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Ciné to host special screening of 'That Evening Sun'

Forget your "Clerks" and your "Blair Witch Project."

The amount of heavy lifting normally involved in getting an independent film to the screen is mammoth.

But sometimes fateful events occur that can help speed the plow. And sometimes those events occur inside Mexican restaurants.

Such was the case when producer Terrence Berry ran into actor Ray McKinnon at a Los Angeles eatery sometime after having failed to interest McKinnon in a project he and director Scott Teems had been working on.

"He swore that he wasn't stalking me," McKinnon says over a phone line from Los Angeles. "But he was a well-spoken young man, and when I came home and reread his cover letter and got 10 pages into the script, I was hooked."

McKinnon, who won an Oscar in 2002 for his short film "The Accountant," not only agreed to help Teems and Berry produce the project, he also took one of the supporting roles.

The film, "That Evening Sun," opens Friday at Ciné and features the work of McKinnon and Carrie Preston; Berry and Teems also were able to secure the services of none other than Hal Holbrook for the lead.

The movie centers around the conflict between retired farmer Abner Meecham (Holbrook), who's fled his nursing home only to find ne'er-do-well Lonzo Choat (McKinnon) and his family having taken up residence on what Meecham still contends is his property.

The struggle over what the other's presence signifies to each character slowly escalates after the older man installs himself in a shack adjacent to the main farmhouse.

At 84, Holbrook is as sturdy a figure on screen as ever, but Teems initially hadn't considered the veteran actor, despite the small size of the talent pool that potentially could portray Meecham.

"There are only a handful of actors who can really play the role of an 80-year-old Tennessee farmer. And Hal Holbrook wasn't on my list, because he was just off my radar," Teems says.

But after seeing Holbrook in Sean Penn's 2007 award-winning drama "Into The Wild," a role for which Holbrook was nominated for an Oscar, he realized "that's the guy,"