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Film Festival
On my way to Cinépolis for my first screening of DIFF 2025, I heard a ping from my phone. As I drove, my car’s robot voice delivered the incoming message from a North Texas Film Critics Association colleague. He was letting the NTFCA Discord channel know that he saw one of the DIFF opening films, called Omaha, at Sundance, and that it was his favorite film of that fest. I was, in fact, on my way to see that very movie.
My film festival coverage for 2025 is in full swing with the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF). This is an exciting year for DIFF for one particular reason. For the first time in its nineteen-year history, DIFF is now an Oscar-qualifying festival following an announcement last October from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The Dallas International Film Festival is now one of 181 festivals worldwide – 59 in the US – that has been approved by the AMPAS as a qualifying festival. According to the DIFF 2025 website, “[F]ilms that win qualified awards between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025, may be qualified to enter the 98th Academy Awards®, provided that the films meet all the requirements set forth in the official rules for that season.”
Two weeks ago, I signed off at the end of my SXSW 2025 post-mortem by looking ahead to the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival. Please allow me to now pull a Tarantino and go back to the week before SXSW started. In the crush of activity over the four days between what I’m about to describe and the first day of South By – it was a flurry of laundry, the day job (because I’m only given so much PTO in a given year!), and preparing for my trip down to Austin – I barely had time to recover from another film festival (let alone getting anything written about it) before I was out the door again.
But I need to go back even further.
Standing near the entrance of the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse, waiting to get into my next screening, I noticed something odd. On the street right in front of the theater, where a lone curb forms to separate cars from pedestrians and street from sidewalk, a large, black SUV swiftly pulled up and a flurry of activity followed. The SUV stopped about thirty feet from where I was standing; there was a direct line from the vehicle to the theater doors.
I branched out a little this year at SXSW by attending my first of the many discussion sessions available during the fest, which are held in the Austin Convention Center ballrooms. It wasn’t a movie, but the conversation was certainly movie related, as it was an interview with actor Kyle MacLachlan, hosted by Jenni Kaye, who is a contributor to Letterboxd.
There’s something familiar yet exciting about showing up in the morning waiting for a new day of screenings to start at a film festival. I got to the Lamar Street Alamo a little early on day two of SXSW 2025. The volunteers of the fest have been instructed to start handing out queue cards for each movie an hour before each screening starts. I arrived with about 90 minutes to spare before my chosen first screening for the day, The Spies Among Us, was to begin.
As soon as I dialed into one of the many conversations that was happening around me in theater three of the Lamar Street Alamo Drafthouse, I knew I was in the right place. Waiting for my first screening of South By 2025 to start, I heard one festival goer ask a few others what brought them to the fest. They responded that one of their children was celebrating his impending college graduation. The family celebrated graduations by gathering for an event of the graduate’s choice. This child studied film in college, so his pick was for the family to attend the festival together.
Next week, for the third straight year, I’m heading down to Austin, TX to cover the Lone Star State’s biggest multi-hyphenate festival and conference, South by Southwest. I’ll be honest, I really wasn’t expecting to get in this year, but I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when I received confirmation that I had been approved for press credentials. In 2023, I was gifted a pass by a friend. In 2024, I was sponsored by, and primarily wrote for, a website with a bigger reach than mine in order to cover the fest. This year, I applied on my own, thinking there was no way my little 2800-visitor-a-month website would secure me a press pass.
The theme of this year’s It Came from Texas film festival was a celebration of the independent Texas spirit. Festival director Kelly Kitchens infused that theme not only into the movies she chose to screen, but into every aspect of the fest to create a wider celebration of Texas artists and their impact on the history and legacy of film.
The theme of Oak Cliff Film Festival (OCFF) 2024 – movies are all around us – fit with my experience of the fest. The opening night celebration launched with an endearing short film, shot by the OCFF crew, in which an escaped Wes Anderson character extols the virtues of seeing movies everywhere we look. (Full disclosure: Chris Gardner, the actor who portrays the quirky “filmthropoligist” in the short, is my across-the-street neighbor and runs PR for the fest.)
During the short, Dr. Ovie McClintock makes the classic director’s frame by putting his two thumbs and forefingers together to form a widescreen rectangle. In his world, inanimate objects on the street around the Texas Theatre create the "wild, undomesticated, feral cinema" all around us. He drolly asks a parking meter about its motivation, encourages a few newspaper vending machines on their outstanding performances, and tells us that even the giant cow sitting atop the local Charco Broiler Steak House is in on the magic. “That’s not a cow,” McClintock breathlessly intones, “that’s a character!”
As the movie year rolls on, I’m excited to announce another first in my film festival adventures. It’s taken me almost ten years, but I’m finally covering my local neighborhood movie celebration as a critic. Taking place primarily at the legendary Texas Theatre, the Oak Cliff Film Festival (OCFF) is celebrating its 13th annual installment from June 20 through June 23, including dozens of screenings loaded with intriguing new titles, repertory screenings of cinema classics, multiple shorts blocks (including shorts from local Texas students), live shows, filmmaker workshops, and more.
After attending two Dallas International Film Festivals, I’ve discovered that one of the pleasures of a smaller fest is in connecting with the other movie lovers around me. One can certainly do the same at a gargantuan event like South By Southwest, but there’s a distinct difference. At SXSW, you might connect with a few people as you’re standing in line for a screening, or while in the theater before the show starts. Because of the thousands and thousands in attendance, however, there’s a good chance you might never see the same person twice over the course of the fest. That’s not the case at DIFF.
When trying to set my lineup in the DIFF ticketing system, I learned that my press badge wasn’t authorized to reserve tickets, as is the case for other film festivals like Fantastic Fest and SXSW. After a few email exchanges, I was informed that paying customers were the priority, and that I would need to queue up in the waitlist line for any movie I wanted to see. But, as is often the case in my charmed life, a magnanimous benefactor swooped in and gifted me a regular badge so that I can bypass the waitlist line, making my odds of getting into each screening much better. Many thanks are owed to my Dickensian guardian angel who did me a solid. I am eternally grateful.
After a few weeks spent recharging my battery in the wake of covering SXSW 2024, I’m locked and loaded for the 18th annual Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF), which will be held April 25-May 2 at several theaters around town. DIFF 2024 will feature screenings of over 100 titles, many of which will be world premieres. The festival will also be host to a panel discussion about the future of cinematic exhibition and dozens of opportunities to hear filmmakers speak about their movies at post-screening Q&As.
I stood in the dining room of Melody, the gracious host for my SXSW 2024 adventure. She had asked me the day before how the fest was going. I had issued a boilerplate response about how it was tiring, as fests always are, but that I was having a good time. Later I realized that she was probably asking about the quality of the fest; how good were this year’s crop of movies?
As we chatted the next day, I admitted that the movies I had seen this year weren’t quite as good as what I had seen at last year’s South By. Upon further reflection, I don’t think that sentiment is entirely the fault of the movies or the SXSW programmers. There were a few other factors at play that made me feel this way.
If you’re reading this within the first few hours of its publication, that means I’m making final preparations for my coverage of South By Southwest 2024 in Austin, TX! I’m partnering with an outside website this year, which means you’ll have to do some clicking for my reactions to what I’m watching at this year’s fest. The good folks at The Cosmic Circus are sponsoring my press credentials, so anything I write will be posted there.
Blonde Death is a stunning piece of outsider art/trash cinema. Made in 1984 by first (and only) time director James Robert Baker – aka James Dillinger – the shot-on-VHS movie is Badlands by way of a soap opera. Baker was a member of an early- ‘80s L.A. art collective called EZTV, and he was a prolific author of, as Wikipedia describes it, “sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction.” Shot with a budget of $2000 of his own money, Blonde Death has an air of Tennessee Williams about it, albeit unapologetically queer and gloriously transgressive.
As I type this, I’m getting ready to reserve my tickets for day three of the fest before making the short trek to the theater for day two’s first screening. On the docket for today is my first documentary, Scala!!!, a Fantastic Fest original found footage festival, two more 2023 releases, The Origin and What You Wish For, and I’ll wrap things up at midnight with a 1984 repertory screening of Blonde Death.
This will be a short one; day one of the fest is more like a quarter day, with the opening film of the festival – Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger – and a few other titles starting at 8 P.M. Other titles playing in the 8 P.M. block are The Animal Kingdom, Baby Assassins 2, #Manhole, and Messiah of Evil. There are three titles in the midnight round tonight, Sleep, In My Mother’s Skin, and Divinity.
