Twenty-Four Teenagers Made a Movie on the MTSU Campus. Now There’s a Movie About Them.
Every summer, something happens on the MTSU campus that most of Murfreesboro never sees. Twenty-four high school students from across Tennessee arrive, move into residence halls, and are handed the job of making an actual narrative motion picture — not a class exercise, not a short for a portfolio, but a film with a script, a shooting schedule, departments, deadlines, and all the ordinary misery that entails.
That is the Tennessee Governor's School for the Arts, the state-funded summer intensive that MTSU hosts. And this fall, a documentary about it is going to a film festival.
The film
Little Hollywood, Tennessee, directed by Christian Whittemore, is among the first three titles announced for the 57th Nashville Film Festival, which runs Sept. 24 through 30. It follows those twenty-four students through the residency as they build their movie and, in the process, find out what they are actually made of alongside peers who are as serious about it as they are. Whittemore is scheduled to attend for a discussion after the screening.
It shares that opening announcement with heavy company. One is Frampton, directed by Rob Arthur, about the rock guitarist's career and his ongoing struggle with a degenerative condition; Peter Frampton himself is slated to appear on opening night. The other is The Lorraine, from Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated director Sam Pollard, on the Memphis motel that served as a Black-owned refuge during the Jim Crow era before it became the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
Being named alongside those two is not a small thing. The festival is Academy Award-qualifying and will present close to 150 films this year across the National Museum of African American Music, the Belcourt, Hooky Entertainment at Nashville Yards, Regal Green Hills and other venues.
Why this is a Murfreesboro story
It is tempting to file this under Nashville, since that is where it screens. But the thing being documented happens here, and it happens because a public university decided decades ago that hosting the state's most talented teenage artists for a summer was worth the residence-hall space and the faculty time.
Governor's Schools are one of those quietly excellent pieces of Tennessee public infrastructure that residents rarely think about. A student gets selected — from a rural county or a city magnet, it does not matter — and for one summer is dropped into a room full of people who are as good as they are. For a lot of teenagers, that is the first time that has ever happened. Some of them find out they want to do this for a living. Some find out they do not, which is nearly as valuable and considerably cheaper to learn at seventeen than at twenty-four.
The filmmaking track produces something unusually concrete: a finished film, made under real constraints, by people who cannot yet legally rent a car. That is the raw material Whittemore had to work with, and it is why the documentary is a coming-of-age story rather than a program brochure.
A campus that keeps turning up in the credits
None of this is disconnected from what MTSU already is. The university houses one of the country's better-known recording industry programs and has spent years building out media production, and the Governor's School's filmmaking component sits comfortably in that ecosystem. Students who spend a summer here at sixteen have seen the equipment, the buildings and the faculty before they ever fill out a college application.
Which is, presumably, part of the point.
If you want to go
The festival runs Sept. 24 through 30 across those Nashville venues, roughly a half-hour up I-24 depending on when you leave. Individual screening times and the remainder of the nearly 150-film slate are still rolling out, so the schedule is worth checking closer to the date if this is the one you want to see.
More: our full guide to the 2026 Nashville Film Festival on our sister site, and the reopening of Kirksey Old Main on the same campus.
