My film festival coverage for 2025 is in full swing with the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF). This is an exciting year for DIFF for one particular reason. For the first time in its nineteen-year history, DIFF is now an Oscar-qualifying festival following an announcement last October from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The Dallas International Film Festival is now one of 181 festivals worldwide – 59 in the US – that has been approved by the AMPAS as a qualifying festival. According to the DIFF 2025 website, “[F]ilms that win qualified awards between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025, may be qualified to enter the 98th Academy Awards®, provided that the films meet all the requirements set forth in the official rules for that season.”
On a personal note, I hope that the above announcement doesn’t make it harder for me to get in to screenings at the fest. I wrote briefly in my DIFF 2024 coverage about having issues reserving advance tickets with my press badge. I was informed that, because paying customers were the priority, I would have to take my chances in the waitlist line for each screening. Last year I was saved by a benefactor who gifted me a badge that granted me priority seating. I’ve been informed by that same benefactor that I’m on my own this year. Hopefully the glitz and glam (by association) of the Oscars doesn’t make the fest so busy that I can’t get into any screenings.
For my third trip to DIFF – taking place this year between April 25-May 1 – I was excited to find out which classic title would be selected for the fest’s mid-week repertory screening. My first trip to the fest, in 2023, offered up the classic Western Shane. Last year’s mid-week classic was An Affair to Remember. DIFF 2025 is changing the presentation of this screening to honor the person who, for eighteen of the last nineteen installments of the fest, has programmed the mid-week classic screening. The Stodghill Classic Movie Night for DIFF 2025 will feature the 1953 Fred Zinnemann war/romance picture From Here to Eternity, starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Deborah Kerr, the star of last year’s Stodghill Classic Movie Night.
I’ve never seen From Here to Eternity, so catching up with it on the big screen will be the perfect way to further my film history education. This yearly tradition is where you’ll find me at the halfway point of the fest on Monday night.
Also on offer at this year’s DIFF are a series of live screenplay table reads. Each year, the fest holds screenwriting competitions, and the winners of those competitions have their screenplays read for a live audience. The one that caught my attention as I scanned this year’s slate of screenings and events was the winner in the Texas category, honoring storytellers from the Lone Star State.
This year’s winner in that category is How to Start a Cult by Melinda Scully. The description from the fest guide reads: “When a young woman challenges the gatekeepers of academia by starting her own cult, her radical research blurs the line between devotion and destruction.” I’ll report back if I’m able to attend.
Below are a few more of the screenings that I’m most anticipating at DIFF 2025:
Friendship: This new project from director Andrew DeYoung and stars Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson is one I missed at SXSW 2025. Rudd and Robinson’s involvement, and this mysteriously banal description: “[A] suburban dad falls hard for his charismatic new neighbor,” makes me intrigued to know more.
Free Leonard Peltier: Documentary hive activate! I won’t lie, I’m mostly interested to see this film about Peltier, “one of the surviving leaders of the American Indian Movement,” in order to find out how they frame the screening, as one of President Joe Biden’s last acts in office was to commute Peltier’s 50+ year prison sentence to home confinement. I’m also interested to get into the minutia of the Peltier case.
Happy as Larry: “Unsatisfied with life after years of writing novels far more interesting than his own life, Larry decides to go on one last adventure in the Isle of Skye before his scheduled demise.” Mostly, I want to know if this movie is connected in any way to the 2018 Alice Rohrwacher film Happy as Lazzaro. Plus, those last two words, “scheduled demise,” also have me intrigued to learn more.
A still from Happy As Larry.
40 Acres: “Hailey Freeman and her family are the last descendants of African American farmers who settled in rural Canada after the Civil War. In a famine-decimated near future, they now struggle to safeguard their farm, as they make one last stand against a vicious militia hell-bent on taking their 40 Acres.”
Gallagher: I was always fascinated whenever I would come upon a VHS box for one of stand-up comedian Gallagher’s specials at the video rental store. I wasn’t even through my first decade on earth when Gallagher was at the height of his powers, in the mid-1980s, so I never actually saw any of those specials. I knew that a watermelon and a sledgehammer were featured items of his routine, but I couldn’t tell you anything about the content of his actual comedy. Hopefully this new documentary, coming only three years after its subject’s death in 2022 at age seventy-six, will shed some light for me.
The poster for Gallagher.
That’s only a few of the over 125 movies that will be screened at DIFF 2025, in addition to, as the fest says, “Q&A sessions…panels with filmmakers and actors, nightly DIFF Red Carpets, and special events.” There is also a change in venue for this year’s fest. The main hub for all things DIFF 2025 will be the Cinépolis Victory Park location, a short walk from the American Airlines Center, home to both the Dallas Mavericks and the Dallas Stars.
The festival guide, a full list of events, and the ability to purchase both festival badges and individual tickets are all available at the DIFF 2025 website. I’ll publish at least one update during the fest. As always, you can find a complete log of everything I’m seeing at DIFF 2025 over on my Letterboxd account.
See you at the movies!