As I write these words, the citizens of the United States are grappling with The Man Who Would Be King, aka Donald Trump, unilaterally deciding to bomb Iran. In further support of the hypothesis that the movie Idiocracy is a documentary in disguise, it seems that the US population – and more importantly, US leaders – are now too stupid to understand that our founding documents give the power to declare war solely to the US Congress. (This dovetails nicely with a YouTube video I recently watched in which belligerently ignorant MAGAs proudly display their benighted cognitive states by declaring that the separation between church and state shouldn’t exist, because, well gosh, it says “In God We Trust” right there on the money!)
While we’re on the topic of the separation between church and state, in my home state of Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed a bill into law requiring all public classrooms in the state to display the Ten Commandments. It’s a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It will be tied up in court for months, if not years, and the money spent to defend this unconstitutional law will be a massive waste of taxpayer dollars.
I mention all of the above as a way to stress how heavy of a lift the Oak Cliff Film Festival has this year when it comes to transporting me to a euphoric state through the power of cinema. OCFF 2025’s theme, Real Movies for Real Movie People, stresses the idea of human emotion and connection through movies. The fest’s website landing page features a graphic that includes the phrases “Human Cinema, Filling Heads, Connecting Souls, Sparking Feelings.”
Based on my personal belief that the absolute best antidote to small people with small minds – a constituency that only seems to grow by the day here in the good ole US of A – is as much exposure to different cultures, perspectives, ideas, and art as possible.
So, if anything can get me out of my funk, it’s a film festival.
It helps that, like last year, OCFF 2025 will feature several self-care events during the fest. The Oak Cliff Cultural Center, located right next to the iconic Texas Theatre, where the bulk of OCFF screenings take place, is host to the OCFF 2025 Wellness Lounge. It’s here that Filmmaker, VIP, Press and Jury badge holders can participate in any of the four yoga sessions and two sound bath meditation sessions on offer. Despite my best efforts last year, I did not make it to any of these events, because I was too busy watching movies. I’m going to try to get to at least one of the yoga sessions this year.
Taking place June 26-29, OCFF 2025 will feature dozens of feature film and short film screenings, live music events, and workshops for filmmakers. There is a grant workshop hosted by the Austin Film Society for shorts filmmakers, a presentation titled “The Future of Film Distribution,” and a panel discussion co-presented by the Dallas Film Commission and the Oak Cliff Cultural Center called “Women in Filmmaking: Progress, Challenges, and the Road Ahead.”
Regular readers will know that I lamented missing every screening at SXSW 2025 of a movie with the eye-catching title Fucktoys. I’m excited to announce that director Annapurna Sriram’s debut feature is playing at OCFF 2025 and that I have secured my boarding pass to its (hopefully) bonkers and transgressive pleasures.
In case you missed the description in my SX coverage, Fucktoys, in the OCFF program, is billed as “[a] lush and surreal 16mm fever dream allegory of the Tarot told through the story of AP- a sanguine young woman seeking salvation from a curse. At the outset AP is promised by not one but multiple psychics that -for a cool $1000 and the sacrifice of a baby lamb- it can be lifted. So she makes money the only way she knows how, scootering her way deeper into the night, into the uncouth underbelly of Trashtown. Dark, irreverent, and sexy, AP stumbles upon new characters and absurd situations, each more unhinged than the last, as she winds her way towards the inevitable. Fucktoys is a campy romp that explores the intersection of intimacy, exploitation, and class in a pre-millennium alternate universe.”
It sounds like an absolute blast.
I’ll also be revisiting a title I saw at SXSW 2025. My friend Tim is a fan of Marc Maron and his podcast WTF, and when I mentioned to him that Are We Good?, the documentary exploring Maron’s grief after the sudden death of his romantic partner, was playing at OCFF, he asked if I’d like to join him for the screening. There is one thing better than seeing a movie at a film festival: seeing a movie at a film festival with a good friend. Rae and Brynna, another good friend (since high school!) who happens to be Tim’s wife has decided to join us.
I’ll close with my usual roundup of titles that I’m most anticipating seeing at the fest. I was able to set my schedule for OCFF 2025 before sitting down to write this curtain raiser, so, barring some unforeseen event that makes me miss a screening, I will be seeing everything described below, plus much more.
[All quotes below come from the OCFF 2025 programming guide.]
OBEX: Pete Ohs, the director of a film I enjoyed at SXSW 2025, The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, served as the cinematographer for this picture from director Albert Birney. One of Birney’s previous efforts includes a movie called Strawberry Mansion, about a near-future surveillance state that conducts dream audits to collect taxes on its subjects’ unconscious lives.
I haven’t seen it, but it sounds wild.
The description of OBEX is equally as out there: “Conor Marsh lives a secluded life with his dog, Sandy, until one day he begins playing OBEX, a new, state-of-the-art computer game. When Sandy goes missing, the line between reality and game blurs and Conor must venture into the strange world of OBEX to bring her home.”
Director Birney also stars as Conor and is scheduled to be in attendance.
The Maya Deren Project: I discovered Ukrainian-born filmmaker Maya Deren in college. I was shown her best-known work, the experimental and avant-garde 1943 short film Meshes of the Afternoon in one class or another. It’s been two decades since I’ve seen it, but Meshes of the Afternoon struck me at the time as a bold, innovative piece of filmmaking.
Minneapolis based lo-fi instrumental duo Ten Thousand Lakes are also enamored of Deren’s work. The pair have created a soundscape for four of the iconic director’s works, namely, At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time, The Very Eye of Night, and the aforementioned Meshes of the Afternoon. They will perform a live set of their accompaniments synched to Deren’s films at OCFF 2025.
According to the fest guide: “Deren conceived AT LAND and RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME as silent films to be shown as a visual experience without sound or music. She collaborated with her husband, the musician Teiji Ito, to compose music for MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON and THE VERY EYE OF NIGHT. The Maya Deren estate has gracefully allowed us (ten thousand lakes) to show these films with our own musical compositions, in order to allow her work to inspire us, to reach our own creative heights.”
This is sure to be a transcendent experience.
Long Live the State: “In 1988, a group of friends met at New York University and formed a sketch comedy group. Shortly after graduating, they received their own television series. The show would change their lives and the world of comedy forever. They were and still are The State.”
I didn’t watch The State. It aired in 1994 and 1995 on MTV, a time when the local blue-hairs in the rural East Texas town I grew up in made it their mission to keep MTV a verboten choice on our local cable package. To this day, I’ve only seen one sketch from the show. Included in the group of friends mentioned in the synopsis were Michael Ian Black, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Thomas Lennon, Joe Lo Truglio, Ken Marino, Michael Showalter, and David Wain. I didn’t watch the show, but I’m certainly interested in the doc.
Director Matt Perniciaro is scheduled to be in attendance.
Reveries: The Mind Prison: “Two mysterious drifters wandering a strange desert find themselves thrown into a journey of self-discovery, traversing a surreal and hostile terrain in search of answers to life’s unanswerable questions. As they spiral deeper into a world of madness, they must discover the meaning of…THE MIND PRISON.”
This sounds nuts. Count me in.
Videoheaven: Director Alex Ross Perry was behind Her Smell, one of my top ten titles of 2019. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend giving it a watch. Perry has made a handful of documentaries in addition to his fiction work. One of his newest, Videoheaven – this is the second documentary released by Perry within the last year, the other covering American indie band Pavement, called, appropriately, Pavements – is a gargantuan 172-minute meditation on the cultural and economic impact of the VHS rental store, narrated by Maya Hawke.
From the guide: “A sociocultural hub, consumer mecca, and source of existential dread, the video rental store forever changed the way we interact with movies, and there's no better way to understand this than through their depiction in the movies themselves. Alex Ross Perry's essay documentary uses existing footage culled from hundreds of sources, ranging from TV commercials to blockbuster films, to tell the story of an industry's glorious, confusing, novel, sometimes seedy, but undeniably seismic impact on American movie culture.”
This movie sounds essentially like FFC catnip.
As stated above, the Oak Cliff Film Festival will run June 26-29, and passes and individual tickets are available for purchase at the OCFF website and the Texas Theatre website, respectively. As always, you can find a complete log of everything I’m seeing at OCFF 2025 on my Letterboxd profile.
See you at the movies!