After a few weeks spent recharging my battery in the wake of covering SXSW 2024, I’m locked and loaded for the 18th annual Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF), which will be held April 25-May 2 at several theaters around town. DIFF 2024 will feature screenings of over 100 titles, many of which will be world premieres. The festival will also be host to a panel discussion about the future of cinematic exhibition and dozens of opportunities to hear filmmakers speak about their movies at post-screening Q&As.
Regular readers will know that when given free rein, I tend to gravitate toward documentaries at film festivals. DIFF 2024 has plenty of intriguing-sounding docs on offer that should scratch the itch. Here are a few of the documentaries I’ve added to my tentative screening schedule:
- Shaking It Up: The Life and Times of Liz Carpenter: The story of a woman who, according to the DIFF website description, reported on the JFK assassination, helped enact Great Society reforms from within the White House, and championed the Equal Rights Amendment, among other achievements.
A still from Shaking It Up: The Life and Times of Liz Carpenter
- Print It Black is a doc that follows journalists reporting from Uvalde, TX in the aftermath of the Robb Elementary school shooting.
A still from Print It Black.
- An Army of Women documents the work of a group of women in Austin, TX who “join forces and help build a movement of plaintiffs legally challenging the system that allowed their rapists to walk free.”
- Clemente, executive produced by Richard Linklater, promises to be an “immersive documentary about the remarkable life and legacy of MLB icon Roberto Clemente.”
I’ve already had the chance to sample one of the documentaries premiering at DIFF 2024. In preparation for a media roundtable discussion featuring two of the film’s producers, I screened Water Wars, which is making its world premiere at DIFF 2024 and is playing twice, on Friday, April 26 (that screening has already sold out) and on Sunday, April 28, both at DIFF’s primary venue, Uptown’s Violet Crown Cinema.
Water Wars tells the story of ranchers and farmers battling it out at public meetings held by the Hudspeth County water board after the city of El Paso announces that it would like to buy water rights from the residents of neighboring Dell City. El Paso needs the extra water for its growing population.
The situation becomes combative when two out-of-state billionaires begin making moves to secure the lucrative water rights for themselves. The underhanded machinations of the billionaires and their manipulation of the Hudspeth County water board sparked a legal case that was ultimately decided by the Texas State Supreme Court.
I wish I had enjoyed director Mario Mattei’s film. Produced by a family member of one of the subjects of the documentary, Water Wars plays like a vanity project made to memorialize a millionaire’s defeat over a billionaire. Mattei makes the core of the movie about the injustice of a system that would deny the ownership of buried resources – in this case, underground water reservoirs – to the people who own the land under which those resources sit.
What stuck in my mind while watching Water Wars, though, was the scramble from all involved to try to make as much money as possible from a substance vital to human survival. As my wife succinctly put it in her own Letterboxd review for the movie: “NO ONE SHOULD OWN THE WATER.”
A still from Water Wars.
There are also several structural issues with Water Wars. It struggles to give us basic information pertinent to the story it’s telling, like establishing a timeline of events. I wasn’t even sure in what year the Texas Supreme Court decided the case that is central to the entire film.
A few instances of connective voiceover narration in the movie are written and performed like they’re being delivered by a prairie cowpoke, including clichéd passages about ridin’ and ropin’ freedom-lovin’ Texans. (You can hear the narrator carefully drop every “g,” that is when the music on the soundtrack doesn’t drown out what he’s saying.)
DIFF 2024 will also offer a few opportunities for me to catch up with titles I missed at last month’s SXSW. Principal among them is A24’s new horror film from director Jane Schoenbrun – and producer Emma Stone – called I Saw the TV Glow. It was a buzzy title at SXSW, one of those movies that you hear people talking about as a must-see. From the DIFF website: “Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.”
I’m hoping to also catch the latest from newly-minted Oscar nominee Colman Domingo. The star of Rustin – a biopic of the long-ignored civil rights movement hero (which I still need to see!) – is in a new film titled Sing Sing, about a man “imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn’t commit, [who] finds purpose by acting in a theatre group with other incarcerated men.” The word coming out of SXSW was very positive.
I’m also looking forward to spending some time with short films at DIFF 2024. I’ve scheduled myself for two blocks of shorts, one of which is billed as a “late night” collection, which features a little something for folks who like it when things get weird. I ask you, how can you read the description of the late-night short film offering titled Mr. Feets and not want to seek it out immediately: “At the gym, Gerry is the well-respected tough guy, but online, he's the popular masked food-smashing fetish creator ‘Mr. Feets.’” I’m hoping for 12 minutes of off-the-wall WTF.
The poster for the short film Mr. Feets.
Each year DIFF schedules one classic film to screen during the fest. I’m a sucker for repertory screenings, so I’m planning on attending this year’s classic cinema selection, the Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr romance from 1957, An Affair to Remember. I enjoyed last year’s screening of the western Shane, and it’s always advisable to see a classic on the big screen, so that’s where you’ll find me at DIFF’s midpoint on Monday night.
As mentioned above, DIFF 2024 will run April 25-May 2, with most screenings taking place at the Uptown Violet Crown Cinema, with satellite screenings at the Majestic Theater in Downtown Dallas, and my beloved Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff. You can view the complete schedule and purchase either festival badges or tickets for individual screenings at the official DIFF website. I’ll post a few updates during the fest containing capsule reviews for what I’m seeing, similar to my coverage for DIFF 2023 as well as Fantastic Fest 2023. You can find a complete log of everything I’m seeing at DIFF 2024 on my Letterboxd profile.
See you at the movies!