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Bleak Week, C’est Chic
Come and See (1985) The inaugural season of the American Cinematheque series Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair took place in 2022, a cheeky stab at some summertime counter-programming. Its diverse lineup was aimed, as per the Cinematheque’s website, at spotlighting “filmmakers who wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.” Indeed, in the festival’s first 33 film–strong slate of repertory classics like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Come and See (1985), Winter Light (1963), Funny Games (1997), Breaking the Waves (1996), and Sátántangó (1994), this visceral quality was front and center as an organizing principle, even if the films weren’t united by much besides their baseline dreariness and arthouse bonafides. Now entering its fifth and most curatorially focused iteration, Bleak Week has grown from a local phenomenon into a worldwide event: a 73-city, nearly 100-theater expansion begins in June, an invitation for programmers from around the world to interpret the series’ broad definition of “bleakness” for their own audiences.
Chris LeMaire, Director of Programming at the American Cinematheque, has always embraced films that might otherwise be labeled heavy or depressing. Before the pandemic, he led programming efforts to spotlight rare Andrei Tarkovsky prints, and also enticed Lav Diaz to come to the US for the very first time. Tarkovsky and Diaz’s austere, often durational films about national history and political atrocity operate in very different aesthetic modes, but are both invested in existential concerns. In this spirit, Bleak Week’s apparently surface-level branding actually encourages audiences to attend to our most foundational human qualities, even though it might be easy to say, “I’m not in the mood today…” This dedication to patience and humanism—to sticking with what may seem intimidatingly heavy—is the heart and soul of Bleak Week.
American Cinematheque Artistic Director Grant Moninger told me over Zoom that the germ of Bleak Week came out of a desire to “take Chris’s brilliant programming and present it in a way to really bring some recognition to art house films and great auteurs throughout the history of cinema.” LeMaire and Moninger achieved this, in part, by bucking one of the American Cinematheque’s unspoken programming rules. Rather than present the first edition of Bleak Week as just one among many thematic programs from which their audience could choose, they instead filled the schedules of all three of their LA-based venues with wall-to-wall despair.
This new way of programming presented both a predicament and an opportunity. If their audience had no choice but to participate in Bleak Week, then how might they personally navigate the program? This led LeMaire to wonder about the different ways in which movies can be bleak, or as he put it, “What if there are different types of bleaks?” There weren’t many left-field choices in the first Bleek Week program besides Arthur Penn’s black comedy Penn & Teller Get Killed (1989). This year’s more diverse lineup, however, presents arthouse and repertory staples—including Bleak Week favorite Béla Tarr, Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), and Ingmar Bergman’s war apologia Shame (1968)—as equals to all manner of genre film like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) and Mick Jackson’s post-apocalyptic nightmare Threads (1984), which are not often programmed alongside them. With retrospective strands on Isabelle Huppert, Warwick Thornton, and Ari Aster, all in town for Q&As, as centerpieces of the lineup, the hope is that there is something for every type of audience member.
Still, Moninger and LeMaire were apprehensive about the public’s response to a festival with such a specific tone. The Hollywood Reporter suggested that audiences’ interests were veering in the opposite direction in Carly Thomas’s recent article about “Hopecore,” or a trend in uncynical storytelling that celebrates collaboration and the indomitable human spirit. The sci-fi blockbuster Project Hail Mary is, as Thomas describes, “at the vanguard” of this new trend, a distinct break from Hollywood’s penchant for downbeat, grayscale filmmaking inaugurated by Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. Sweeping generalizations aside, Thomas’s argument flies in the face of something like Bleak Week. After a gradual expansion from Los Angeles into other major hubs like New York City, Chicago, Dallas, and London, this year’s edition features programming in 73 cities worldwide. Such a widespread appetite seems to suggest a powerful desire among audiences to see films more reflective of reality—warts and all. “To me,” said Moninger, “the greater hope is that places are uniting. These are films made by humans, programmed by humans, for humans, about the human condition. There’s nothing more hopeful than that.”
To Moninger’s point, Bleak Week’s geographic expansion has been collaborative. Kerstin Larson, programming director at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theater (my former hometown cinema) noted in a Zoom call that LeMaire reached out directly about potentially participating in the expansion; though, Larsen pointed out first, she was aware of the series already through her own programming research and after LA-based friends attended screenings. As for the collaborative nature, Larson said it wasn’t “too collaborative,” but they were open with resources such as “a giant spreadsheet” of past programs and distributors’ upcoming slates of restorations. “What’s extremely important to us,” LeMaire noted, “is that we don’t impose a lineup. We don’t even say it has to be seven days. What is a ‘week’ to you? What would that look like in your programming?”
This ethos is evident in the diversity of nationwide Bleak Week programming. The Oriental Theater, for example, may have a very focused lineup of seven films thanks to the availability of screens, but the overlap between their program and the American Cinematheque’s is limited just to William Friedkin’s heist thriller Sorcerer (1977). “I did decide to home in on a bit of a theme for our programming,” she told me. “One of the films that I absolutely had to show was the restoration of American Job (1996), because Chris Smith’s American Movie (1999) is so well-regarded here in Milwaukee. We decided to expand that into a [thematic strand] about how work and labor continues to be bleak. We’re showing The Turin Horse (2011) on Father’s Day, which also is just hilarious—doing all of this programming in June when everything is so bright and sunny.”
Perhaps just as much as the programmers, filmmakers and actors have also wanted to get in on the Bleak Week action. “When Chris convinced Béla Tarr, who said he would never come back to the United States, to come back for Bleak Week, it suddenly changed the stature of the festival,” said Moninger. As one of the “heroes” of Bleak Week, Béla Tarr’s approval and presence imparted a sense of occasion that the series might not otherwise have had. In the years since, other renowned cinematic voices have come into the fold. In 2025, independent maverick Jon Jost was on hand for a rare retrospective, and 2024 featured tributes to Kenneth Lonergan, Lynne Ramsay, and Charlie Kaufman.
“It’s cool we can even call Bleak Week a film festival,” said LeMaire. “There are no premieres of new films. It’s pretty much all repertory programming. And the response to it in this town is like, ‘I gotta get a ticket for every night.’ Year one, we never would have dreamed.” Moninger echoed this assessment, noting that Ari Aster’s retrospective sold out “in just a few minutes.” LeMaire is quick to emphasize the important role that distributors have played in the excitement around the festival. “Janus Films and American Genre Film Archive are willing to hold some restorations they have for the year for Bleak Week,” he shares, “which is really cool.” To that point, this year’s edition flexes restorations of the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) and Daniel Petrie’s difficult-to-see Buster and Billie (1974), both of which will screen as world premieres.
Of course, it’s hard to discount the boost that a big name like Isabelle Huppert can bring. “This is the easiest year we’ve ever programmed,” LeMaire said. “Because once you have her, everyone’s saying ‘yes.’” There’s a trickle-down aspect to this kind of strategizing, too. “If we can have someone that big, then we can ask audiences to take a chance on some of the rarer things in the lineup,” LeMaire added. “If it’s in a festival with Isabelle Huppert and Ari Aster, it must be interesting.”
A notable omission in Bleak Week’s programming is nonfiction filmmaking. If one views narrative as a vehicle for fantasy and extrapolation, then screening documentaries about real-world atrocities under a comparatively glib series banner might not sit right with audiences. “We don’t actually want to show the suffering,” explained Moninger. “Bleak Week is really triumphant. It’s saying that no matter what people have been through, what they’re going through now, or who they are, you can make art about it.” Nevertheless, avoiding direct reflections of the real world feels oddly limiting for a program as open-ended as Bleak Week, so it may take another programmer’s focus on unflinching but equally urgent documentaries to frame those films thoughtfully for audiences.
I was still curious why something as specific as Bleak Week is important to cinema culture. The “Hopecore” trend registers more like a clickbaity media headline rather than a rigorously documented shift in culture; treacly sentimentality has never truly been in or out of style, but a constant throughout film history. Similarly, as Moninger said, “There’s never been a time on this earth that wasn’t bleak. It may not be bleak in your house, but I guarantee that next door it’s kind of bleak. And I guarantee you across the ocean it’s kind of bleak. So to say it’s really all about ‘now’ is limiting.” Setting aside the program’s limitations, I find resonances between mine and Moninger’s excitement about Bleak Week, which unsurprisingly returns to the communal potential that cinema offers. “Being able to experience sorrow and grief together—there’s something more hopeful about that than people watching entertainment at home.”
