An annual arts tradition in Deep Ellum is calling it quits: The Deep Ellum Arts Festival, which has been a staple of Dallas' spring festival circuit for 28 years, will not return.
According to a statement on its website from founder and owner Stephen Millard, the festival did not have enough money to continue.
"The Festival has had a great run, but with the current economic conditions, along with security concerns affecting all major public events, producing a free-to-attend art and music festival in Deep Ellum has become too costly and arduous to continue," he says. "We have always been dependent on support from the local community, national sponsors and in-kind media, and I have become unable to move forward at this time without taking on unjustifiable personal financial and liability risks. Under these circumstances, the Festival has simply and sadly become unsustainable."
The festival faltered during the pandemic getting pushed back three times. The 2020 rendition was initially postponed from April to September, then canceled entirely.
Created in 1994, the Deep Ellum Arts Festival was a free community event featuring artists from across the U.S. displaying and selling original paintings, sculptures, photography, jewelry, woodworking, ceramics, mixed media, leatherworks, and fashion.
It also featured a stage with bands, singer/songwriters, and musical artists representing different genres.
Some local artists and performers said they felt it favored out-of-towners over locals, and have created a Facebook page to brainstorm a replacement.
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in We Live in Time.
The art of filmmaking is one that can be done in myriad ways, although the vast majority of them tend to follow the three-act structure of telling a story linearly from beginning to end. Filmmakers that play around with that structure, as is done in aptly-named
We Live in Time, must find sufficient ways in which to involve viewers or they risk undercutting the power of the story they’re trying to tell.
Within the first few minutes of the film, it has shown scenes featuring Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) in the midst of early love, interacting with their young daughter, and reacting to the news of a cancer diagnosis for Almut. Two of those revelations are ones that are typically held back in a story focused on the romance of one couple, so the fact that they’re shown right away is an indication that director John Crowley and writer Nick Payne have great confidence in their ability to keep viewers hooked.
The film continues its transmogrification of time throughout, sometimes stopping to show a few scenes in a row from one period in Almut and Tobias’ life together, but more often than not mixing them up as a way of comparing and contrasting how alike or different they are. Each scene builds upon the next to paint a picture of the couple’s unique love.
Organizing the film as a traditional narrative would have been the safe way to go for the filmmakers, as it has all the hallmarks of the grand romance turned tearjerker. This mixing up of the story definitely makes it stand out, although the results are hit-and-miss. When Crowley sticks with one timeline longer than he had previously, it helps to connect with the two main characters. When he goes through the multiple times rapidly, it forces the audience to play catch up, slightly hampering the story’s progress.
The scenes that work the best are the ones depicting the couple’s burgeoning bond, as it shows who they were as individuals and what they were becoming together. The film mostly elides the age gap between the two actors (Garfield is 41, Pugh is 28), and that’s for the best as the characters have an affinity for one another that transcends any other concerns.
As the film progresses, it does become a little difficult to keep the timelines straight. The story contains certain markers that aid in the storytelling, but the rapidity with which Crowley goes back and forth between different times, as well as similar looks for the two stars, leads to questions about when a certain segment is taking place.
Even if the story is not quite as powerful as it could have been, both Pugh and Garfield put in great performances. The former Oscar nominees each have a way of saying a lot with just their faces, and their expressiveness often does more to elicit emotions than the story itself. Few other actors get much time to make much of an impact, but Lee Braithwaite makes a nice impression as a sous chef to Almut, who is an acclaimed chef.
Going the linear route might have helped the legibility of the story of
We Live in Time, but it also would have made it the same as most other films in its genre. The strength of the narrative is somewhat muted by its early reveals, but it still has a very affecting arc for the central couple, aided by two award-worthy actors demonstrating their significant talents.