RETRO MdFF

Oscar Micheaux, 1925, USA, 105 min.

Screening on 35mm! Live score with Aaron Hill.

The Rt. Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins is a charismatic preacher who commands the respect and reverence of his congregation in Tatesville, a small Black town in Georgia. Martha Jane, one of his devout congregants, is determined to have her daughter Isabelle marry the Reverend. Meanwhile, Isabelle is in love with Sylvester, the reverend’s twin brother. Unbeknownst to Martha Jane and the rest of the town, the reverend is actually an imposter and a fugitive who has been drinking, gambling and stealing the church’s collection plate for himself. Starring Paul Robeson (in his film debut), Mercedes Gilbert, Julia Theresa Russell and Lawrence Chenault, Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul is an incisive portrait of religion and unquestioning faith in a small community. (Deidre A. Thompson)

Presented with an introduction from Deidre A. Thompson, Collection Services Librarian at MICA. Baltimore musician Aaron Hill accompanies Michaeux’s film with an original live score in the theater.

Gakuryû Ishii, 1984, Japan, 106 min.

All notions of what it means to be a normal family are dropped into a blender and warped to hell in Gakuryû Ishii’s deconstruction of the nuclear household: The Crazy Family (1984).

Katsuhiko Kobayashi thinks his family’s trajectory is declining due to their “civilization sickness,” which he believes is perhaps a consequence of city living. He decides to move them to a more suburban setting away from the city, so they can settle more into the roles he imagined for them. But his plans are gradually disturbed by his own eccentric actions and the rest of the family’s rapid descent into madness.

Gakuryû Ishii is one of Japan’s leading filmmaking Punk visionaries, who aided in the creation of his country’s own cyberpunk movement. His body of work includes the punk-rock cyberpunk showdown film Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001) and the psycho-thriller Angel Dust (1994). (Samuel Antezana, Video Editor & Co-Owner of Error_4444 Distribution Company).

Darryl Wharton-Rigby, 1998, USA, 83 min.

Screening on 16mm!
Released the very year that MdFF was being created, shot on Super-16mm film and supported by MdFF’s Producer’s Club, Detention is the 1998 feature debut of Baltimore’s own Darryl Wharton-Rigby, an accomplished TV writer and professor at Temple University’s Japan campus. Based on Wharton-Rigby’s own recollections of the Baltimore public school system, the film follows five exceptional students and one dedicated teacher as they experience an afternoon of detention. That particular event turns out to be a pivotal life changing experience for everyone involved. (Eric Cotten)

Preceded by Hearth
Cameron Clay, 2023, USA, 13 min.
A family returns home to find a mysterious man, disheveled and unwelcome, at their suburban doorstep.

Steve Yaeger, 1998, USA, 97 min.

Screening on 35mm with Steve Yeager in attendance!

John Waters’ Pink Flamingos is one of the most notorious cult films ever made. Filmmaker Steve Yeager was shooting behind-the-scenes footage of the production. Decades later, he combined that footage with other archival materials and newly shot interviews with the likes of Steve Buscemi, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, to create Divine Trash, a documentary that serves as not only a time capsule of Waters’ early Dreamland Productions days, but also the 1990s world of indie filmmaking. The film features the charming look of that decade’s low-budget 16mm filmmaking, just before the digital revolution changed the indie film landscape.

Divine Trash premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, and brought home the prestigious Filmmakers Trophy for Best Documentary. The following year it screened at the inaugural Maryland Film Festival. (Skizz Cyzyk).

Kenneth Price, 2014, USA, 78 min.

A decade ago, MdFF featured a beloved film about Grammy Award winning producer Patrick Douhit aka 9th Wonder's tenure at Harvard University, and those who caught the doc have been raving about it ever since. As Harvard’s first Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow, Douhit indulges academics and hip hop heads old and new in the extensive history of hip hop, sampling, and crate digging via his class “The Standards of Hip Hop.” The film centers on the emerging significance of incorporating hip-hop studies into the academy and spotlights the scholars and musicians at the forefront of preserving 40 (and now 50!) years of hip-hop culture. (Jasmine Patrick).

Dawn Porter, 2016, USA, 80 min.

At least as relevant now as it was at our 2016 Festival, Trapped is Dawn Porter’s pointed investigation of U.S. abortion clinics fighting to survive. Since 2010, hundreds of laws regulating abortion clinics have been passed by conservative state legislatures, particularly in the South. These restrictions, known as TRAP laws, (or Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers,) spread across America. Faced with increased costs of compliance and the alarming fear of violence from protestors, the stakes for the women and men on the frontlines couldn't be any higher. As the battle heads to the U.S. Supreme Court, Trapped follows the struggles of the clinic workers and lawyers fighting to keep abortion safe and legal for millions of American women, many of them poor and uninsured.

Anna Biller, 2007, USA, 120 min

Screening on 35mm!
A fan favorite from our 2007 MdFF, Anna Biller’s VIVA is a cult freak-out retro 1970's spectacle, about a bored housewife who gets sucked into the sexual revolution. Abandoned by her perfect Ken-doll husband, Barbi is dragged into trouble by her girlfriend, who spouts women's lib as she gets Barbi to discard her bra and go out on the town. Barbi becomes a Red Riding Hood in a sea of wolves, and quickly learns a lot more than she wanted to about the different kinds of scenes going on in the wild '70's, including nudist camps, the hippie scene, orgies, bisexuality, sadism, drugs, and bohemia. VIVA is a highly stylized film that draws on classic exploitation cinema for its look and characters. Saturated to the hilt with vibrant color, and exquisitely detailed in its depiction of the period, VIVA looks like a lost film from the late '60s, even down to the campy and self-assured performances, the big lighting, the plethora of negligées, and the delirious assortment of Salvation Army ashtrays, lamps, fabrics, and bric-a-brac. Whether you're looking for naked people dancing, alcoholic swingers, stylish sex scenes, a sea of polyester, Hammond organ jams, glitzy show numbers, white horses, blondes in the bathtub, gay hairdressers, or psychedelic animation, VIVA has it all!