The second half of the Nashville Film Festival began Tuesday and I had the chance to see four featured films and nine shorts.

The highlight was “A Fat Wreck”, a documentary about the early history of Fat Wreck Chords and the label’s influence on punk rock, was a film that originally wasn’t on my schedule but it fit in with my other screenings so I added it at the last minute.

It wound up being a pleasant surprise, an interesting look at a side of music that I’m rather unfamiliar with.

Interviews with co-founders Fat Mike and Erin Burkett, as well as artists that worked with the label (with band names like No Use For a Name, Strung Out, and Propaghandi), provide interesting insight into how the label evolved into one big dysfunctional family with Mike giving the artists unprecedented creative freedom.

The film captures that attitude with the use of 8-bit animation and re-enactments with puppets that strangely enough captures the insanity of the bands and their music.

A shorts program dealing with romance entitled “Love Bites” also provided some fun, with eight films ranging from the sad to the sublime. My favorites included the comically wrong “Love is Blind,” “How to Lose Weight in Four Easy Steps,” and the Bryce Dallas Howard directed “Solemates.”

Another actress stepping behind the camera was Academy Award winner Natalie Portman, who directed and co-wrote “A Tale of Love and Darkness.”

Based on the memoirs of Amos Oz the film takes place at Jerusalem in the last years of Mandatory Palestine and the first years of independent Israel and how Amos’s mother (played by Portman).

Portman clearly tackled a project that has meaning to her, but I don’t think the final result delivers quite the impact she was hoping for. The film plays like memoirs, with some ideas and scenes working but the entire scope lacking consistency.

I feel like the mother’s damaged backstory was more compelling and would have taken the film in a much more intriguing – and emotional – place.

Here are the other two feature films I viewed on Tuesday:

“The Lure” was the insane horror-musical from Poland  about two mermaid sisters who come ashore and join a band, with one sister having an appetite for human blood.

This is a bizarre experience that kind of goes haywire in the second half, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it gain cult status and have a successful run on the midnight movie circuit.

“Before the Sun Explodes” is a dark comedy about a middle aged stay at home dad and washed up comedian (Bill Dawes) who is befriended by a female comedian (Sarah Butler) after a blow-up with his wife leads to a horrible set in front of a producer for a potential sit-com.

The film starts out promising but fizzles, although Butler’s performance is very good. I found myself much more interested in her story, than the male lead, and would have loved to have seen a movie about her character instead.