The Circuit

by Kim Voynar
Oklahoma City's homegrown film fest, the DeadCenter Film Festival, is all grown up in its eighth year. The fest kicked off with Nanette Burnstein's Sundance fave, "American Teen" followed by the Opening Night party at the Oklahoma Museum of Art.

The packed house responded well to Burnstein's doc, which follows five teens in Warsaw, Indiana through their senior year of high school. The crowd cheered on spunky, artsy Hannah, who doesn't fit into the social strata in Warsaw and longs to go to film school, and loved to hate pretty, rich, popular Megan, who bullies her friends and plays mean pranks on her enemies while worrying about whether she'll get into her father's alma mater, Notre Dame.


Another popular film at the fest was "Okie Noodling 2," by one of Oklahoma's favorite filmmaker sons, Brad Beesly. The documentary is follow-up to Beesly's 2001 film "Okie Noodling," which exposed the world to the intriguing (some might say bizarre) sport of "noodling" -- catching catfish without hooks or bait. Since "Okie Noodling" – perhaps even because of it – noodling has become legitimized as type of sport fishing, and has been featured on MTV, ESPN and Food Network. Most of the noodlers featured in the film were on-hand for the screening and stuck around for a lively post-show Q&A.

Other highlights included the sublimely lovely "The New Year's Parade," which won the Narrative Features competition at the fest, Grand Jury Narrative winner "Disfigured," and an outdoor screening last night of popular geek film "Nerdcore Rising."