The 29th edition of Dallas VideoFest kicks off Tuesday night with a screening of the classic 1927 silent film Sunrise, accompanied by the Dallas Chamber Symphony’s performance of a new original score, at City Performance Hall.
On Wednesday at the Texas Theatre, a reinterpretation of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is brought screaming into 2016. The 1915 film is known as much for its influential filmmaking innovations as its vile racism and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, and should benefit from its 21st century update. DJ Spooky, an artist and producer comfortable remixing both sound and film, calls his new version Rebirth of a Nation.
From there, it’s on to more than 100 programs at the Angelika.
How media changes or reflects the way people live remains a theme, as does a willingness to explore new technology, but VideoFest’s greatest strength may be the large net it casts. No other festival in Dallas can match it in terms of its breadth, its grab-bag approach to documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and more. Art, movies, the art of movies — as long as it’s compelling. There are even several sports films to see this year.
And, as always, directors and other speakers will be on hand for certain screenings and events throughout the weekend. (A particularly newsy trio of events includes a look at 60 Minutes with an editor of the CBS news show, a dive into the Channel 8 archives with North Teas TV journalists, and a trip into virtual reality with the New York Times.)
VideoFest’s bread and butter remains whatever independent, experimental, off-the-beaten-path, fascinating movies catch the eye of founder Bart Weiss, who ensures that these programs — most of them not otherwise coming to a theater near you — find an audience in North Texas.
We sat down with Weiss earlier this month to talk about the festival. Weiss, who sees more movies in a month than most people see in a lifetime, was kind enough to tell us about some of the standouts from this year’s lineup, many of which follow below.
For a full schedule, tickets, and more information on Dallas VideoFest, go here.
Streets of a Scion | Thursday, Oct. 20 at 9:15 p.m. | Angelika 2
The dramatic film, directed by UT-Arlington graduate and filmmaker Gabriel Duran, will make its premiere at VideoFest. A modern gangster film set in Dallas, Streets of a Scion also explores issues of race and class.
Two Trains Runnin’ | Friday, Oct. 21 at 9:30 p.m. | Angelika 2
This documentary, narrated by Common and with music by the great Gary Clark Jr., follows three groups traveling independently to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Two of the groups — young blues fans — are searching for Son House and Skip James, in an effort to get the now-legendary bluesmen back in front of a microphone. The third consisted of hundreds of students joining the civil rights movement in a state that counted the Ku Klux Klan and a racist police force among its two most powerful institutions. These stories converge during Freedom Summer, with plenty of lessons for our own fractured times.
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Hoop Dreams | Saturday, Oct. 22 at 1 p.m. | Angelika 2
The classic documentary about two high school basketball players working to play their way out of their impoverished neighborhoods tops a sports doc lineup that also includes The Trials of Muhammad Ali and Full Court, a film about Spencer Haywood fighting for free agency for NBA players. Hoop Dreams producer Gordon Quinn, founder of the film production company Kartemquin Films, will be in attendance as VideoFest pays tribute to the idea of “democracy through documentary.”
The Cambodian Space Project | Saturday, Oct. 22 at 11:15 p.m. | Angelika 3
A Cambodian karaoke singer and an itinerant Australian musician fall in love — their romance is likely worth a documentary in itself. The star-crossed lovers cross cultures to form a band that revives a Cambodian tradition of ebullient, quirky pop music and a funky youth culture crushed by the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. The documentary could be seen as a testament to the power of rock and roll to endure the violence of history and an oppressive regime, and as a chronicle of one of the most unique bands performing today.
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Burden | Sunday, Oct. 23 at 3 p.m. | Angelika 3
Chris Burden died of melanoma last year at the age of 69, a remarkably natural death for a performance artist whose most famous work saw him shot, cut, kicked, and beaten in any number of different ways. This documentary covers the career and the significance of an artist who redefined the human body as an endlessly malleable canvas.
The Love Witch | Saturday, Oct. 22 at 11:30 p.m. | Angelika 2
Earning its late-night billing, The Love Witch is loaded with sex, drugs, violence, and sorcery. Paying stylish homage to the visual composure of horror films of the 1960s, the “horror comedy” embraces some of the era’s campier storytelling techniques to wonderful effect. The film follows a woman whose at-any-costs approach to finding love, which entails all the tools at her witchy disposal, meets with mixed results in a small community in Northern California.
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Other People’s Footage | Sunday, Oct. 23 at 1 p.m. | Angelika 3
Filmmakers, aspiring and otherwise, may get the most from Other People’s Footage, which explores copyright and fair use issues regarding pre-existing recordings. It’s an important subject, and a more entertaining way to grasp it than skimming through pages of legalese.
Rooster Teeth | Saturday, Oct. 22 at 4:45 p.m. | Angelika 2
A block of content from Rooster Teeth, the forward-thinking Austin production company that was creating its own original web series when Netflix was still mailing DVDs. Several Rooster Teeth creators and showrunners will be in the house for screenings of Connected — following “two people who give up their smartphones, laptops and the internet for 24 hours” — and the first episode of Day 5, an end-times serial “set in the aftermath of a fatal sleep epidemic and encroaching apocalypse.” Expect to hear some talk on Rooster Teeth’s approach to web distribution and independent filmmaking.
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Left On Pearl | Friday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. | Angelika 2
Years before Occupy Wall Street, decades before a major U.S. political party nominated a woman for president, a group of International Women’s Day demonstrators in 1971 took control of a Harvard University building, transforming it into a women’s community center, an action explored in this important and timely documentary.
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