As you can see in the image to the left of these words, the 2026 Oak Cliff Film Festival was held between July 30 and August second. Why am I only now posting my coverage of it, over two months later? I’ll just say that depression is a hell of a drug, and leave it at that. Better late than never. Please read on for part one of my OCFF 2026 coverage.
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It was simultaneously comical and inspiring to hear a roomful of people cheer and applaud for printed programs. During his pre-screening remarks on opening night, Oak Cliff Film Festival cofounder and codirector Barak Epstein held up the beautifully printed guide to all things OCFF 2026 – celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year – and thanked local vendor Oak Cliff Print for their superior craftsmanship of the programs.
The reaction was inspiring because what most of us held in our hands was a work of real elegance. It was clear that the final product was a labor of love and skill, not merely an ephemeral digital document that ChatGPT vomited all over for twenty-three seconds before shitting out an abhorrent monstrosity. (I’m not a fan of AI.)
At the same time, it was comical (in a depressing way) because it perfectly illustrated what we’ve all been reduced to by the Epstein Class. This group of malignant narcissist CEOs, billionaires, and tech oligarchs are taking everything from us: a livable environment; stable employment; the hope of retirement; health care that doesn’t leave us destitute. They’re even taking our ability to think with their relentless attempts to make AI happen.
The crowd gathered for Joe Swanberg’s The Sun Never Sets, the opening night film of OCFF 2026, let out a primal scream that night letting the world know that it would take our printed programs from our cold, dead hands. Inspiring, considering our present circumstances, but it’s not exactly, “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
Located about five blocks from the Texas Theatre, the flagship venue for OCFF, Oak Cliff Print is a local mom-and-pop business – in the sense that, by doing business there, you aren’t giving your money to an Amazon-like evil empire – that is rooted in the community.
In fact, the local community was the focal point of the OCFF theme this year. Celebrating fifteen years of cinematic adventures in the heart of Oak Cliff, the fest’s pre-screening bumper this year celebrated our – Rae and I have been residents of this Dallas neighborhood since buying a house here in 2015 – unique and eclectic community. I don’t know if that was a happy accident or an intentional decision as a way to fight back against what the City of Dallas is going through with our current corrupt local leadership.
I won’t get too in the weeds, but it’s clear that some extremely shady shit is going down concerning the effort by certain members of our city council to hand over the land that our city hall sits on to greedy, disgusting real estate developers. The council’s plan is to give up the land, bulldoze the iconic City Hall – designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and featured in RoboCop as OCP Headquarters – and move the city’s operations to a downtown high-rise.
That move will necessitate City of Dallas tax dollars going to pay rent (seemingly in perpetuity) for these skyscraper offices. This will effectively be another handout to the same Epstein Class losers who own the downtown office buildings, which, since the pandemic, have been hemorrhaging more and more of their tenants. The great Peter Weller, RoboCop himself, has weighed in on the situation.
At the same time, our glorious city council is also making moves to end service to or radically alter traffic paths for several bridges that connect Oak Cliff to downtown Dallas over the Trinity River. They’re doing this to accommodate the new, billon dollar+ convention center currently in the works. (Yes, they’re screwing up thousands of commuters’ daily routes to, again, help out – say it with me – the Epstein Class ghouls. It’s ALMOST like any and every elected official in this country has been bought and paid for to do the bidding of the rich.) If you want to know more, seek out either Jim Schutze’s online coverage of these issues, or Robert Wilonsky’s coverage in the Dallas Morning News.
Celebrating the culture and the people of Oak Cliff right now feels necessary, and the Oak Cliff Film Festival answered the call. The last page of that beautiful fest guide features photos of a weekly event in Oak Cliff. The Dallas Lowriders, a group of car enthusiasts, held a car show along Jefferson Boulevard (where both Oak Cliff Print and the Texas Theatre are located) in 2019 that turned into a weekly event featuring food vendors, people in camping chairs on the sidewalk watching the lowriders cruise the drag, and a fun, carnival-like atmosphere.
I’m old and sad, which means I’m usually at home on the couch on Sunday evenings when this event takes place. However, as long-time readers know, I had the opportunity to see almost every episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks on the big screen at the beginning of this year. Those screenings mostly took place on Sunday evenings. The first time that I came out of the Texas after a screening, and immediately found myself driving through the middle of this moving car show, was a surprise. I soon came to look forward to (very slowly) making my way up Jefferson after each Twin Peaks screening.
Long live Oak Cliff.
To make a long story short (“TOO LATE!”), the audience for the opening night film was in a joyful, rambunctious mood to kick off the fest. Director Joe Swanberg and star Cory Michael Smith were in attendance for the screening of The Sun Never Sets. This new comedy in the mumblecore mode, the director’s first feature since 2017’s Win It All – which features frequent Swanberg collaborator, and costar of The Sun Never Sets, Jake Johnson – is only funny if you’re charitable and trusting of Swanberg’s motives.
In his pre-screening remarks, Swanberg, whose films are usually rooted in personal experience, told us that his latest was no exception. The Sun Never Sets borrows from the filmmaker’s experiences of going through a divorce, and a subsequent breakup. Alaska, the location for the movie and the inspiration for its title, was simply a bucket-list destination to shoot a movie. If you could make the funding work, why wouldn’t you want to make a movie in Alaska?
Festival Director Ashton Campbell also announced that this was the second time a Swanberg movie had opened OCFF. His film Drinking Buddies held the same distinction at the 2013 edition of the fest. Campbell handed out some hardware, awarding Swanberg a trophy to honor the occasion.
The Sun Never Sets focuses on Wendy, a woman in her early 30s who is dating Jack, a man almost two decades her senior who is divorced with two tween kids. Jack is settled in life, has soured on marriage, and he isn’t interested in starting over with a new family. As the film opens, Wendy is chafing at the pre-fab domesticity in which she’s found herself. She doesn’t want kids and is content in her relationship status with Jack, but her happy romantic life exists in tension with her desire to head out on a camping trip at a moment’s notice. Again, if you’re in Alaska, how could you not enjoy its natural wonder to the fullest?
A still from The Sun Never Sets.
With the cocky self-assurance of a used car salesman, Jake Johnson’s Jack insists that the couple should take a break. He tells Dakota Fanning’s Wendy that she should stay at her place for a few months and test out the dating scene to make sure she’s not missing out on a more adventurous life. In a later scene, we learn that Jack is full of it. He tells a friend that the local dating pool is stocked with losers. Wendy will strike out on a few dates before realizing how happy she is with Jack and the kids, he smugly confides to his friend.
Then Chuck shows up.
At a bar/pool hall, on one of the ill-fated dates that Jack had predicted, Wendy runs into Chuck, aka The One Who Got Away. Swanberg magnificently holds on Fanning’s face for an extended shot as she realizes who has come back into her life. Cory Michael Smith joked in the post-screening Q&A that Swanberg had somehow made the actor look hot as Chuck.
The director and his crew certainly did their part to turn the lanky Smith – who portrayed a young Chevy Chase in Saturday Night, about the events leading up to the first episode of SNL – into a dreamboat, but the sexual chemistry between Fanning and Smith lights up the screen. The scene in which the two finally rekindle the physical aspect of their relationship is extremely sexy.
Jake Johnson, meanwhile, is as funny as his costars are sultry. The scene in which Jack learns that Chuck is back in the picture is a masterclass from Johnson on comedic timing and furious backpedaling. Most of the comedy comes from the fact that Jack is a complete idiot who makes horrible decisions. While I laughed my ass off, a less charitable view is that Jack is manipulating Wendy, especially when he needs to win her back from Chuck. The same masterclass in comedic timing mentioned above also offers a dual credit in gaslighting as Jack tries to pull a switcheroo on whose idea this experiment was to begin with. I also formulated a new movie rule as a result of this picture: you only get one coincidental meeting per movie. The Sun Never Sets mostly soars on the power of Johnson’s comedic instincts and a strong dramatic turn from Fanning, alongside her incendiary chemistry with Smith.
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Night two of the fest offered up what I’m coming to apricate as one of my favorite things about OCFF: their yearly flagship repertory screening. Last year featured a quartet of silent short films from legendary experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, with musical accompaniment from band ten thousand lakes. The year before was a screening of Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 masterwork Häxan, screened with a live reading of the English intertitles and a brand-new live score performed by Texas musician David Didonato.
(Before covering OCFF for this site, I attended a repertory screening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway in 2022. Way back in 2014, before the FFC website was even a twinkle in my eye, I volunteered for the OCFF, and I used one of the free passes I was granted in exchange for my labor to see Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer. An hour-long documentary made in 1975, the film focuses on Eadweard Muybridge, whose experiments with photography and animal movement in the 1870s were a precursor to what would become motion pictures. It was directed by Thom Andersen and narrated by Dean Stockwell.)
The not-to-be-missed repertory screening for OCFF 2026 was German director Lotte Reiniger’s absolutely transfixing 1926 silent animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, with an equally transfixing live score, written and performed by Anvil Orchestra. The oldest surviving animated feature film, Prince Achmed combines several stories from One Thousand and One Nights. As a ‘90s kid, I was delighted to see Disney’s Aladdin poking through the origins of this movie’s plot. This screening also seemed of a piece with this summer’s main movie preoccupation, Christopher Nolan’s retelling of another exemplar of ancient human literary texts, The Odyssey.
Focusing solely on writing and performing live scores for silent film screenings, Anvil Orchestra is Terry Donahue, Roger Clark Miller, and, when the movie demands a fuller percussive sound, Lawrence Dersch. The group’s work for Prince Achmed was every bit as grand and mysterious as the images it accompanied.
The most breathtaking thing about Prince Achmed is also the hardest to express in writing. Reiniger, working with her husband Carl Koch and a few other animators, pioneered a form of silhouette animation using cardboard cutouts and sheets of lead. The result is a stunning achievement that must be seen to be truly appreciated.
A still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed.
Reiniger and her team spent three years making the movie, and it initially failed to find a distributor after being rejected by every theater they approached. A successful, privately funded press screening began the word-of-mouth that would lead to the film’s appraisal as an early masterpiece of movie animation. After 100 years, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is every bit as hypnotic as the year it premiered.
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Be sure to check back in a few days for the next part of my OCFF 2026 coverage.