Blade Runner (1982) - Thursday Night (7PM)
Ridley Scott’s prescient and harrowing science-fiction masterpiece kicks off the festival as we ask whether humanity itself is flying too close to the sun. As artificial intelligence and deepfakes become increasingly indistinguishable from reality and as human beings grow ever more integrated with technology, we are all becoming Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, who is tasked with answering the question “what does it mean to be human?” Panelists will engage in a long-form panel discussion after the screening to determine if this future is a nightmare or a dream, an allegorical warning or a rhapsodic vision of the inevitable.
Tickets available here.
SAFE (1995) - Friday Daytime (1oAM)
Friday’s programming pivots around the questions raised by Todd Haynes’s psychological drama about the anxiety of modernity in Safe. A mysterious undiagnosable illness afflicts Carol White, played by Julianne Moore. In her quest to figure out what is to blame for her symptoms—chemicals, fragrances, pesticides, diet— she moves from the isolation of idyllic affluent suburbia to the isolation of a self-quarantined desert community that is afflicted with the same intangible illness. In the panel discussion following the screening, panelists will examine the portrayals of medical tyranny, psychologically excruciating and totalitarian health fads, and general malaise in post-industrial life.
Tickets available here.
GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) - Sunday DAYTIME (10am)
Until the summer of 2020 Gone With the Wind was widely considered one of the greatest films of all time. It won a record-setting 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It became one of the first films selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, it was placed at #4 on the American Film Institute’s Top 100, and it was screened annually at theaters and film festivals throughout the U.S. Adjusting for inflation, it is still the highest-grossing film in history. But during the summer of “racial reckoning,” Gone With The Wind was removed from HBO Max and its annual showings were canceled across the country. It can now be seen on HBO Max but with a new introduction by a cinema studies professor warning that the film should only be seen as “a prime text for examining expressions of white supremacy in popular culture.”
After our screening, Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist podcast will join Thaddeus Russell in a discussion with the audience about the quality of the film, its historical significance, what it tells us about race relations, gender relations, and US history, and why in today’s America we’re not allowed to see it without a warning.
Tickets available here.
The UNREDACTED (2022) - Saturday night (6:30PM)
Under its original title Jihad Rehab, this film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, won the audience award at the Warsaw Film Festival, was slated to win the Vanguard Award at the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, and received glowing reviews in the mainstream press, with many critics praising the film’s “humanizing” portrayal of former Islamic jihadis. Then it was canceled. Following a campaign to identify the film as “Islamophobic,” the heads of the Sundance Film Festival formally apologized for screening the film, South By Southwest canceled its screening, as did the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, which also withdrew the Vanguard Award. The film still has not found a distributor and cannot be seen except at special screenings.
Following the screening of “the most controversial documentary film of the year,” Meg Smaker will be joined by panelists to discuss what UnRedacted teaches us about the War on Terror and what the career of the film tells us about the state of free inquiry in today’s culture. Tickets available here.