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