To paraphrase the troubled Jimmy Gator: I’m back, ready for round two!
Day Three: Saturday
I’ve come to enjoy the sleepy vibe that permeates the first full day of the OCFF, in contrast to the excitement of the evening screenings and the hype that accompanies the opening of the fest. I stepped into the theater from the sweltering and oppressive Texas summer heat, ready for my first catch of the day.
In the upstairs auditorium, I and a crowd of fifty or sixty other people settled in for the documentary Seeds from first-time director Brittany Shyne. Coming off of a well-received screening at Sundance, Seeds follows a community of Black farmers and the struggles they face in trying to keep their way of life from being eradicated by systemic racism, industrial factory farming, and myriad other threats.
The passage of the documentary that hit me hardest was one in which a subject pleads his case to a Washington congressperson’s aide. The man admonishes (at the time) President Joe Biden for sending so much money, in the form of weapons, to Ukraine while he and the community around him flails to survive in the aftermath of the Coronavirus pandemic.
A still from Seeds.
He also attempts to petition his government for a redress of grievances concerning the fact that monetary relief for farmers passed by Congress during the worst of the 2020 COVID pandemic went immediately to white farmers, while Black farmers waited in vain for their fair share. It’s an outstanding case study in the argument that politics and government exist to improve the material reality of the constituents. When they don’t do that, people become cynical and angry, and rightly so.
Seeds, shot in hauntingly beautiful black-and-white, quietly and unassumingly documents the dignity of this community, who have fended off threats for generations to their ownership of the land and their precarious attempts to build wealth for themselves.
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After Seeds, I swung over to a local burger joint to meet my good friend Tim for a bite. I then picked up my wife Rae so the three of us could attend the mid-afternoon screening of Are We Good?, the Steven Feinartz doc about Marc Maron.
I caught up with Are We Good? at SXSW 2025, and it hit me this time with the same strong emotions I had at that screening. I decided to see it again, this time with Tim and Rae, because Tim expressed an interest in seeing it, and I’m always happy to see a movie with a friend.
The core of the film, revolving around Maron’s unimaginable grief at losing his romantic partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, in 2020 to acute myeloid leukemia is exemplified in one fleeting moment. Feinartz uses the simple technique of putting the audio waveform of Maron’s podcasts against a black background whenever he plays clips from Maron’s WTF show. One of these, in which Maron tearfully acknowledges that Shelton loved him, and that he knew that, is a devastating moment in the documentary.
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The last film of Friday night was the screening I had been waiting for since mid-March. Fucktoys, a bonkers new movie from first-time feature director Annapurna Sriram, played at SXSW 2025, but, as I mentioned in my coverage of that fest, I either couldn’t make seeing it work with the rest of my schedule, or the screenings I did try to get into were full when I got there. I left SX hoping that it might play at DIFF – this was slightly unlikely, Fucktoys, as its title implies, is a little too outré for DIFF’s more tony sensibilities and clientele. I knew I’d have a pretty good chance of seeing it at OCFF, and I was right.
Fucktoys tells the story of AP, played by Sriram, a woman on the fringes of society. That’s a bad place to be, considering she lives in Trashtown, a hellscape that rivals the Tromaville created by writer/director Macon Blair in his remake of The Toxic Avenger. When one of her teeth suddenly falls out of her head, AP consults her friendly local psychic for answers. This soothsayer tells AP that a black magic curse has been placed on her, and AP will need to sacrifice a goat and, of course, pay the psychic a thousand bucks to get the curse lifted. We spend the rest of the movie observing AP’s efforts to scrape together the scratch for the ritual, before it’s too late.
The Tarot Woman, as she’s listed in the credits, is played with over-the-top glee by an actor known as Big Freedia. She understood, like everyone else in the movie, Sriram’s assignment. Fucktoys revels in graphic sex and violence, all through a gleefully queer camp aesthetic. One (improbably) touching scene takes place as a john receives his fondest wish of being urinated upon.
Character actor Damian Young – who you might have seen in Birdman, The Greatest Showman, or The Trial of the Chicago 7, and who I will never forget doing a wild shirtless dance in the Netflix series House of Cards – appears as one of AP’s johns who has fallen in love with her. A tryst between the two for the purpose of AP trying to collect the money she needs leads to hijinks on the level of a Safdie brothers movie.
A still from Fucktoys.
Returning to my theme of cinematic oneiric states, Fucktoys effortlessly glides into and out of dreamlike states at will. At one point, AP dutifully gets a second opinion about the curse from another psychic. This psychic – in a sequence that can best be described like a bizzarro hat tip to Oda Mae Brown’s body being possessed without her consent in Ghost – accidentally channels the spirit of a cat. The movie shifts in this moment to something out of a surrealist experimental short film; the movie feels exciting and fresh for its enthusiasm to explore the strange vibrations of the universe while not taking itself too seriously. That’s an incredibly difficult balance to strike.
I won’t tell you why Sriram’s movie is called Fucktoys. You’ll have to see it for yourself to uncover that particular mystery.
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Before the screening for Fucktoys began, I spotted a fellow Dallas critic on the other side of the room, so I got up to ask if the seat next to her was taken. We sat and chatted about what we were seeing at the fest and other recent movies we’d watched. Because of the movie we were both there to see, we bonded over the joy we experience in seeing weird shit happen on screen.
I got to tell her how, only a few weeks before, I had been in this very auditorium to see Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the infamous screed against fascism from legendary Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Like Fucktoys, the screening for Salò, a movie depicting extremely graphic torture and sexual violence, was packed. When the presenter began his opening remarks, he asked what was wrong with us. We cheered in response. I was there for the overt linking of fascism to religion and an exploration of the depravity of those with too much money and power. It was an experience I’ll never forget.
Also, fuck all Nazis.
Day Four: Sunday
David Lowery, the director of A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, introduced himself in the late morning of the last day of the fest. He was there to deliver the opening remarks for the three-hour long documentary about the history of video rental stores that we were all there to see.
Lowery told us that Alex Ross Perry, the director of Videoheaven, was sorry he couldn’t be there in person. The two had exchanged a few text messages that morning, and Lowery asked Perry for the one thing he wanted us to know before we took a look at his work. His response was simple and direct: If you want to walk around a video store for three hours RIGHT NOW, this is the movie for you.
As someone who was lightly joshed once for perusing his Letterboxd account during a party, I was immediately sure I had made the right decision on how to spend the last morning of the fest. (I recently heard or read someone describe using Letterboxd as like walking through a video store. I wholeheartedly agree.)
Perry’s documentary uses only archival news footage and scenes from movies or television episodes that feature video rental stores on screen. Narrated by Maya Hawke, Videoheaven feels like a dream. We wander through countless video stores – thirty years from now, I want to find a twenty-year-old and ask them what they think of the term “video store,” and what they think was sold in these establishments – as Hawke walks us through the history of these now-mythical places.
The film was inspired by Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, a 2014 book by Daniel Herbert. Perry, through Hawke’s reverent intonation, walks us through the entire four-decade history of the video store. We experience the entire life cycle of the industry – its mysterious and less-then-respectable beginnings; its appropriation into the mainstream by the likes of Blockbuster and other family-friendly mega-chains; and its ignominious last gasp a little more than a decade ago.
A still from Videoheaven, which is actually a still from Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet.
And don’t worry, Videoheaven spends an ample amount of time exploring what was in the little room at the back, behind the curtain. Perry’s documentary, via Herbert’s book, argues that the explosion in accessibility to pornography that these businesses facilitated – beyond the disreputable movie theaters in the rough part of town – is part of the reason video rental stores were initially viewed as suspect.
In my research to write about Videoheaven, I came across several descriptions of it as “almost masochistically long,” “bloated,” and that it “could stand a tighter edit.” I see the point, but I completely disagree. This will likely be the definitive cinematic word on the history and impact of video rental stores, both in the real world and the reel world, where they shaped film culture in ways that Perry lovingly explores.
As someone who was born right as the home video industry began, worked at a video store to put myself through college, and witnessed its quiet death, I could easily have wandered around Perry’s rigorous study of these places for another couple of hours. Oh, and I’m a huge sucker for montages of movie scenes, which Perry delivers with contemplative reflection and insightful juxtaposition.
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I wound down the fest with a late afternoon screening of A Body to Live In, a fascinating documentary about Fakir Musafar, born in 1930 as Roland Loomis. Musafar pioneered the practices and philosophy of body modification and the modern primitive movement in the United States.
A common criticism of many documentaries (and their fiction counterpart, the biopic) is the approach of trying to tell the whole life story of a person in only a few hours. That strategy often causes much of the nuance of the person’s life to be flattened out in order to achieve the storytelling goal of having a satisfactory beginning, middle, and end. A Body to Live In tells the whole life story of Musafar, as well as covering the birth and maturation of the movement he started. In this instance, it’s necessary.
We meet the man as a shy and awkward teenager in the 1940s who takes advantage of having the house to himself when his parents leave for a trip. He uses the alone time to perform body modification on himself that was more intense than what he could do with others around. Musafar also had ample time to photograph the process, another passion that he would explore throughout his life.
A photograph of Fakir Musafar from A Body to Live In.
Musafar began his experiments with a waist training corset. He eventually graduated to the practice of suspending himself from hooks he mounted into his chest. The most fascinating thing to me about Musafar’s life was imagining him trying to exist as his authentic self during the 1940s and ‘50s, when straight society would have called him a monster. He hid this side of himself until the counterculture of the 1960s expanded the entire societal consciousness.
A Body to Live In and its director, Angelo Madsen Minax, don’t shy away from addressing the uncomfortable truths of the movement that Musafar started. Criticism came swiftly and clearly when he was featured in a 1985 documentary, Dances Sacred and Profane, which attributed much of the modern primitive movement’s practices – Musafar was filmed in the doc hanging from a tree by hooks in his chest – to modified versions of various indigenous cultures’ sacred practices.
This was, say it with me, plain ole cultural appropriation. Minax shows us archival television footage of indigenous peoples calling this out – and almost forty years ago – for what it was. But it’s also important to note that the subculture that ended up flourishing from these problematic origins freed many people to live the lives they truly wanted.
I’ll be honest, I was somewhat disturbed by the images of body modification I saw, including elaborate piercings, scarification, human branding, and suspension from hooks to induce a spiritual experience. But that’s only because it isn’t for me. Believing in the right of absolute bodily autonomy insists that these folks be allowed to adorn their earthly meat suits in any way they wish.
That brings me around to a vital function of art: seeing people and places that are unfamiliar and wrestling with ideas that make us uncomfortable. I subscribe to the Ebertian philosophy of movies as empathy machines. A Body to Live In gave me an understanding of a culture and people I share almost nothing in common with, and, hopefully, that makes me a kinder, more compassionate human.
What more could you ask for of a film festival?
Thanks for reading.
Movies are neat.
