Denton’s inaugural film festival hopes to blur the line between fact and fiction. 
Denton’s festivals come in all varieties: airborne and terrestrial, human and animal, musical and visual. With all of its quirky events celebrating dogs, redbuds, and the blues, Denton is now poised to conquer the last festival frontier when its first major film fest debuts August 30 through September 2.
The Thin Line Film Festival will be one of only a handful of competitive, all-documentary inspired film festivals in North America—definitely a one-of-a-kind in Texas.
The festival’s primary organizer and sponsor, Texas Filmmakers Corp., is based in Denton and chose to host it in the city because of the unique art scene and lack of a major film festival, and also because the University of North Texas recently became one of only a few universities in the country to offer a graduate degree in documentary production. It’s a match made in documentary heaven.
“It’s always been one of our founding goals to create a film festival in Denton,” says Joshua Butler, the president of Texas Filmmakers Corp. “It’s just time to have an event like this in Denton.”
Butler anticipates 200 to 300 films will be submitted.
The festival’s purpose is to examine the often-blurred line between fictional films and documentaries. In addition to conventional documentaries, the festival also showcases mockumentaries and hybrid films that qualify as fiction but which are filmed in a documentary style. Organizers don’t plan on telling the audience if what they’ve seen is real or scripted.
“Viewers kind of instinctively take documentaries as fact,” Butler says. “But the filmmakers spend a lot of time trying to create an entertaining piece. Some things might be scripted, but does that mean it stops being a documentary?”
By Jason Goodman