I’m planning on film festival coverage becoming a big part of what I do here, but it’s a few years down the line. I want to finish expanding my languages and see Europe first, but I’m still going to be accruing cash and vacation time once I’ve seen the places I want to see, and this is the obvious way to spend those things.

My focus is on the U.S. box office, so I want to stick to major international festivals with entrants that are actually likely to get distribution deals and be seen, but especially now when I don’t really know how to do it, it’s weird that I’ve been inclined to ignore the biggest festival in my Dallas backyard, the Oak Cliff Film Festival put on every June in my favorite place in the world, the Texas Theatre.

What else is out this weekend, anyway? You really think I’m writing about No Hard Feelings? Fuck you!

I haven’t actually ignored it. I spent a couple of years volunteering, and that was a pretty fun way to let my bouncer side out, but I’m too old for free labor now. I’d asked to step up to the jury, which I could use to solidify myself as a critic, but they never got back with me on that.

But I never waited for nobody’s permission to write about movies before, and I’m not sure why I wanted it here.

I thought about asking for press credentials, but a personal blog that gets maybe 50 views per post isn’t a strong starting point, and I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’m feeding $225 for a VIP badge to someone who just told me I’m not important enough to get press credentials. That’s not a scenario I’m going to allow room for, and again, why am I suddenly asking for permission to do this? Volunteering for a day and covering the other is another way to cut costs, and it’ll also grant me the opportunity to hang out with other volunteers, and that’s important, because volunteers are much sexier and more interesting than other kinds of people, but it’d lock me out of half of my potential screenings. I’m going to have to do this as a full paying customer.

I can’t afford a $225 VIP badge – well, actually I can, but all I’m getting for that money is priority access to screenings and the ability to bump shoulders with other people who have that kind of money to spare in the VIP lounge, so I figure I’ll get 10 individual $13 tickets and save some coin. If I order them in advance, it’ll be $15 per and I’ll lose flexibility, but I’ll still save $75. Since I’m not paying for everything, I’m also going to skip opening night. Oak Cliff is a far way to drive for only one movie, especially when it’s a documentary.

Then Alex told me there’s free booze in the VIP lounge, so now the plan is to get a VIP badge and be violently cross-faded the entire time. Also, since I’m paying for it anyway, opening night is back on!

The opening night feature is Going Varsity in Mariachi, which follows the Edinburg North High School Mariachi band though the 2021-22 school year, mostly focusing on the struggles of their new guitarrón player and a lesbian couple. Fortunately,  it’s an 8 p.m. curtain, so I’m able to make it down there after staying at work an extra hour. There are a lot of reasons I don’t normally make time for documentaries, but the broad version is fact is a lot more interesting to me than fiction, and I know I’ll get lost in the information much more than I’ll analyze how it’s being conveyed, and that’s what happens here.

Also, this is a film festival, so it isn’t just a screening. Several people featured in the film were on-hand, including band director Abel Acuña and his wife, and the number of personal connections in the audience make the graduation ceremony finale sound like an actual graduation. The festival also called in a floor show from the Grand Prairie High School Mariachi to open with.

One of the festival hosts mentions it being important to open the festival at the Texas Theatre with a Texas story, and he’s right. Going Varsity in Mariachi is a fairly predictable “year in the life” documentary, shot mostly with coverage – after the screening, Acuña talks about how much was recorded that couldn’t make it into the final product – but it’s striking how much I can absorb about the space this story takes place in. In a narrative feature, I’d call it “worldbuilding,” but here in a documentary, it’s simple to gather.

Edinburg, Texas is in the Rio Grande Valley, the very southern tip of Texas 40 minutes from the border in Hidalgo. In the opening credits, Going Varsity in Mariachi tracks across the incomplete border wall, then smashcuts to a suburb, the row of houses taking the wall’s place in the frame. The presence of Border Patrol, with its sector headquarters 20 minutes down the highway from the high school, in an 87.7% Hispanic town looms without being directly addressed.

The documentary doesn’t go into the cultural history of mariachi, though Acuña and some of the bandmates discuss what it means to them personally, but it strikes me that this is the only positive representation I’ve ever seen of the genre. Whenever I thought of it before, it was only as a punchline, either in a John Mulaney special or that scene in No Country for Old Men. The representational power of the experience is palpable.

It’s a full day of work tomorrow, so I’m only able to stay for one drink, but I leave energized and with a slew of new friends already. Tomorrow is time for the rotoscoped sci-fi western Quantum Cowboys, which could be the highlight of the festival.