FEAR TOWN, USA
On St. Blevins Day (the most debauched of regional holidays), four boys looking to lose their virginity, a girl haunted by a dark secret, a lonely teenager, and an escaped mental patient all meet at a party in the woods. They were looking for fun but what they found was………FUCKING TERROR.”

Fear Town, USA is a Wet Hot American Summer-like take on classic horror films like Friday The 13th, Last House On The Left, and Sleepaway Camp. Directed by Brandon Bassham and starring a huge ensemble of performers from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.

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Nitehawk Cinema presents this 1982 classic as part of their Future Noir midnight screening series, Friday6/20 and Saturday 6/21.

Invisible aliens in a tiny flying saucer come to Earth looking for heroin and find it in the early 80s new wave scene. 35mm presentation!

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Spectacle is pleased to welcome Su Friedrich in person for a 16mm screening of her masterpiece SINK OR SWIM (1990), followed by a selection of her short films, including the New York Premiere of her latest work QUEEN TAKES PAWN (2013).

“A major filmmaker.” – P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM: THE AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE

 

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“I am a man of struggle and my cinema is the cinema of the liberation struggle of my people.” -Yilmaz Güney

Critics are fond of separating a filmmaker’s “life” from his “work,” as if the two were related but autonomous spheres. In the case of Yilmaz Güney, the hollow-cheeked, mustachioed action movie star and director whose name has become legend in Turkey, it is clear to everyone that the two are inseparable. A communist Kurd, Güney was looked upon with an unfriendly eye by three successive military regimes in Turkey and spent twelve of his 26 years as a filmmaker behind bars.

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Even considering the long history of alternative Indian cinemas that have emerged under the shadow of Bollywood—the insistent auteurism of Guru Dutt, the humanist realism of Satyajit Ray, the Marxist interventions of Mrinal Sen—the subcontinent has produced nothing else like Kamal Swaroop’s utterly sui generis feature debut, Om Dar Ba Dar.

Upon its completion in 1988, Swaroop’s periphrastic coming-of-age tale baffled national film censors, who damned it to obscurity with an “adults only” rating. Nevertheless, it garnered critical acclaim and almost mythic notoriety through decades of festival screenings, eventually achieving an unparalleled cult status among Indian cinephiles, largely on the basis of murky file-shared video dubs. Now newly-restored, it was released to theaters in India for the first time only this year.

Swaroop’s film begins in a fictional village in Rajasthan, where Om, the son of an eccentric astrologer, grows from boyhood to adolescence alongside his sister Gayatri, a small-town feminist who insists on sitting in the men’s section at the local movie house. The fever dream plot that spins around these two characters defies easy recounting: a mysterious woman arrives as if from the pages of a pulp Hindi novel; festive Diwali firecrackers transform into actual bombs; frogs steal a black-market stash of diamonds; a local businessman attempts to avert the next World War; Om discovers how to breathe underwater and becomes a tourist attraction. Unlike the often strident rejections of popular film form espoused by parallel cinema, Om Dar Ba Dar embraces the Bollywood conventions of romance and musical numbers, but delivers these pleasures through dialog peppered with arch non-sequiturs, sly references to mythology and politics, psychedelic sequences that may be fantasies or dreams, and off-kilter filmi songs larded with weird synths and vocoder. As one New Delhi-based critic put it: “Welcome to the trippiest film made in Indian cinema.”

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