If you’re sleeping on the Oak Cliff Flim Festival (OCFF), I’m here to let you know that you’re missing out on one of the country’s most authentic, scrappy, and original celebrations of the moving image. Each of the handful of times I’ve attended the fest – including once as a volunteer over a decade ago, and twice now covering it for this site – I’ve been delighted by its punk-rock aesthetic and complete and total immersion in film culture. The programmers and staff at OCFF schedule quirky, thought-provoking titles that rarely disappoint.
While the fest has its share of corporate sponsors – hopefully we’ll collectively decide one day to throw off the disgusting tyranny of capitalism, which dictates that those with the most resources make all the decisions – they don’t overwhelm and sanitize the creativity and individuality of OCFF in the same way that they do with other film festivals I’ve attended.
The OCFF 2025 pre-screening promotional film, which played before each and every screening, was inspired and hilarious. This year’s theme, Real Movies for Real Movie People, was accompanied by a riff on AMC’s Nicole Kidman-starring short that you’ve probably seen approximately eight thousand times if you’re a regular moviegoer.
In the OCFF 2025 version, Real Movie People are represented by mannequins, and, as she’s listed in the closing credits, Nicole Kidmannequin shows up to deliver her polished soliloquy on the magic of the movies, not in an empty theater, but in a fully populated one. She then proceeds to steal a handful of one patron’s popcorn before stepping on the feet of several others as she walks up and down the aisles, oblivious to everyone around her. You can see this goofy tribute to AMC’s ubiquitous promo for yourself here.
We’re ready for our closeup, Mr. DeMille (photo by the author)
The fact that I’ve never mentioned one of these intro videos for any other fest I’ve covered (and they all feature them) speaks volumes about the unique experience you get at the Oak Cliff Film Festival.
Day One: Thursday
As was true last year, there was a buzz in the air that I could feel immediately upon entering the Texas Theatre on the opening night of the fest. The lobby was packed as film fans anxiously awaited the two opening night screenings. The downstairs auditorium was showing the documentary Street Smart: Lessons from a TV Icon, about Sonia Manzano, who played Maria for decades on Sesame Street.
The upstairs theater was where my own first cinematic adventure of the fest would soon begin. My only obstacle was a particular film fan who had decided to avail herself of the staircase to pop a squat in order to study the fest guide. As I climbed up to and around her, I initially wondered if I should offer help, in case this lady had fallen or was in some other form of distress. After a few seconds of observation, it was clear to me that, no, this person did not need any help from me. She simply wanted to get a better look at the guide.
I was tempted to go ahead and ask anyway. “Excuse me, ma'am, do you need any help getting up? No? Then what the fuck!? Get the hell up out of the middle of this staircase!” As my wife likes to say, human beings are unpredictable little chaos monsters. I thought better of my (hilarious only to me) plan, and I let the woman continue to peruse her guide undisturbed.
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OBEX, from director Albert Birney, set the tone for much of the weekend. That tone was oneiric, or dreamlike. Many of the films I saw at OCFF 2025 had an oneiric quality to them; as that’s one of my absolute favorite properties of movies, I couldn’t have been happier about it.
Set in the long-ago of 1987, OBEX tells the story of Conor Marsh, a recluse who won’t even open the door for his weekly grocery delivery. He talks to Mary, the kind woman who delivers his pantry staples, through the closed front door of his house, not even so much as cracking it to make eye contact with her.
Conor fills his days by making bespoke ASCII portraits for customers who send in a picture of themselves for Conor to reference and watching TV with his dog, Sandy. (In Sandy, canine actor Dorothy gives us the most compelling cinematic dog performance since Messi’s portrayal of Snoop in Anatomy of a Fall.)
One night, while Conor watches the most unhinged cooking show ever, featuring the “Cicada Chef,” (and, yes, that means exactly what you think it does), he spots an ad for a revolutionary new computer game. It’s called OBEX, and it promises to transport Conor to a realm of adventure and awe.
After videotaping himself talking about his life and interests, so that the game producers can insert him into OBEX, Conor anxiously waits for his personalized game experience to arrive. Director Birney gives us closeups of the video camera as Conor records himself that are reminiscent of a similar technique Paul Thomas Anderson employed in Boogie Nights.
Director of photography Pete Ohs’s stark black-and-white cinematography adds to the fever dream aesthetic of the picture. This reinforces the dreamlike quality of OBEX, especially when Conor mysteriously finds himself inside this new game. It’s a marked contrast from the movie’s biggest laugh; when Conor boots up the game for the first time, those of us who actually played these types of games – the favorite of both me and my brother was a series called King’s Quest – recognize the severe limitations of that era.
OBEX director Albert Birney (left) and OCFF co-founder & festival co-director Barak Epstein (right) (photo by the author)
The theme of metamorphosis hangs heavy over the movie. That strike of inspiration was partly dictated by Birney’s surroundings. The director lives in an area of the country that was inundated by emerging cicadas in 2021, at the end of their seventeen-year gestation cycle. The year 1987 was another one of the years that these screeching cicadas appeared. Conor’s own metamorphosis is reflected in the transformation of the cicadae, and Birney captured plenty of B-roll of the loud insects as he formulated his story. OBEX is ultimately a trippy riff on how games and other popular entertainments can change and shape us in unimaginable ways.
Day Two: Friday
The first screening of Friday night was a revelation and a highlight of the fest. It combined a series of silent short films from legendary feminist filmmaker Maya Deren and a live score from Minneapolis duo ten thousand lakes. The band is comprised of Steven Larsen and Peter Bruhn; their style is described as low-fi, ambient, downtempo, post shoe-gaze.
The show started with two experimental short films from the 1920s directed by German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann. Both films were part of Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel (Lightplay) Opus, and both featured animated abstract shapes dancing across the screen as ten thousand lakes supplied trippy ambient accompaniment.
Then we fast-forwarded to the 1940s for four stunning films from Deren. Like each of the programmed short films, the first, At Land, continued the oneiric tone of the fest. At Land presents the surreal journey of a woman (played by Deren) who washes up on a beach and climbs an uprooted tree only to find herself at the end of a long, aristocratic dining room table. It’s fifteen minutes depicting the confusion and fear of a woman navigating modern society and her (precarious) place in it.
Ritual in Transfigured Time and The Very Eye of Night both take as their inspiration dance and the human body in motion. Time uses dance to explore our social rituals, and Eye of Night eschews plot altogether for a surreal series of images of dancers practicing their craft against everchanging heavenly bodies. Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School for this mystical experiment.
The fourth and final short, Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren’s most famous film, is literally about a dream. A young woman (again, played by Deren) comes home and promptly falls asleep on a lazy afternoon. We see her dream play out and, unlike with the film’s original release, ten thousand lakes used synthesizers, guitars, and percussion to conjure a hallucinatory state when combined with Deren’s surrealist imagery.
Ten thousand lakes are touring this show all over the country, and, like OCFF 2024’s inspired repertory screening of Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 silent classic Häxan, The Maya Deren Project will live in my memory as a standout moment in my film festival adventures.
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The second screening of Friday night didn’t quite live up to the hype of what came before it. Long Live the State, director Matthew Perniciaro’s overlong examination of the mid-‘90s sketch comedy troupe The State, succumbs to an overreliance on the most overused device of the documentary: the talking head interview. Over the course of my work on this website, I’ve become acutely aware of the sensation of a documentary revealing itself to essentially be one long, seemingly interminable string of interview segments. It’s a tough pitfall to avoid, but it can be done.
Compouding the issue is the fact that most of the interview segments, conducted with all eleven members of The State, eventually spiral into each member talking about how amazing the other members are. I have a sexually graphic descriptor for this specific tendency of Long Live the State, but I’ll refrain from employing it here.
As someone fairly unfamiliar with the legacy of The State (outside of some of my favorite comedic performers, like Joe Lo Truglio and Ken Marino, springing from the group) I did learn a lot that I didn’t know. I also got the rush of the movie covering the troupe’s first cinematic effort, one of my all-time favorite comedies, Wet Hot American Summer.
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I capped off Friday night in the most un-FFC way imaginable. After Long Live the State, I walked up the short staircase at the side of the stage for the 11PM(!) Behind the Screen rock show from Austin-based experimental band The Octopus Project. I’ve been a fan of the three-piece group since discovering them in the mid-aughts, and they’ve produced some of my favorite film soundtracks of the last few years with musical contributions to Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, Butterfly in the Sky, the documentary about Reading Rainbow, and one of my favorite movies of 2024 (which I only caught up with in 2025 at the insistence of my wife), Sasquatch Sunset.
I was very, very tired – the only reason I decided to stick around was because I chose to forgo writing the next morning in exchange for more sleep – but the show was a raucous good time. The Octopus Project melted my face off with their set. I got to see one of my favorite musical instruments, the theremin, played live. You can find the entire performance here. (And you can spot me at least once among the hundred-or-so audience members.
Octopus Project’s Yvonne Lambert (center of frame) doing her thing on the theremin (photo by the author)
My brother let me know that a relative of his wife’s was in town and thinking about going to the show. My brother texted that this person, whom I had never met, “might still want to go and neither of us are interested in being awake that long. If he does go (and so do you) will you be his friend?” The only person more antisocial than me is my brother, so he probably knew the response he would get. I texted back, “Hahaha! Absolutely not. I’ll be coming out of a screening that finishes at 10:45, 15 minutes before the show starts. That will probably guarantee that I’ll get a shitty spot, and I’m not going outside to try and find a stranger for the worst episode of Blind Date ever.”
I did end up getting a pretty great spot for the show, but I wasn’t into making any new friends that night.
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Check back tomorrow for the last part of my OCFF 2025 coverage.