First-ever Storyfest kicks off 2025 Red Brick Roads festival
By Sherry Lucas
The new Storyfest expands the Red Brick Roads Music & Arts Festival to embrace and celebrate additional creative pursuits. It gives the festival a day’s head start, too.
The free event at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, is hosted by the Institute for Southern Storytelling at Mississippi College. Its first outing is a double header, welcoming award-winning Mississippi author Michael Farris Smith and celebrated character actor and Mississippi native Gary Grubbs.
“It’s basically a film festival, but we didn’t want to limit ourselves to film,” said institute co-founder Anthony Thaxton. “With Storyfest, we can have an author and cover books or popular culture or music or whatever – anything with stories.”
Festival organizers had long wanted a film festival component, Thaxton said.
“And, with us having this Storytelling Institute, it just made sense for us to be able to provide that for them.”
This inaugural evening at in the Gore Art Complex’s Entergy Theater (Mississippi College East Campus at 400 East College Street) features a screening of Smith’s directorial debut short film Chasing Rabbits, based on his short story, that was filmed in Clinton with a student crew from the Institute, followed by a Q & A session. The short film premiered at the Oxford Film Festival in late February. Smith, also a screenwriter, adapted his novels, Desperation Road and The Fighter (titled “Rumble Through the Dark” as a movie) for feature films. Lemuria Books will be on hand with books for sale.
The night’s second half features a conversation with Grubbs, along with film and TV clips highlighting his long career that has included nearly two hundred credited shows and films since the 1970s, including movies such as JFK, Silkwood and Honkytonk Man, and television programs such as The Burning Bed, Fatal Vision and Foxfire. Some of his best-known roles include Harlan in Will & Grace and Mr. Dummont in Common Law.
Enjoy behind-the-scenes scoops and Hollywood insider stories from the guests, stick around for the meet-and-greet and book signing, and get a peek at the studio, too, at Storyfest.
