Tony Ruggio

Keep Dallas Pretentious. That shirt exists out there, in the glimmer and glamorous ether of the second largest city in Texas, worn by Dallas denizens swathed in club wear and creating noise across downtown via all manner of loud engines and dirty exhaust pipes. So it’s much to my surprise and pleasure to find an oasis among the jet-setters and white collars. That oasis was the 2023 Oak Cliff Film Festival, my first networking foray into Dallas’ cinema landscape in eight years. Surrounded by fellow cinephiles and art world locals, it was a reprieve from a city that often prioritizes business over burgeoning culture, commerce over curation of the arts. There were low-riders strolling down Jefferson Boulevard and high-flyers from the coasts hobnobbing inside the Texas Theatre. 

For a little while, I forgot what it was like to be around fellow film folks, those of us obsessed with movies and who affectionately refer to cinema as “the church.” For my first time there in their 12-year tenure running in south Dallas, the Oak Cliff Film Festival reminded me of such intoxication, in more ways than one. Discussing the pictures themselves, dashing from screening to screening and drinking to our hearts’ content from the VIP bar tucked away upstairs at the end of a cramped, red-lit staircase like some crooked corner of a Scorsese film. 

Julio Torres’ Problemista, which was scheduled to release Aug. 4 but has been delayed indefinitely by the SAG-AFTRA strike, is the quintessential festival film: a good-but-not-great comedy from a singular mind, a picture that would’ve fallen by the wayside had I not ventured inside the Texas Theatre that day. Savannah Leaf’s Earth Mama is the other side of this coin, the sort of gritty slice-of-life following a young person coming-of-age through all manner of misery porn. Both are incredibly authentic urban tales mining the life experience of marginalized groups. 

Problemista plumbs the awkward hustle, literal and figurative, of a quirky Latino immigrant struggling to retain his VISA status upon his unceremonious firing from a cryogenics lab, of all places. Earth Mama, as empathetic as it is, revels in an endless series of past mistakes wrought by its lead heroine. We’re supposed to feel pity for a person who can only charitably be called a “fuck-up,” presumably because she’s a poor black woman living among systemic pitfalls and constant catcalls. In the case of the latter, great performances and welcome humor prevent the picture from failing outright. In the case of the former, humor is the point and buoys a heart at the center of its frequently amusing script. In particular, Tilda Swinton’s manic performance as the belligerent artist’s wife is exceptionally fiery, even for her. She rants about New York desperately trying to sell the work of a man who chose cryo-sleep out of the misguided sense his disappearance from the world would make him famous. 

Despite any eventual success or heart-of-gold moment, the lead characters of these two films represent an ethos that isn’t in short supply in Dallas. That beating heart of the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the U.S. is chock-full of wealthy and pretend-wealthy people flailing around for fame and societal relevance, peacocking for a world that often ignores their city as a cultural hub or an important American metropolis. The pretension and perfunctory attitudes are merely a function of their insecurity. Or perhaps I’m merely projecting, for what person becomes intoxicated by “high-flyers from the coasts hobnobbing inside the Texas Theatre?” Either way, the Oak Cliff Film Festival represents an opportunity for our forgotten metropolis to assert itself culturally, particularly at a time when climate change and a forever affordable housing crisis has upended American migration patterns. 

When the festival rolls around next year, whether you’re a film nerd or a film agnostic, you’ll have a grand time. Or at least I will.