Directed by Gus Van Sant • 1985 • United States
Starring Tim Streeter, Doug Cooeyate, Ray Monge
With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature MALA NOCHE heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day-shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. MALA NOCHE was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating capsule from a time and place that continues to haunt its director’s work.
Up Next in American Independents
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George Washington
Directed by David Gordon Green • 2000 • United States
Starring Candace Evanofski, Donald Holden, Damien Jewan LeeOver the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the decaying rural South must confront a tangle of difficult choices. An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed med...
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Bless Their Little Hearts
Directed by Billy Woodberry • 1984 • United States
Starring Nate Hardman, Kaycee Moore, Angela BurnettScripted and shot by Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry’s slice-of-life revelation is a key masterpiece of the LA Rebellion, the black independent-cinema renaissance that emerged from UCLA’s film...
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Clean, Shaven
Directed by Lodge Kerrigan • 1994 • United States
Starring Peter Greene, Robert Albert, Megan OwenLodge Kerrigan began his succession of utterly unique, visually and aurally dazzling character studies with the raw, ravaging CLEAN, SHAVEN. A compelling headfirst dive into the mindscape of a schi...
