John Mitchell and Jeremy Kipp Walker's delightful The History of Future Folk is screening in The Beyond, the festival's sidebar for “films that dare to be different.” This sweet, cheapie, sci-fi comedy (the aliens' space helmets are reminiscent of plastic red buckets) tells the story of Bill, aka General Trius (Nils d'Aulaire), an alien from the planet Hondo.

While searching the galaxy for somewhere new for the people of his comet-threatened planet to live, Bill wanders into a megastore and hears music for the first time. Falling irrevocably in love with tunes and musical instruments, he decides to stay on Earth, starting a family and a one-man bluegrass act. His happy life is comically disturbed when wacky fellow Hondonian Kevin (Jay Klaitz) is sent to Earth to prod Bill to resume his mission of destroying those pesky humans so that Hondonians can come to live on Earth. This is a film that sincerely has love for its characters, and the songs are actually quite catchy.

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