One of those offerings is Vikram Jayanti's searing James Ellroy's Feast of Death (April 30, 7 p.m.), in which the author of L.A. Confidentialand White Jazz once more opens the unsolved case of his murdered mother and finds only his own face staring up from the coffin. Jayanti's film is the hardest to watch--it overflows with grisly crime-scene pics--but among the most rewarding, because it's a doc that gets beneath the skin of its subject till it sucks out every last drop of blood.
"We don't want to be the same thing every year," Fallen says. "We're excited about the diversity of this year's festival. We can hit all segments of the community that way. People can look at the schedule and always find something they'll be interested in. Some years it's more successful than others, but that's always at the front of our minds, trying to do something that will hit all segments as much as we can."
Burgle me this: Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea in Paul Wendkos' B-noir
A Tromatic filmmaker: Lloyd Kaufman
Details
runs April 24 through May 1 at the Angelika Film Center, 531 E. Mockingbird Lane. Call
214-821-3456 or go to
www.usafilmfestival.com for a complete schedule and ticket information.
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To that end, the USA Film Festival will co-host several screenings this year with such local organizations as the Mexico Institute of Dallas, whose founder, Clara Hinojosa, helped bring Two Crimesto Dallas; and Black Cinematheque, which is bringing Charles Burnett's documentary Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (April 26, 4:30 p.m.) to the festival this year. Indeed, the USAFF has gone out of its way this year to include arts organizations that normally exist well below the radar screen: Black Cinematheque hosts regular screenings of hard-to-find films at the South Dallas Cultural Center, as well as monthlyfilm fests, including the forthcoming Stand Up! Rise Up! Resist! Black Man's Film Festival in late May.
Intentionally or not, there is one film here that links the USA Film Festival with its heritage: A Decade Under the Influence (April 30, 7 p.m.), directed by screenwriter Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme, who brought in LaBute, Alexander Payne and other indie filmmakers to interview their spiritual fathers about movies in the 1970s. What you'll see at the fest is an abbreviated version of a three-part documentary due to air on the Independent Film Channel in August, which is why it feels as though it treads over the same ground covered in Trio's recent Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. But the stories told by Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Dennis Hopper and others who once came to Dallas for this very festival can't be heard enough, especially by those who need to be reminded there was once a period in American filmmaking when studios made personal, powerful movies--the kind now relegated to independent cinema, the kind that make the rounds at festivals and play art houses but are never allowed into the multiplexes. It's as much a cautionary tale as celebration.
