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 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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 nanlage@mplonline.org.
The premiere kicks off a full weekend of programming for the South Alabama Film Festival, now in its fifth year. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.