takes viewers back in time to 1922 when a Black farmer shot a white farmer in self-defense, leading to the entire Black community — nearly 200 residents — being forced to leave town. Today, U.S. Census data shows only four of the town’s nearly 500 residents are Black.
“The film is is a courtroom drama, to a certain degree, like the courtroom is kind of what you follow as one of the threads,” Morgan said. “And it also goes back in time, and it tells the story of the Black and white farmer, which we did probably thousands of hours of research to dig up that story.”
Until the 1970s, there were signs posted in the town threatening Black people that they’d be harmed if they were in town after dark. For this reason, Jay has long had the reputation of being a “sundown town.”
“The Black community still perceives it as a sundown town,” Morgan said. “A lot of people still wouldn’t come after dark. The film explores whether the town lives up to its reputation.”
Morgan discovered Jay while working on his first documentary film “Lily and Leander” in neighboring Escambia County. “We kept hearing about this town called Jay,” Morgan said. “There was a tangible fear in the Black community.”
Morgan says he later learned about Benjamin’s death in the news, giving him an idea for a film and an opportunity to use the interviews he’d gathered about the town. “Those tapes kind of sat gathering dust, but it was like it stuck in my mind, because it was these very sad stories that were going to be lost.”
Morgan, who lives near New York City, traveled to the region to film the documentary on his work vacations.
Recently, the documentary received the Levine Fellowship, which is from the Better Angels Society, an organization affiliated with famous documentarian Ken Burns.
Morgan says he finished making the film earlier this year, and chose the Tallahassee Film Festival for the film’s first screening partly because it’s the closest festival to the town where the documentary is set.
The film should appeal to audiences beyond North Florida, Morgan said. “The town of Jay is not unique,” he said. “There were towns like Jay that have these kind of reputations all over the country, in every region.”
The film screening will take place at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday at the Vivid Sky Theater.
Big Bend wildlife documentaries will hit the big screen
The festival will give viewers a chance to view wildlife footage on the big screen, with “Florida Gone Wild” a series of nature documentaries, including two that were shot in the Big Bend region.
In “River Obscura,” viewers will get a rare encounter with the critters that live below the Sopchoppy River. “It’s got a lot of underwater footage of fish, turtles, otters, alligators,” said local filmmaker and musician Sammy Tedder, who made the documentary. “I really want people to understand better what this river here is about.”
The Sopchoppy River is a blackwater river, making it difficult to see beneath the surface. “You can’t see what’s underwater half the time,” Tedder added he’d often wondered what lives below the surface. “I started filming,” he said, “and just seeing what would come through.”
“From above, it's black,” he said. “From underwater, you look up, it's red.”
Tedder also composed and produced musical scores that accompany the film’s wildlife footage. The documentary also includes some narration.
“I just hope people will feel like they want to take care of it.”
The documentary runs about 55 minutes and will begin screening on Saturday at 6:51 p.m. at the IMAX Theater.
“Tigers of the Sky” takes viewers to the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to the great horned owl.
“Great horned owls are known as tigers of the sky because they're fierce predators,” said Ian Weir, a documentary film professor at Florida State University and the film’s director.

Weir says he followed a particular owl for about a year and a half and filmed its life after getting some rare shots of a baby owl in its nest.
“Last year around March, there was a baby in the nest,” Weir said. “That was the first footage that I shot, and then the mother was kind of close by, and the father, and then I went two weeks later, and I got some shots, and then I went about two months later, and there's a sequence in my in my film that is just it's pretty mind boggling.”
The documentary short runs just over 18 minutes and includes narration. It will screen on Saturday at 6:33 p.m. at the IMAX Theater.
“Welcome Space Brothers” is filmed by a local documentarian
Documentary filmmaker Jodi Wille, who recently moved to Tallahassee from California, is showing her documentary film “Welcome Space Brothers.”
“It's a documentary, but it feels like, almost like a far-out science fiction film,” Wille said.
The documentary is about the Unarius Academy of Science, “an extraterrestrial channeling spiritual community who became a wildly prolific creative collective of filmmakers in the late 70s into the mid 80s.” Wille said.
The group “made their own elaborately conceived videos and four feature films that were process-oriented films made in order to heal themselves and transform themselves.”
Wille says she discovered one of the group’s shows on public access television and “was completely blown away by the costumes and the pageantry.”
“They just looked like kooks to me at that time, but there was something that felt really positive about it too, and uplifting. I couldn't explain it, but I was drawn to it.”
Wille’s documentary shows footage from the group’s massive film archives. The film’s executive producer is Elijah Wood.
The Tallahassee Film Festival isn’t the only place where the film is showing, but it’s not yet streaming anywhere. “It's been making its way through a number of film festivals.” That includes the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia.
The film screening will take place Saturday at 1:30 p.m. at the IMAX Theater.