Starring: Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofalo, Joe Don Baker, John Mahoney, Steve Zahn, Swoosie Kurtz, Winona Ryder

The Future of Film is Female celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Gen-X malaise classic REALITY BITES, and honors the work of its writer, Helen Childress, and editor, Lisa Zeno Churgin. To make an additional $10 donation to The Future of Film is Female, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.

“There are many ways to peg the twentysomething generation, but none funnier, more accurate or less pretentious than by using the details that stick to characters like a second skin in REALITY BITES. On their college graduation day, the film’s heroes — Lelaina, Vickie, Troy and Sammy — gather on a rooftop in Houston to smoke cigarettes, drink beer and sing ‘Conjunction Junction,’ a Saturday-morning cartoon snippet that helped educate them. Higher education is fine, but as a life-shaping experience it’s just no match for television.

Lelaina (Winona Ryder) is the center of the film and of its romantic triangle. An aspiring filmmaker and her class valedictorian, she is taping a documentary about her friends. The audience sees snippets of this throughout “Reality Bites,” a technique that offers a visual tie to the MTV generation without becoming intrusive. ‘I kind of made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t think about where it was going to end up,’ Lelaina says of her film. ‘I didn’t want to unintentionally commercialize it.’ That’s not a problem REALITY BITES has, and that mainstream sleekness accounts for a great deal of its charm. This film is SLACKER without the slackness, intentionally commercial and breezily entertaining.

REALITY BITES is directed by the comedian Ben Stiller with a sure comic touch and a feel for the texture of lives that are pretty much all texture and no forward drive. This generation has the overwhelming sense that ambition is wasted on the old. Helen Childress, the 23-year-old screenwriter, perfectly captures the slightly defensive wit of people like Lelaina, who can hold up a giant soft-drink cup and announce, ‘The most profound, important invention of my life: the Big Gulp.'” –Caryn James, The New York Times, Feb. 18, 1994

Doc N Roll Film Festival Presents

Having Fun with A**h*les: The Greatest Band No One Knows tells the story of The Giraffes, a native New York City band. The documentary delves into their nearly 30-year career, highlighting their raw beginnings, tumultuous experiences, and unwavering passion for creating and performing rock and roll music. Despite their dedication and drive, the band has not achieved the same level of success as similar artists they shared the stage with, such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes, Interpol, and many others from the early 2000s New York City music scene. Yet, The Giraffes continue to record and perform all over the country, with a small but loyal fan base showing up.

The documentary captures the essence of what it means to be a passionate musician in an ever-changing industry. It celebrates the spirit of perseverance and the joy of making music for the love of it. Having Fun with A**h*les is a testament to the band’s enduring legacy and their relentless pursuit of their rock and roll dreams.

Doc N Roll Film Festival Presents

Amidst Soho’s flourishing folk scene of the mid-60s, Jackson C. Frank released a masterpiece album, produced by fellow American expat Paul Simon. Jackson was close to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and was a vital musical influence for so many, like Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, Counting Crows, Graham Coxon, John Mayer and Laura Marling. However, after the release of his album, he disappeared without a trace.

With physical disabilities and severe PTSD as a result of a childhood tragedy, his mental health deteriorated. While absent, his musical influence greatly increased over the years. That’s when a young music fan decided to seek him out. This film follows in Frank’s footsteps to unknot the threads of a unique artist with a dire fate.

Doc N Roll Film Festival Presents

The first-ever feature documentary on acclaimed London-born artist Chris Gollon (1953 – 2017), Life in Paint explores his pioneering use of music to create new imagery; from lyrics by Bob Dylan, Neil Young or Talk Talk, to direct collaborations with musicians such as Yi Yao, Eleanor McEvoy and Thurston Moore, who has hailed Gollon’s “creative and modest genius.”

A sensitive and innovative painter of women, Gollon also expressed a powerful common humanity via his androgynous figures, and there has been a surge of interest in his work since his untimely death just seven years ago. Via found footage and BBC clips, the film shows Gollon disarmingly revealing his creative process and innovative techniques. Moving montages of Gollon’s images, combined with music by artists including The Skids, Gavin Bryars, Sleaford Mods, Yi Yao and Eleanor McEvoy, provide insights into how Gollon fused the two art forms, and how each energized and changed the other.

Doc N Roll Film Festival Presents

After paying tribute to and introducing the photographic and pictorial work of Peter Christopherson (1955-2010) and John Balance (1962-2004) to a larger audience, founding members of the cult formation COIL, Timeless editions have had the duo’s filmed archives restored, from their early films in adolescence in the early 1970s to the more accomplished works of the 1980s/90s, uncovering a first-rate cinematic body of work.

Alternating between medical art, homoerotic performances, and body horror, these short films and other moments immortalized on 8mm and 16mm film are firmly rooted within an aesthetic sense that resonates with the concerns of the emerging industrial scene in England. At the intersections of Eros and Thanatos, these images assembled by Maxime Lachaud and Reivaks Timeless into a raw, hallucinatory, and immersive film evoke the spectres of Georges Bataille, J.G. Ballard, Jean Genet, Derek Jarman as well as the Viennese Actionists. Underpinned by a number of previously unpublished compositions by the duo, A Way to Die is a unique document, sensual, disturbing, and profoundly haunted.

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: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ralph Ineson, Julia Garner, Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich, Natasha Lyonne, Sarah Niles

Set against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, The Fantastic Four: First Steps introduces Marvel’s First Family—Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Johnny Storm/Human Torch and Ben Grimm/The Thing as they face their most daunting challenge yet.

Starring: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Alan Tudyk, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Skyler Gisondo

Superman embarks on a journey to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing as Clark Kent.

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Mahershala Ali

Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures across land, sea and air within that tropical biosphere hold, in their DNA, the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.