American Regional Cinema Lineup and Competition Juries Announced
September 29, 2026
FILM FEST KNOX, announces the lineup of its 2026 American Regional Cinema Competition: Act One, Airport BLVD, And Then I Knew ‘Twas Wind, Ponderosa, and The Pirate King. The Best Film winner will receive an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run, courtesy of Regal. Additional awards include Best Director and a Jury Prize. FILM FEST KNOX will take place November 12–15, 2026, at the downtown Regal Riviera in Knoxville, Tennessee.
VIP and Full Festival Passes for 2026 FILM FEST KNOX are on sale now, with additional ticket options available closer to the festival.
The American Regional Cinema Competition is a diverse showcase of the personal, ambitious filmmaking happening outside of the traditional industry capitals of Los Angeles and New York City. The films in the 2026 lineup were produced at various budgets and in far-ranging styles in suburban New Jersey, East Austin, Oregon, Chicago, and Virginia Beach. The makers of the competition films will be in attendance to introduce their films, participate in Q&As, and discuss the current state and future of regional cinema.
Now in its fourth edition, the American Regional Cinema Competition is fast gaining industry recognition as a platform for regional film production. For the second year in a row, MovieMaker included FILM FEST KNOX on its list of “50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.” Last year’s Best Film winner, Mouse, written and directed by Kenny Riches, began its Regal theatrical run in September with a series of sold-out screenings in his hometown, Salt Lake City, before expanding to New York City and beyond.
Another 2026 winner, Tropical Park, which had its second-ever screening in Knoxville, was later programmed at True/False Festival and First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image, and it recently won best U.S. narrative film at the New York Latino Film Festival. The director of Tropical Park, Hansel Porras Garcia, who has now screened twice at FILM FEST KNOX, was included this year in Filmmaker magazine’s prestigious “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”
“It’s been incredibly gratifying to see a community of talented filmmakers form around this competition,” said artistic director Darren Hughes. “We considered nearly 80 films before selecting these five. They’re wildly different from one another, and each evokes the particular ‘sense of place’ we champion here. Watching them all will give the FILM FEST KNOX audience a renewed excitement about American cinema.”
FILM FEST KNOX will welcome dozens of film industry professionals to Knoxville in November, including the three competition juries, which this year feature award-winning filmmakers, critics, publicists, distributors, and representatives of major streaming services.
American Regional Cinema Competition
Act One
Sophia Takal · 104 minutes
An aspiring young actress, desperate for guidance and belonging, falls under the spell of a manipulative acting coach who draws her into a web of control and obsession.
Airport BLVD
Alejandro Hendricks · 90 minutes
Set in the transforming streets of East Austin, this jazz-infused musical follows Xavier as he watches his community, friendships, and sense of home disappear. As the city evolves around him, Airport BLVD becomes a soulful, romantic, and bittersweet love letter to a city old and new.
And Then I Knew ‘Twas Wind
Darius Mackenzie · 88 minutes
A writer goes missing on a canoe trip with her boyfriend in an area of Oregon known for its fossil record dating back sixty million years.
Ponderosa
Rob Rice · 90 minutes
When the buffet where Zeke’s mom works closes down, he’s forced to entertain the advances of a rich regular who is weirdly obsessed with becoming his dad.
The Pirate King
Josh Plasse · 111 minutes
A Marine veteran struggling with PTSD and addiction finds unexpected redemption when he joins a group of pirate re-enactors, giving him a chance to fight for custody of his daughter and rebuild the life he thought was lost forever.
American Regional Cinema Competition Jury
Peter Gilbert
Peter Gilbert is an award-winning producer/director and director of photography (DP). He has been a member of Kartemquin Films and an emeritus board member for 40 years. Peter is known for his work as one of the filmmakers of Hoop Dreams. Peter also DP’d Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning American Dream. He teaches in the MFA Documentary Film Program at Wake Forest University. Last year, a film he produced, The Easy Kind, screened at FILM FEST KNOX. Peter moves back and forth between documentary and narrative films. Documentary has always been his love.
Daniel Kasman
Daniel Kasman is the VP Publishing at MUBI, a global streaming service, production company, and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. Based out of MUBI’s New York office and one of the first to join the company over 19 years ago, Daniel oversees the curatorial writing for the streaming service and is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of MUBI’s international film publication, Notebook. He also leads MUBI Editions, a new book imprint dedicated to cinema and the arts.
Madeline Whittle
Madeline Whittle is a Programmer at Film at Lincoln Center, where she joined the team in 2016. A co-programmer of NYFF Talks since 2020 and lead programmer of FLC’s Scary Movies genre showcase, she also serves on selection committees for the annual festivals New Directors/New Films and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and she has organized or co-organized numerous retrospectives and thematic repertory series. Her writing on film appears regularly in Film Comment, and her translation of French critic Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond was published by BFI/Austrian Filmmuseum in 2016.
Made in Tennessee Competition Jury
Penelope Bartlett
Penelope Bartlett has worked across streaming platforms, festivals, and art-house theaters for organizations including the Criterion Collection, Metrograph, Vimeo, Tribeca Film Festival, Full Frame Film Festival, Palm Springs Film Festival, and more. She is based in Durham, NC and is the founder and co-director of Film Durham, an organization devoted to developing, promoting, and celebrating independent film and creators in Durham and the Research Triangle area.
Thomas Southerland
Thomas Southerland teaches filmmaking at Eastern Kentucky University. In the past decade, he’s created three hybrid feature films with the poet Katerina Stoykova and co-director S. Cagney Gentry that form a loose Bulgarian trilogy. Proud Citizen won the Jury Prize at New Orleans. Fort Maria won the Best Film and Cinematography award from Ashland. Their most recent film, Other Houses, premiered at the 2025 FILM FEST KNOX and won the Best Director prize. He is dedicated to regional filmmaking.
Hillary Weston
Hillary Weston is a New York-based writer. For the last ten years, she has been the director of social for the Criterion Collection and a co-producer of their Closet Video series. In addition to writing for Criterion’s online magazine, she has also programmed collections for their streaming service, The Criterion Channel, and contributed to their disc releases. Her work has also appeared in Film Quarterly, BOMB, Interview, SSENSE, and other publications.
Elev8or Pitch Competition Jury
Jonathan Duffy
Jonathan Duffy is a creative producer, Independent Spirit Award Winner, and co-founder of Ten Acre Films. Jonathan’s recent work includes feature titles such as All That We Love starring Margaret Cho and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, What Happens Later, starring Meg Ryan and David Duchovny, and Rod Lurie’s The Senior starring Michael Chiklis and Mary Stuart Masterson. Other recent releases include Rob Connolly’s Blueback (TIFF 2022 & Sundance 2023), Mark, Mary & Some Other People (Tribeca 2021 jury award winner), and No Future (Tribeca 2021).
Tracie Laymon
Named to IFC’s list of emerging “Icons” and film innovators, Tracie Laymon studied filmmaking at the University of Texas at Austin while cutting her teeth as a video journalist for Time Warner News and interning for Richard Linklater. Her short directorial projects have won jury awards at SXSW and other festivals, while her screenwriting pursuits have won awards and honors at competitions such as LA Comedy Festival, Madrid International Film Festival, BlueCat, Scriptapalooza, ScreenCraft, and many more. Bob Trevino Likes It, her debut feature film, won the Grand Jury award and Audience Award for Best Feature Film at SXSW 2024 and has been distributed theatrically in more than a dozen countries.
Kristin Shrader
Kristin Shrader is a Knoxville-based independent awards consultant working alongside the public relations teams at Warner Bros. Discovery, FOX Entertainment, and Netflix. Prior to launching her own firm, she oversaw communications for series and brand initiatives at the #1 entertainment cable network, USA. She previously held positions at Bravo, Oxygen Media, and Fuse TV where she executed unscripted series campaigns and corporate PR initiatives.
Kelly Williams
Kelly Williams is a creative producer and co-founder, with Jonathan Duffy, of Ten Acre Films. His credits include six features that have premiered at Sundance, including Light from Light, Sorry to Bother You (Independent Spirit Award winner), The Long Dumb Road, and Pit Stop (Independent Spirit Award nominee). Other films include Mark, Mary & Some Other People (Tribeca 2021), No Future (Tribeca 2021), I Used to Go Here (SXSW 2020), What Happens Later (2023), The Senior (2023), and All That We Love(Tribeca 2024).