A depressed writer, a group of angry librarians, nuclear waste, and a pioneering comedian all played a part in my cinematic adventures at DIFF 2025, along with a few detours to connect with friends and loved ones, as well as to join in solidarity, for a few hours at least, to others like me who are desperate to stem the tide of the spreading fascism in our country.
Day three began with what turned out to be the worst film I saw during the fest. Due West is a Texas production about the horrors of living in a place that has turned women into broodmares for the state by criminalizing routine medical care. This first feature effort – which, at 81 minutes, barely qualifies as a feature – from director Evan Miller might have been crafted by Miller and his cowriters, Hardy Janson and Sandra Adair, with nuance regarding the complexities of denying women access to abortion care.
Instead, the filmmakers used this scenario to assemble an emotionally manipulative, simplistic story that almost delights in putting its protagonist through one horrific scenario after the next, in an effort to make the audience feel as sympathetic as possible.
Anyone who knows me knows that I support abortion rights unequivocally. Safe, legal, and on demand is the slogan I prefer. Zero beliefs about the Magic Invisible Sky Wizard should play a role in what kind of medical care a pregnant person is allowed to access. The message of Due West is not what bothered me. It was the sloppy storytelling and lazy writing that pushed me over the edge into actively being pissed off at the picture.
Listed in the closing credits simply as The Woman – in a misguided attempt at what I’m assuming is an effort to universalize the story, but instead acts to erase the character’s humanity – we meet our protagonist in a desperate situation. She needs $700 but doesn’t have it. She visits her brother to get the money from him, but it’s not easy considering her wicked sister-in-law is the one controlling the purse strings.
Cash in hand, The Woman leaves the next day for her scheduled appointment but hits a snag when the fan belt on her truck turns to spaghetti. I haven’t mentioned why she needs the $700 or what appointment she needs to make it to, because Due West frustratingly plays coy in its first half about what predicament The Woman is in. We don’t know who she’s desperate to meet, although it’s painfully obvious to any audience member with two brain cells to rub together.
Each villain in Due West, from the sister-in-law to the man on the other end of the burner phone that The Woman is texting for her appointment, is straight out of a Stephen King novel, pure evil. The heroes, most prominently The Woman and her local church pastor – played by Henry Thomas, who also produced – are absolute saints.
The word abortion isn’t uttered once in Due West. The filmmakers also go to excruciating pains to make The Woman a perfect victim. The abuse that the character suffers during the film – me mentioning the perfect victim trope probably means you’ve figured out that she’s pregnant as a result of rape – is sensationalistic at best and cruelly emotionally manipulative at worst. We are forced to watch as she’s raped a second time during the film. Due West is an exercise in cheap exploitation that will do nothing to win over opponents of abortion.
*****
I had made arrangements with Rae and my good friends Brynna and Tim to see the new 4K remaster exhibition of Pink Floyd’s 1972 concert film Live at Pompeii before I realized that it would conflict with DIFF. So, I blew off a DIFF screening to meet them at the nearby Alamo Drafthouse showing Live at Pompeii. I swam in the mystic sounds of the Floyd as the band played to the empty ancient amphitheater.
Pink Floyd is probably my all-time favorite band (depending on the day you ask me; Led Zeppelin and Radiohead are the two other possible answers) so this screening was not to be missed. I cracked a joke to Brynna as the movie got started about how much the interview portions of Live at Pompeii would sound like a scene from This is Spinal Tap. One particular scene featuring a conversation about pie with no crust came the closest.
*****
The disappointment of Due West aside, the remainder of DIFF featured some inspiring, enraging (due to subject matter), and contemplative cinematic experiences.
Happy as Larry is a Scottish-set dramedy that follows a despondent writer, Larry, who has decided to end it all because his own life feels empty when compared to the lives of his imagined characters. After a disastrous(ly hilarious) attempt to give away his car, first to an old lady, then to a pack of disrespectful teens, Larry marches off into the wilds of the Isle of Skye to die in peace. That’s when his real troubles begin. He meets the happy-go-lucky Dale, who thwarts Larry’s ultimate goal at every turn.
I was surprised by Happy as Larry because, in the opening minutes of the movie, I expected Dale to be a character who buffoonishly makes life a living hell for Larry and nothing more. The movie makes a turn, though, at about the halfway point, which transforms the budding relationship between the two men into a heartfelt study of depression and human connection. Director Hugo Andre pulls double duty, stepping into the role of Dean, one half of a couple that Larry and Dale encounter during their idiosyncratic camping trip.
My only reservation about the movie is that Dean is coded as a closeted gay man, and Andre plays up the character with a lisp. Representation is everything, so if Andre is actually a gay man (I have no idea), then his decisions in the role should be judged completely differently than if the director/actor is a straight man performing a stereotypical gay character.
*****
To Use a Mountain is an elliptical, almost experimental documentary about the US government’s decision – in the early 1980s – to select one site to store all of the country’s nuclear waste. Nearly a dozen sites were initially considered, and the film takes us to a handful of them and documents the fight each community – I’m sure you’ll be unsurprised to discover that each site was in proximity to poor and marginalized populations – had to wage to keep deadly nuclear waste out of their back yards.
A producer (left) and the director (center) of To Use a Mountain. (Photo by the author)
The winner of this dubious contest to store hundreds of tons of nuclear waste for 10,000 years was Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a sacred formation for the local indigenous peoples. Those local tribes, and one indigenous man in particular, rage against not only the plan for Yucca Mountain, but the dozens of treaties the US government has broken in its history of subjugating the first inhabitants of this continent. The history of pushing indigenous peoples off of their lands for the atomic bomb testing in New Mexico during World War II is mentioned, making To Use a Mountain an excellent counterpoint to the heroism depicted in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The two films would make for a powerful double feature.
*****
Tim joined me for the DIFF closing night film, Gallagher, a documentary about the once-wildly popular standup comedian. He told me on the way to the theater about his family being big Gallagher fans, which is what made him interested in the doc.
Gallagher is a heartfelt chronicle of an artist who rode a wave of popularity to fame and fortune only to then watch the culture leave him behind. It’s also as much about the director’s attempt to get and keep his subject interested in the project as it is about Gallagher’s career. It’s sad to see the standup slowly become a MAGA grandpa, doing his own version of raging against political correctness, what today has been twisted by reactionaries into so called “wokeness.”
I came away from the documentary glad that I knew so much more about a complicated guy who revolutionized standup comedy. The film also allows for the realization that an ounce of humility – one of the last things the performer said to his director before he died in late 2022 was how he, Gallagher, was the greatest of all time and everyone else was an idiot – might have made for a much happier man. Learning about the demons he fought, mostly concerning his relationship with his father, completes the portrait of a complicated artist.
*****
Another documentary I saw at DIFF perfectly captured the malaise I felt throughout the fest. The Librarians is an enraging film about efforts from far-right culture warriors to demonize our public and school libraries, claiming that they, and the librarians who serve the public through their work, are sexualizing and grooming children by exposing them to pornographic material.
As the documentary takes great pains to explain, nothing of the sort is happening. These politically (and often, religiously) motivated agitators are trying to erase parts of our history and our present that make them uncomfortable. In short, they are fascists who should spend more time reading books rather than trying to burn them.
We were told during the post-screening Q&A that The Librarians will eventually air on PBS. As further evidence that the threat to our constitutionally protected right to free speech and expression documented in The Librarians is very real, I feel obliged to add that the movie will be available on PBS, assuming that the Public Broadcasting System still exists after the fascistic Trump regime is done with it.
The director (with microphone) discusses making The Librarians with the support of three of her subjects (right of director). (Photo by the author)
During the fest, I had to do a lot of driving around DFW for the day job. Through podcasts, I was plugged into current events in a way that I’m usually not while covering a film festival. So, while I was delighted to be doing one of my favorite things in the world, I was at the same time acutely aware of how badly our country is falling apart.
The Trump regime is using a secret police force (known as ICE) to abduct people off of the street and render them to a concentration camp in a foreign country. Trump himself said he wasn’t sure if all people within the borders of the United States deserve due process, the only thing that keeps ordinary citizens from being thrown away into the prison system because they are inconvenient to those in power. Trump’s advisor, Stephen Miller, has announced that the White House is “considering” suspending habeas corpus, the only mechanism to ensure you can plead your case in front of a judge.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia and hundreds like him are languishing in a Salvadoran torture chamber for the crime of being brown. Attendees at a recent Trump rally began cheering when shown video footage of helpless men being brutally herded into this facility; it might as well have been footage of the Jews being walled off in the ghettos.
This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I sometimes feel like Debbie Downer because, even in celebratory settings, these issues are all I want to talk about. Frankly, I don’t understand how we can talk about anything other than what is happening all around us.
Still, I have hope. There was a May Day rally in downtown Dallas during the fest. It started at four PM, so I skipped lunch at the day job, and blew off the first DIFF screening of the afternoon, in order to attend and join in solidarity with others who do not think any of what’s happening is normal. Continuing to speak out here and adding my body to as many protests and marches as possible is all I can do, so I’ll do it. And, of course, I’ll continue to watch movies. That’s how I can learn about perspectives other than my own and see the world in completely new ways. Art is a vital tool in increasing empathy and love for every member of the human family, so drink up as much as you can find, but always do it thoughtfully.
Some local art spotted while waiting for a DIFF screening to start at The Texas Theatre that gave me hope. (Photo by the author)