Film Tourism + Regional Indie Filmmaking Drive New Visitors to Tennessee Small Town
a/b studios’ latest film How to Get the Girl stars in the Falling for Sweetwater film tourism campaign, or ‘cinematourism’ as we’ve been calling it before doing a simple Google search for this Substack. Film tourism, according to its Wiki article, focuses mainly on large-scale feature films and franchises, and credits its increase in popularity to the rise of international travel, the rapid growth of the entertainment industry, and cult-like celebrity status. Our work with Sweetwater is already paying dividends, proving you don’t need celebrity star power to inspire interest when you have a genuinely charming cinematic setting.
Why focus on regional tourism?
When I (Amelia) worked as the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center’s rural outreach coordinator, I met county and city leaders from rural communities surrounding Knoxville who shared a near universal concern. They were interested in the small business resources — like education, mentorship, and tools — that we offered, but the idea of starting more businesses further exacerbated the real need: Customers.
Rural communities, whose populations are often in the hundreds or single thousands, need tourism to drive local revenues, especially to sustain small businesses. Many of these communities host events like the Grainger County Tomato Festival and the Great Smoky Mountains Fiber Fair to attract new visitors they hope will stop at local eateries and purchase goods from local vendors.
Entrepreneurship has always felt like the obvious solution to economic uncertainty and opportunities for prosperity when it came to folks living outside “the system,” whether that was coastal hubs, regional metropoles, or traditional employment and academic pathways. I was humbled to learn that there were problems even entrepreneurship couldn’t solve.
I created Outdoorsy, a regional travel TV show centered on activities like mountain biking, paddleboarding, hiking, and more, to experiment with ways to drive new visitors to small towns. We know that media (especially video) has the potential to drive thousands of tourists to otherwise little-known destinations, depending on your distribution footprint — but also that media is expensive to create.
While watching the 2024 Netflix rom-com Find Me Falling, it occurred to me that “This movie is a 90-minute tourism ad for the country of Cyprus,” and I was hooked! The historic architecture, stunning natural scenery, even the food montage had me researching flights and texting the a/b studios team “There’s a collaboration opportunity here, we just gotta figure it out!”
Flash forward to researching nearby small towns as potential locations for How to Get the Girl, the short film we produced for Film Fest Knox’s Elev8or Pitch Competition. A lot of familiar locales came up on the list from my rural outreach days, and my memories of Sweetwater’s historic Main Street, from the cozy coffee shop and festive gazebo serenading the whole street with music has me digging through my contacts for their director of tourism. The locations that are now iconic locations in the film has been “new discoveries” for me after a stop off I40 led to a small-town love affair.
Featured: Sweetwater murals by Megan Lingerfelt (top right) and Cymone Wilder, painted by Kristin Luna and Scott VanVelaor of DMA Events, The Lazy Beagle, Cup Runneth Over Coffeehouse, Sweetwater Antiques, Sweetwater Creamery, and Sweetwater Flower Shop.
I’ll never forget their response to me running this crazy idea behind them — to make a short film that acted like a commercial for a small town, driving tourism and setting the stage for a future feature film.
“Our biggest dream as a tourism office is to have a Hallmark movie made here.”
What synchronicity! Not only were we pitching them a romantic comedy for this first project, but members of the a/b studios team have connections to Hallmark through their broader production networks. They were willing to take a chance with us, and we were willing to give it our all to make it happen.
That first conversation took place in August; by November, we screened the finished film for the first time. We dove right into creating the rom-com-themed Travel Guide over the holiday season, and kicked off a press tour at the beginning of the year.
On January 23, we launched the Falling for Sweetwater tourism campaign with the “Sweetheart Supercut,” a collection of clips from the film that illustrate the series of romantic dates, featuring the real local businesses from the story. The ad has now been seen more than 16,000 times (on February 5, 2025), driving thousands of clicks to the travel guide and the experiences linked on the page.
The media created by our talented cast & crew for the short film is now being repurposed in the Supercut, on the Travel Guide, in social media content, and across a press tour — all driving new visitors to the city of Sweetwater and its Main Street businesses.
We’ll know more after the campaign concludes on Valentine’s Day weekend; we plan to use Placer.AI data to compare the 2024 downtown traffic to this year’s numbers, as well as calculate conversion rates from the video ads, web traffic, social media posts, SEO inquiries, and supporting articles. Support from the Sweetwater community and regional press outlets like Teknovation, the Talking Indies in My Undies podcast, soon-to-include Living East Tennessee (tune in on Valentine’s Day for a thirty-minute special!) and more has syndicated this campaign further than we could’ve ever imagined.
Recently, Texas shared a star-studded video calling for more productions in the state, focusing on relevant stories and the celebrities already invested in the region. Not only have Tennessee locations starred the popular TV show Nashville and films like Stoker and October Sky, the Falling for Sweetwater campaign illustrates you can inspire tourism even without big stars if you have a charming, irresistible setting.
More to come on this campaign, the results, and our next steps for developing Sweetwater’s feature film.
