The lineup of screenings at this year's AthFest FilmFest is pretty staggering: including shorts (but not counting individual music videos), over 30 different films will be shown over the weekend, nearly all of them produced in Athens and/or by Athenians.

Programs include Athens TeenScreen (a collection of shorts by "the next generation of Athens filmmakers"), two more separate programs of shorts (one devoted to horror films!) and the AthFest Music + Video Show, featuring about two dozen bands. Then there are the locally produced features Pushin' Up Daisies, Not Since You and The Gallon Challenge.

If you think AthFest is about music, there's plenty of it onscreen here. For starters, The Runaways and When You're Strange, both major-indie releases about major rock bands, have already begun their runs at Ciné and will continue through June 30. Weekend-only screenings include Of Montreal: Family Nouveau, Spenser Simrill, Jr.'s up-close chronicle of the local heroes' (and heroines') 2009 European tour, and the eternal local music doc Athens, GA: Inside/Out.

But the most exciting local-film-and-music event of this weekend may be the two screenings of a two-hour program dedicated to the late, beloved Athens songwriter Vic Chesnutt. The anchor of the program is Speed Racer: Welcome to the World of Vic Chesnutt, Pete Sillen's 30-minute documentary from 1994, which has never been released on DVD.

Also on the bill is a grab bag of exclusive video shot by local documentary filmmaker Erica McCarthy: a "Christmas special" from the 1980s featuring Chesnutt and the legendary Athens writer John Seawright, some footage from Chesnutt's final show, Dec.

4, 2009 in Austin, TX, and a preview of McCarthy's doc-in-progress tentatively titled Vic Chesnutt Celebration. That features interviews and performances from the weekend of Vic tribute shows at the 40 Watt this past February, including Liz Durrett's utterly breathtaking version—with Guy Picciotto and Thee Silver Mt. Zion—of "This Cruel Thing," a then-unrecorded Chesnutt song that has since shown up on Widespread Panic's new album.