Mobile film fans have a packed weekend ahead starting Sept. 12, when the South Alabama Film Festival opens its fifth year alongside the world premiere of a locally made film exploring the life of one of the city’s most celebrated literary figures. “The Passion of Miss Augusta,” a new film centered on 19th-century novelist Augusta Evans Wilson and her 1866 bestseller “St. Elmo,” will debut at Bernheim Hall in downtown Mobile on Thursday, Sept. 12, at 6:30 p.m. The screening will be preceded by a 6 p.m. reception sponsored by the Ben May Charitable Trust. Both the reception and the screening are free and open to the public.
The pairing is a fitting way for the festival to mark a milestone year. Bernheim Hall, the stately auditorium inside the Ben May Main Library downtown, sits in the same city where Wilson grew up and set much of her fiction, and the premiere brings her story back to the streets that produced it. For a festival that has spent five years building an audience for independent and regional film, opening with a homegrown work about a homegrown literary giant doubles down on the identity that separates it from the larger festivals in bigger cities.
A Novelist the Whole Country Read
The film comes from Alabama filmmaker Robert Clem, whose previous documentary work has examined figures such as writer Eugene Walter and novelist William March. Clem’s latest project pairs the film with an accompanying online museum devoted to Wilson’s life and literary legacy, which is also set to launch Sept. 12. The museum is designed as a permanent companion to the film, holding the interviews, photographs and documents that could not fit into the runtime and making them available to readers and researchers anywhere.
Wilson ranked among the most commercially successful American novelists of the 19th century, and “St. Elmo” was a phenomenon in its day, later adapted into several film versions after her death. The novel sold with a speed that put it behind only the Bible and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the American book market of its era, and readers named towns, schools and even their daughters after its characters. Augusta herself became one of the first American women to earn a fortune from fiction alone, an achievement all the more striking for a Southern woman writing during and just after the Civil War.
Because only a handful of photographs of Wilson are known to survive, Clem built the film around dramatized scenes drawn from “St. Elmo” itself, a novel widely regarded as closely mirroring Wilson’s own life. The story follows a young woman of modest means and high principle who pursues a career as a writer, hoping to serve as an example to other young women of her time. The scarcity of visual records made the dramatization not merely a stylistic choice but a practical necessity, and it allows the film to show Wilson’s inner life through the fiction she wrote rather than through images that no longer exist.
The Cast and the Characters
Yale-trained actress Marnye Young takes on the dual role of Wilson and the novel’s heroine, Edna Earl. Actor Jason Downs plays both St. Elmo Murray, the novel’s brooding hero, and James Spaulding, the real-life New York publisher whose broken engagement to Wilson in 1860 is widely believed to have inspired the Murray character. The doubling is the film’s central device: Edna Earl’s rise from poor Southern girl to celebrated author tracks Wilson’s own path, and the magnetic, irritable St. Elmo Murray stands in for the publisher Wilson nearly married.
Literary scholar Nina Baym has argued that Wilson’s novels, though their style may feel dated to modern readers, helped lay the groundwork for what later became known as Southern Gothic literature. Clem’s film leans into that idea by presenting “St. Elmo” in two distinct forms: as the silent film it actually became in the early 20th century, and as an imagined 1950s Hollywood adaptation done in the Southern Gothic style popularized by adaptations of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.
Clem has said the approach lets him test Baym’s theory while probing how much the constraints placed on women had really changed between 1866 and the 1950s. Framing the same story in two eras exposes the question the film keeps asking: whether a woman of talent and principle in the mid-20th century truly had more freedom to shape her own life than Wilson’s heroine had a century earlier, or whether the forms of constraint had simply changed shape.
The online museum accompanying the film will include video interviews with Baym, Mobile historian and writer John Sledge, and other scholars discussing Wilson’s place in Southern literary history. Sledge, whose books on Mobile’s history and architecture have made him one of the region’s most trusted chroniclers, adds local grounding to a story that is often told as national literary history without attention to the city that shaped Wilson.
Following the Bernheim Hall screening, Clem will join Victorian literature scholar Susan Reynolds for a discussion open to attendees. Those with questions about the event can contact Nancy Anlage, special events coordinator at the Mobile Public Library, at (251) 208-7097 or [email protected].
Five Years of the Festival
The premiere kicks off a full weekend of programming for the South Alabama Film Festival, now in its fifth year. The festival has grown into one of the Gulf Coast’s more distinctive film events, built around Alabama stories and independent work rather than the big-budget premieres that larger cities chase, and its anniversary slate reflects the mix that has drawn audiences to Mobile screens since its founding.
As part of a new partnership with the SouthSounds music festival, organizers have been collecting online votes for a Southern Video Music Block, with the top 10 vote-getters set to screen for a live audience during the festival, who will then pick their own favorites. The collaboration links two of Mobile’s homegrown festivals — one for film, one for music — and gives regional musicians a place for their videos that neither event offered alone. The voting structure keeps the audience involved at every stage, from nominating the videos to choosing the winners in the theater.
Alabama Stories on the Screen
This year’s slate also includes a documentary tracing the story of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and the recording studio built by producer Rick Hall along the banks of the Tennessee River. The film examines how Hall, working through personal hardship and the racial tensions of the era, brought together Black and white musicians to create what became known as the “Muscle Shoals Sound,” drawing artists such as Mick Jagger, Percy Sledge and Etta James to the small Alabama town over the decades.
For Alabama audiences, the Muscle Shoals documentary is a reminder that the state’s cultural exports have never been limited to what outsiders expect. The northwest Alabama recording scene that Hall built produced some of the most influential American music of the 20th century, recorded by integrated studio bands in a region where integration was anything but easy, and its story carries obvious resonance for a Mobile audience watching another set of Alabama artists on the same bill.
Also on the schedule is a documentary revisiting the filming of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in Mobile between late May and early September 1976, told through the recollections of local residents who took part in the production. The Steven Spielberg production brought a Hollywood crew to the Gulf Coast for an entire summer, and for Mobilians of a certain age the memory of watching movie sets rise around their neighborhoods remains vivid. The documentary lets those residents tell the story in their own words, preserving a piece of the city’s film history that exists mostly in scattered recollections.
Independent Shorts and Features
Festival organizers have rounded out the lineup with a mix of independent shorts and features, including a science-fiction thriller centered on a government climate-weapons program, an absurdist comedy following a detective investigating a boy’s mysterious disappearance from his own home, and a coming-of-age short about a teenager who retreats into a soundscape built from field recordings.
The range is characteristic of the festival’s programming philosophy. A single weekend can carry a blockbuster-scale thriller premise, a deadpan comedy, and a quiet experimental short, all sharing nothing except that each represents independent filmmaking in its purest form. The genre spread also gives Mobile audiences a chance to see kinds of film that rarely receive theatrical bookings along the Gulf Coast, particularly short-form and experimental work.
The coming-of-age short built from field recordings illustrates the kind of filmmaking the festival exists to support: small crews, unusual creative choices, and stories told with resources that commercial productions would never attempt. For local filmmakers in the audience, such films double as a demonstration of what is possible without studio backing.
Tickets and the Weekend Ahead
Festival passes granting entry to all screenings and events for the weekend are available for purchase online, with full screening locations and times listed on the festival’s website. The pass structure encourages attendees to sample the full slate rather than attending a single screening, which organizers see as the best way to experience a festival built on discovery — audiences arriving for the Augusta Evans Wilson premiere may find themselves equally captivated by a Muscle Shoals documentary or a student short two days later.
Between the free Bernheim Hall premiere, the music video block, the Alabama documentaries and the independent features, the fifth-anniversary edition may be the festival’s most ambitious yet. It opens with a Mobile novelist who conquered 19th-century America, revisits the Muscle Shoals studios that conquered 20th-century radio, and closes with filmmakers still working toward their own breakthroughs — a through line that runs from Mobile’s literary past to whatever Alabama’s screen future holds.