There’s an argument happening at the bar of the Texas Theater. No, it’s not about politics, as one might guess with a liberal film crowd taking over a small pocket of Texas. This is Oak Cliff, the blossoming cultural community north of the Dallas Trinity river, and no, the conversation is not about karaoke either. The Oak Cliff Film Festival opening night party was at Barbara’s Pavilion, a dive bar in a re-purposed home. As the film festival crowd rolled in around midnight, badges and conversations about Lemon and 35mm making the nerd fumes quite potent, the argument was about […]
by Meredith Alloway on Jul 19, 2017By the time most of the prominent guests, critics and industry hangers-on arrive at the Seattle International Film Festival every year, the show is almost over. The red carpet is rolled out for “gala” screenings during each of its four weekends, but the well-orchestrated influx of movie business types occurs only at the end of the affair. To say, as a visiting film critic — one who might enjoy the luxury of the Kimpton hotel guest lodging, or the effortless springtime beauty of the Emerald City — that you have any handle on the entirety of programming director Beth Barrett’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 24, 2016Regional film festivals all start to feel the same after a while. There’s at least one feature dramatizing the life of a white guy in Brooklyn. The organizers tell you about a farm-to-table restaurant down the street from the movie theater with craft beer you just have to try. When you ask the volunteer driving you around if they grew up in town, they answer, “sort of,” and give the name of some nearby suburb. And usually there’s a VIP party in an antique store or a mansion owned by the town’s historical society where you meet white-haired locals wearing […]
by Whitney Mallett on Apr 21, 2016A few days before the summer solstice, I arrived on an oddly cool night in Dallas for the Third Annual Oak Cliff Film Festival. A driver picked me up from the airport and whisked me directly to a pre-festival soiree at a bar called Wild Detectives where everyone seemed to know each other already. A few houses from the corner of East 8th St. and North Bishop Ave., Wild Detectives is proof Dallas’ zoning rules are the envy of lushes everywhere; the bar is a two-story house right in the middle of a residential neighborhood! That neighborhood, from which the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 24, 2014