Starring: Frederick Wiseman, Bill Lee, Keith William Richards, Wayne Diamond, Cliff Blake, Joe Castiglione, Keith Poulson, Conner Marx, Paul Kandarian, Jeff Saint-Dic

Two recreational baseball teams, the River Dogs and Adler’s Paint, have been meeting on their New England field on Sunday afternoons for longer than anyone can remember. These middle-aged sportsmen can’t run as fast as they used to or connect as reliably with a pitch, but their vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling, and busting chops remains undiminished. After the know-nothing county board opts to raze the baseball diamond to make way for a school, the teams meet for one final game at their beloved Soldier’s Field, with girlfriends, kids, and local hooligans as intermittent spectators. As day turns to night and innings bleed together, the players face the uncertainty of a new era.

Lovingly laid in a vanished Massachusetts of the mid-1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant feature debut plays like a lazy afternoon, perfectly attuned to the rhythms of America’s eternal pastime. Named for a rarely-deployed curveball, Eephus is both a ribald comedy for the baseball connoisseur and a movie for anyone who’s ever lamented their community slipping away.

Starring: Neda Rahmanian, Yasmin Raeis, Mehdi Moinzadeh, Kais Nashif

A film within a film, Looking for Oum Kulthum is the plight of an Iranian woman artist/filmmaker living in exile, as she embarks on capturing the life and art of the legendary female singer of the Arab world, Oum Kulthum. Through her difficult journey, not unlike her heroine’s, she has to face the struggles, sacrifices and the price that a woman has to pay if she dares to cross the lines of a conservative male dominated society.

Mitra is an ambitious artist in her forties who embarks on her dream project of making a film about the legendary Egyptian singer and diva Oum Kulthum. Her film explores the struggles, sacrifices and the price of Oum Kulthum’s success as a female artist in a male dominated society. However, having left her family behind for her career and in
her efforts to capture the essence of Oum Kulthum as a myth, a woman and an artist, Mitra’s own struggles blend with those of the singer and she finds herself caught in an emotional and artistic breakdown.

Starring: Natalia Solián, Alfonso Dosal, Mayra Batalla, Mercedes Hernández, Aída López, Martha Claudia Moreno

The Future of Film is Female and Bloodletter Magazine present HUESERA and short film LADY PARTS. Introduced by Bloodletter Magazine founder and LADY PARTS director Ariel McCleese. To make an additional $10 donation to The Future of Film is Female, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.

Writer/Director Michelle Garza Cervera uniquely explores the complexities of first-time motherhood in her darkly affective debut feature, Huesera. Imbuing a sense of fear and loss of self that is inherent to becoming a parent, the film uses the supernatural curse of “La Huesera” to heighten Valeria (Natalia Solián) sense of anxiety. Valeria’s joy at becoming pregnant with her first child is quickly taken away when she’s cursed by a sinister entity. As danger closes in and relationships with her family become fractured, she’s forced deeper into a chilling world of dark magic that threatens to consume her. A group of witches emerge that could be her only hope for safety and salvation, but not without grave risk.

LADY PARTS
Ariel McCleese / 15 min / 2023
When Iris thinks of Ellie, she gets wet. Very wet. She’s heard it’s normal, but this seems different. And when you’re in high school, different is dangerous.

Bloodletter is a feminist horror magazine showcasing personal and analytic perspectives on the horrific by women, trans, and non-binary writers. Celebrating marginalized voices and empowering emerging writers, Bloodletter is furthermore a community, bonded by the alchemic capacity of storytelling to transform horror into liberation. Issue Four: Lore launches on March 18th at bloodlettermag.com, featuring an interview with HUESERA director Michelle Garza Cervera.

Starring: Christopher Hoskins, Paul Richichi, Joe Zaso, George Reis, Larry Koster, Arlene Burns, Salvatore Finkel

“A throwback to crude, white trash drive-in classics.” – Shock Cinema

A deranged carnival barker unleashes his pet gorilla to wreak havoc on his enemies in a small Long Island town. When the ape embarks on a sex-fueled rampage of murder and dismemberment, a racist local detective sets his sights on an innocent drifter.

From outsider indie auteur and legendary horror zine publisher Keith J. Crocker comes this Super 8-shot, lurid love letter to both the grindhouse era and Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. The Bloody Ape spares no souls and pulls no punches in its depiction of the depraved, morally bankrupt suburbs of a bygone New York City, where sleaze and grime coursed through its veins.

Starring: Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély, Odette Talazac

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’ country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the premiere audience in 1939, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959.

Starring: Silvero Pereira, Udo Kier, Bárbara Colen, Sônia Braga, Karine Teles, Thomas Aquino, Julia Marie Peterson, Antonio Saboia

A few years from now… Bacurau, a small village in the Brazilian sertão, mourns the loss of its matriarch, Carmelita, who lived to be 94. Days later, its inhabitants notice that their village has literally vanished from online maps and a UFO-shaped drone is seen flying overhead. There are forces that want to expel them from their homes, and soon, in a genre-bending twist, a band of armed mercenaries arrive in town picking off the inhabitants one by one. A fierce confrontation takes place when the townspeople turn the tables on the villainous outsiders, banding together by any means necessary to protect and maintain their remote community. The mercenaries just may have met their match in the fed-up, resourceful denizens of little Bacurau.

Starring: Mansour Diouf, Ami Diakhate, Mamadou Mahourédia Gueye, Djibril Diop Mambéty

After being kicked out of her African village three decades earlier for getting pregnant out of wedlock, Linguere (Ami Diakhate) has returned home. While Linguere has done well for herself, her home village has fallen on hard economic times. Intent on punishing Dramaan (Mansour Diouf), the man who fathered her child but refused to own up to the act, Linguere makes a proposal: She will help the town financially, if the locals agree to execute Dramaan.

Starring: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Chatel, Karlheinz Böhm, Adrian Hoven, Christiane Maybach, Harry Baer

In this dark examination of love and money, Fox (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a young, gay member of the German working class. When he meets the older and dapper Max, who has upper-class roots, Fox thinks he may have found someone to help him out, but Max refuses to do so. However, this changes when Fox wins big on the lottery, and Max becomes friendlier and helps to reinvent Fox. But, in fact, Max and his friends are slyly trying to swindle him out of his new fortune.

For decades, Theo Jansen has toiled on the beaches of the Netherlands in his quest to make his beloved Strandbeests self-sufficient. But what happens when, as the artist pursues his dream to create new life, he starts to feel his own slipping away? As he contemplates whether he is the Strandbeests’ master or slave, Theo races against the inevitable passing of time and his eventual death.

Starring: Elia Suleiman

Elia Suleiman (as himself) escapes from Palestine seeking an alternative homeland, only to find that Palestine is trailing behind him. The promise of a new life turns into a comedy of errors: however far he travels, from Paris to New York, something always reminds him of home.