All screenings are at Rialto Cinemas on Monday nights at 6:30pm
Mon 2 March:
Screening: Monday 25 May, 6:30pm
Gus Van Sant | USA | 1985 | M offensive language, sexual references
Distinctively original, 20 years on, the début feature of 33-year-old Gus Van Sant (Elephant, Paranoid Park, My Own Private Idaho) focuses on Walt, who works in a liquor store in Portland, Oregon, and his unrequited love for a young Mexican hustler.
Shot on 16mm for $25,000, it was the first of his bittersweet odes to tender outcasts and remains the simplest and least burdened. Walt, who frames the narrative through his voiceover, is the prototypical Van Sant hero: handsome, vague, and impossibly gentle, poised between cuddly introspection and bright flashes of exuberance...
Mala Noche sidesteps potential clichés with an attentiveness to class dynamics (even skid row has its hierarchies) and the cultural differences, poignantly underplayed, between the grunge gringo and his object of desire... Heartbreak, sickness, even death come into play, yet tenebrous as it is, Mala Noche has the tone of a daydream... It looks fantastic in the fresh 35mm blowup. — Nathan Lee, Village Voice
(78 minutes, 35mm)
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