DALLAS — The Oak Cliff Film Festival will return once again next month, and the 13th installment invites the audience to widen its eyes with this year's theme: "Movies are all around us."
This year's festival features 27 feature films, along with 58 shorts, many of them made by North Texans. More than a dozen of the films will be making their Texas premiere. The Texas Theatre, Bishop Arts Theatre Center and the Kessler Theater will host these films along with other venues around Oak Cliff.
"Experience the bizarre, brutal, and beautiful habits of film in its natural environment: your life!" the OCFF press release states. "These stunningly unique cinema creatures can only be observed June 2023 at the historic Texas Theatre and other venues in Dallas’ Oak Cliff neighborhood. Widen your eyes at the discovery that every day is a film festival and movies are all around you!"
The festival will open June 20 with the DFW premiere of Omar and Cedric: If this Ever Gets Weird, a documentary showing rare archive footage charting the relationship between Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, of the band At the Drive-In, and Cedric Bixler-Zavalar, of The Mars Volta. Texas bands Perdidos and Dezorah will play behind the screen of the Texas Theatre following the screening.
To close the festival, a new Jason Schwartzman film, Between the Temples, will be screened. The crisis-of-faith comedy from Nathan Silver follows Schwartzman, who plays a cantor losing his voice and will to live, but finds hope in an unlikely romance.
The festival also features some unique opportunities to see some classic older films, including a 40th anniversary screening of the Oscar-winning documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk at 1:15 p.m. June 23 at the Texas Theatre, with an introduction by Jake Ettinger, the policy advisory and community liaison for Dallas City Council Member District 1 Chad West.
There will also be a screening of the classic silent horror film from 1922, Häxan, at 9:30 p.m. June 21 at the Texas Theatre with a live orchestra providing the film's backing score. The film uses dramatic vignettes to explore a hypothesis that witches of long ago suffered from the same ailments as hysteria patients in the film's own time.
Films screened in competition at the festival will also be considered for several awards, including Best Narrative Feature, Best Documentary Feature and Special Jury Performance.
To view the full program for this year's festival, click here. And click here to purchase a badge to attend the festival this year.
