Digital Gym Cinema is joining a global film festival to offer counterprogramming to summer fun. Prepare for a weeklong film series catering to the dark side, Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair.
L.A.’s renowned American Cinematheque has expanded its Bleak Week to nearly 100 theaters across the United States and around the world, creating a global film festival.
"Digital Gym Cinema was approached by the American Cinematheque, and so we curated these films specifically for this cinema," said Glenn Heath, Jr., artistic director at Digital Gym Cinema. "Bleak Week is a film festival that happens every June that the American Cinematheque created in 2022, coming out of the pandemic, kind of feeling this overarching sense of of dread. They curated an entire film festival full of these challenging art films that really speak to kind of the darker themes of humanity. So they wanted to give everyone an opportunity to kind of see those films on the big screen, with also the hopes of just trying to kind of like collectively take a sigh of relief after coming out of the pandemic."
Bleak Week is not for the faint of heart and is obviously not for everyone. But if you’re like me and love films that embrace the darkness with fearless artistry and sometimes breathtaking beauty, then this is the festival for us.
For the festival’s opening night on Friday, Heath programmed Nicolas Roeg’s trippy horror masterpiece "Don’t Look Now."
"Because its imagery, its kind of approach to gothic and psychological horror really has stuck with me over the course of the last 25 years and has only been kind of more pronounced ever since I became a parent, because it's about the psychological horror of losing a child," Heath explained. The film stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as grieving parents.
Heath also wanted to showcase a documentary. "I wanted to screen Alan King's 'Dying at Grace,' which is a 2003 documentary that's set entirely in a cancer ward over the course of an entire year," Heath said. "I think it's one of the one of the great documentaries of all time, and it's very criminally under seen."
War is featured prominently in the films selected, with multiple countries addressing the theme.
"Looking at the film selections and then also kind of where we are collectively as a country and, as you know, all across the world right now, it seems like combat and war is such a prominent theme — not just literal wars, but kind of the daily struggle to make it through the day," Heath said. "A lot of these films deal with, you know, the sacrifice and the toll that stress and that combat takes on people, whether they're at home or abroad. And so I really wanted to approach that theme. So you've got the war films by Andrzej Wajda — 'A Generation,' 'Kanal' and 'Ashes of Diamonds' — which are a trilogy. Then you've got 'Fires on the Plain' by Kon Ichikawa, which is a war film, and 'The Red and the White' is actually the final film of the whole series, which really is kind of one of the most harrowing war films ever."
If you attend the festival, you’ll receive this cool passport made by Cinema Associate Laurie Piña. And remember to get it stamped so you can receive prizes for being an adventuresome filmgoer willing to travel through dark terrain.
Bleak Week runs from Friday through June 11. The themes may be bleak, but the filmmaking is exhilarating.
