Hitoshi Ozawa, 2013, Japan, 86 min

When a powerful Yakuza boss passes away, his final order is to locate his long-lost child and name them as his successor. Their search leads to an unexpected place: a lively queer bar, where they meet Nana—a trans woman and the boss’s heir! A fresh and heartfelt reimagining of the yakuza genre, The Clan’s Heir Is a Trans Woman blends action, drama, and surprising tenderness. This genre-bending tale marks a unique and poignant moment in the landscape of trans cinema.

Jean Renoir, France, 1951, 99 min

First Impressions

Director Jean Renoir’s entrancing first color feature—shot entirely on location in India—is a visual tour de force. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the Bengal river around which their daily lives unfold. Enriched by Renoir’s subtle understanding and appreciation for India and its people, The River gracefully explores the fragile connections between transitory emotions and everlasting creation.

Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1958, 118 min

First Impressions

Later in his career, Ozu started becoming increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation, a shift that was cemented in Equinox Flower, his gorgeously detailed first color film, about an old-fashioned father and his newfangled daughter.

Pierre Clémenti, 1986, France, 81 min

In Necrocity, 300 kilos of heroin are missing, the police jump to action. Here, the state is merely a means to efficiently impose cruel police brutality and arbitraty violence, and an underground of club-goers indulge in drugs, parties, and sex. A murderer is on the loose in this dystopian future city, and crime is about to rise to a fever pitch. Shades of Kenneth Anger and Alphaville pervade Pierre Clementi’s wild, hypnotic, and visually overpowering IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLUE RASCAL, a monument of Parisian Underground Cinema.

Glauber Rocha, Brazil, 1964, 118 min // $10

Latin American Film Festival of Dallas is proud to present the LAFFD Film Club. Once a month we will show a classic Latin American film.

Glauber Rocha's sophomore feature is a scorched-earth allegory about the blind followers of dead-end ideologies. Somewhere in the Brazilian hinterlands of the 1940s, ranch hand Manoel becomes an outlaw after killing his swindling boss. He pledges allegiance to Sebastião, a self-styled holy man who preaches revolt against rich landowners even as he perpetrates unspeakable acts of violent zealotry against the innocent. While the landowners hire a mercenary to take out Sebastião, Manoel and his wife Rosa join cangaceiros Corisco and Dadá, only to find themselves once more in league with evil, deluded forces. Steeped in history, myth, religion, and politics, and suffused with the feverish intensity of the blistering desert, Black God, White Devil is one of the Cinema Novo movement's most uncompromising statements on current social issues as well as the universal problem of mindless fanaticism.

Kira Muratova, 1978, USSR/Russia, 79 min

First Impressions

On a rough and tumble construction site, the conversation flows and love blooms for trio Lyuba, Misha, and Kolya. In the liminal space of their workplace, they build material and intangible connections. Kira Muratova’s signature eye for the foibles and quirks of human nature is on full display in this elliptical, entrancing film, which she claimed was her favourite of her own works.

Yalcy is a Dallas based DJ & producer that also runs the DFW based record label Innasection.

Music Time is a class in which you will:

• Collaborate with a community of like-minded individuals

• Cultivate a sustainable creative practice

• Develop skills and knowledge in music production, Ableton and mixing

• Make some cool music

Class is Sunday, Dec 8th from 2-5pm. $30 admission to this class.

Karen Authur, 1978, USA, 102min // Featuring a virtual Q&A with director Karen Authur

One of the first American horror films directed by a woman, Arthur’s independently financed The Mafu Cage features a chillingly committed Kane as Cissy, a child-woman who lives with astronomer sister Lee Grant in a crumbling house in the Hollywood Hills, passing her days tormenting her pet monkeys, harboring incestuous desires for her sibling, and generally spiraling towards a spectacular, blood-splattered breakdown. A primal psychodrama with insidious water torture pacing and suffocatingly claustrophobic atmosphere, The Mafu Cage is a movie that gets under your skin and stays put.

FREE SCREENING! The Oak Cliff Cultural Center will screen the Red Reminds Me… series with Spacy, hold a discussion between Tamera Garrett* and Yolanda Bell, and host a collective grief process engagement with Ofelia Alvarenga. In addition, a mobile STD testing station by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation will be in front of the Oak Cliff Cultural Center. 

The Oak Cliff Cultural Center is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2024 by presenting Red Reminds Me…, a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today.

Red Reminds Me… will feature newly commissioned videos by Gian Cruz (Philippines), Milko Delgado (Panama), Imani Harrington (USA), David Oscar Harvey (USA), Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar (Argentina/Colombia), Nixie (Belgium), Vasilios Papapitsios (USA).

Pierre Etaix France, 1969, 87 min

First Impressions

Despite having a loving and patient wife at home, a good-natured suit-and-tie man, played by writer-director Pierre Etaix, finds himself hopelessly attracted to his gorgeous new secretary in this gently satirical tale of temptation. From this simple, standard premise, Etaix weaves a constantly surprising web of complexly conceived jokes. Le grand amour is a cutting, nearly Buñuelian takedown of the bourgeoisie that somehow doesn’t have a mean bone in its body.

Michelangelo Antonioni, France, 1964, 117 min

First Impressions

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and Red Desert, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This provocative look at the spiritual desolation of the technological age—about a disaffected woman, brilliantly portrayed by Antonioni muse Monica Vitti, wandering through a bleak industrial landscape beset by power plants and environmental toxins, and tentatively flirting with her husband’s coworker, played by Richard Harris—continues to keep viewers spellbound. With one startling, painterly composition after another—of abandoned fishing cottages, electrical towers, looming docked ships—Red Desert creates a nearly apocalyptic image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age.

Max Ophuls Germany, 1955, 115 min

First Impressions

Lola Montès is a visually ravishing, narratively daring dramatization of the life of the notorious courtesan and showgirl, played by Martine Carol. With his customary cinematographic flourish and, for the first time, vibrant color, Max Ophuls charts the course of Montès’s scandalous past through the invocations of the bombastic ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of the American circus where she has ended up performing. Ophuls’s final film, Lola Montès is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1999, Japan, 103 min // FREE SCREENING

Four by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Based on Kazumi Yumoto’s 2010 novel, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film begins with a young widow named Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), who has been emotionally flattened and muted by the disappearance of her husband Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano). One day, from out of the blue or the black, Yusuke’s ghost drops in, more like an exhausted and unexpected guest than a wandering spirit. And then Journey to the Shore becomes a road movie.

Jaromil Jireš, Czechoslovakia, 1970, 76 min

A girl on the verge of womanhood finds herself in a sensual fantasyland of vampires, witchcraft, and other threats in this eerie and mystical movie daydream. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders serves up an endlessly looping, nonlinear fairy tale, set in a quasi-medieval landscape. Ravishingly shot, enchantingly scored, and spilling over with surreal fancies, this enticing phantasmagoria from director Jaromil Jireš is among the most beautiful oddities of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

Věra Chytilová, Czechoslovakia, 1966, 76 min

“Daisies is a brightly colored surrealist comedy starring a couple of chicks in search of kicks.”—B. Ruby Rich

A landmark example of the Czech New Wave intersecting with feminist cinema, Věra Chytilová’s Daisies is a playfully surreal and absurdist romp that follows two young women setting out to prank the patriarchy that controls the world they live in. Seeking pleasure and debauchery, they run rampant through banquet halls and nightclubs, staging farcical scenes of social rebellion.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1999, Japan, 103 min // FREE SCREENING

Four by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

In this quiet masterpiece from filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, patriarch Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) suddenly loses his job, putting his family’s happy lives at risk. Through this tense story of a family on the edge of despair, Kurosawa creates a domestic drama no less haunting than the genre and horror cinema he’s so well known for.

Charles Pinon, 1996, USA, 54 min

A con artist is held captive by an unhinged cannibal family that ingests copious quantities of hallucinogenic, green fungal goo covertly harnessed from an otherworldly, sentient crystal housed in their third third floor apartment of horrors. Featuring a man who willfully chooses to be a dog, sexual stimulation via blowtorch, and a corpulent, nude and blood soaked Godzilla-sized Jesus; We Await is a shot on video, urban riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that slowly descends into a psycho sexual, drug-fueled, analog aurora borealis nightmare like no other. Starring director Pinion, adult filmmaker David Aaron Clark, visual artist Alyssa Taylor Wendt, and boasting a blistering soundtrack featuring music by Crash Worship, Neurosis, and Unsane. Special $15 double feature option!

Charles Pinion, 1993, USA, 69 min

After a vengeful sorceress is tortured and killed by a corrupt industrialist looking to harnass the spectral powers of Red Spirit Lake, her niece arrives in snow covered Angel Falls to settle her aunt's estate. A meditation on The Old Dark House replete with UFO abductions, castration, frank nudity, witchcraft, fatal fistings, and slughterous saunas; Red Spirit Lake is a cacophony of subversive hyper violence, psychotic surrealism, salacious sexual choas, and picturesque winter vistas featuring acting performances by a cavalcade of legendary Cinema of Transgression era artists and filmmakers including Richard Kern, Holly Adams, Kembra Pfahler, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and Tommy Turner as well as an insurgent soundtrack featuring music by Cop Shoot Cop, Lydia Lunch, Clint Ruin, and The Lunachicks. Special $15 double feature option!

Jan Němec, Czechoslovakia, 1964, 67 min

With this simultaneously harrowing and lyrical debut feature, Jan Němec established himself as the most uncompromising visionary among the radical filmmakers who made up the Czechoslovak New Wave. Adapted from a novel by Arnošt Lustig, Diamonds of the Night closely tracks two boys who escape from a concentration-camp transport and flee into the surrounding woods, hostile terrain where the brute realities of survival coexist with dreams, memories, and fragments of visual poetry. Along with visceral camera work by Jaroslav Kučera and Miroslav Ondříček—two of Czechoslovak cinema’s most influential cinematographers—Němec makes inventive use of fractured editing, elliptical storytelling, and flights of surrealism as he strips context away from this bare-bones tale, evoking the panicked delirium of consciousness lost in night and fog.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2002, Japan, 115 min // FREE SCREENING

Four by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Enigmatic Mamoru (Tadanobu Asano) lives alone with his poisonous but hauntingly luminous jellyfish that stings anyone getting too close. Mamoru’s intense antisocial behavior is echoed by his co-worker and sole friend, Yuji (Jô Odagiri). They also share a dislike for their excessively solicitous boss, Fujiwara. However, and inextricably, Mamoru takes matters to the extreme, murdering both Fujiwara and his wife. With Mamoru in prison awaiting execution, Yuji is entrusted with the care of the lethal jellyfish, becoming attached to the strange creature while continuing with Mamoru’s previous efforts to acclimate the saltwater animal to thrive in freshwater.

Martin Rejtman, 1999, Argentina, 92 min // FREE SCREENING

Latin American Film Festival of Dallas is proud to present the LAFFD Film Club. Once a month we will show a classic Latin American film!

Silvia Prieto sells soap to passersby in busy city squares, pores over phone books to find women who share her name, and won’t concede to settle down with either of the boyish men in her orbit. Rejtman’s radiant second feature, which follows Silvia (played by the singer Rosario Bléfari) for a short stretch of her life in Buenos Aires, is a comedy of details—the statue that supposedly resembles Silvia and passes from owner to owner; the blazer Silvia permanently borrows from a wealthy male admirer; the chicken she buys every night—and occasional, quiet epiphanies. Silvia Prieto is one of the jewels of recent Argentine cinema, and perhaps Rejtman’s most perfectly realized film to date.

With directors Matt Peterson & Malek Rasamny in attendance for an introduction and Q&A following the screening. This screening is held at 901 Fort Worth Ave, Dallas, Texas 75208. Free but suggested $10-$15 donation at the door. No one turned away for lack of funds!

Shot between 2014 to 2017, SPACES OF EXCEPTION observes and juxtaposes the communities and struggles of the American Indian reservation and the Palestinian refugee camp. It visits reservations in Arizona, New Mexico, New York, and South Dakota, as well camps in Lebanon and the West Bank, “places defined by their historical and spiritual resistance” in order to “understand the conditions for life, community, and sovereignty.” The film compiles interviews with members of the American Indian Movement, the Mohawk Warrior Society, and Diné families resisting displacement on Black Mesa, as well as members of Fatah, Palestinian environmental and media activists, autonomous youth committees, and the families of political prisoners and martyrs. Directed by Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny, it is an attempt to understand the significance of the land—its memory and divisions—and the conditions for life, community, and sovereignty. While the histories are distinct, dispossession and loss unite these communities in solidarity, and the alternating stories highlight both their unique tragedies and their revolutionary commonalities. Mostly eschewing archival footage, SPACES OF EXCEPTION showcases the present, in which each day lived is itself an act of resistance.

Ester Krumbachová, 1970, Czechoslovakia, 72 min

She is in her forties – or near them –  and life isn’t at all what she expected. Maybe a trip down memory lane could help? In her younger days there had been a splendid young man, Bohouš Čert whom she fancied and who had also seemed interested in her. And so, she looks for and finds Bohouš Čert, who is now Engineer Čert. He has become pretentious, arrogant, self-involved – a nightmare. And still, she thinks it has to be this cretinous creature who will lead her to the altar.

Murdering the Devil remains the sole directorial effort of art director and costume designer Ester Krumbachová.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1999, Japan, 103 min // FREE SCREENING

Masquerading as an ecological thriller, Kurosawa’s fascinating philosophical study of the self is fractal-like in its complexity and elegance. After botching a high-profile hostage negotiation, Goro Yabuike is forced to go on vacation. After missing his bus, he encounters a rare tree specimen that one seeks to destroy, another who would protect at all costs, and government goons who seek to kill and preserve it.

Four by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

A double feature from Texas collective dontwatchtheclock! Followed by a post-screening live Q&A.

CAN WE TALK?

Mark Lopez, 2023, USA, 11 minutes

Personal Issues and ideological differences, during a fifteen minute break, push a film production to the verge of collapse.

"HALF TAB"

William Zamaripa & Natan Makonnen, 2023, USA, 46 minutes

Synopsis: After not seeing him for seven years, Amir goes to New York to meet his childhood best friend, Nike, in hopes of convincing him to take acid to reconnect.

Local Texas collective Dontwatchtheclock Texas Shorts Showcase featuring a live Q&A with the directors // Total runtime: 120 min

"HOMEWORK": A house full of irritable twenty-somethings and their obnoxious shih tzu navigate through a typical Friday, meandering around in search of something to break the boredom.

"DAILIES": After throwing a party the night before, Abiy and Joseph decide to abandon their obligations and spend a peaceful Sunday together.

"BEST WORK YET": Ignoring their struggle to make rent, three kleptomaniacs travel to a punk show across town, pissing off Austin locals every step of the way.

“Can We Talk” Personal Issues and ideological differences, during a fifteen minute break, push a film production to the verge of collapse.

Carol Mansour, 2023, Lebanon, 72 min // FREE SCREENING

Aida (the director’s mother) struggles with Alzheimer’s and loss of memory, frequently “returning” to Yafa of her youth, until her eventual final return. It is a tribute to the past and an attempt to restore individual and collective memory of Palestinians prevented from return, even after death.

Khaled Jarrar, 2012, Palestine, 70 min // FREE SCREENING

A visceral Road Movie that chronicles the daily travails of Palestinians of all backgrounds as they seek routes through, under, around, and over a bewildering matrix of barriers.