Bleak Week, a film festival celebrating “cinema of despair,” started as a contrarian response to cries for feel good movies after the pandemic.
Programmers at the American Cinematheque, a non-profit arts group that curates for several historic theaters in Los Angeles, heard the cries for comedies and thought, well, what if they did the opposite? Bleak Week, which would conveniently coincide with the city’s June Gloom, could be the art house version of Shark Week.
“We didn’t know how it was going to go,” said Grant Moninger, the group’s artistic director. “People may like this…or people may look at it and somehow be offended.”
In 2022, he and Chris LeMaire programmed wall-to-wall selections of world cinema’s most austere offerings, from Elem Klimov’s anti-war epic “Come and See” to Béla Tarr’s 439-minute “Sátántangó.” LA-based film critic Katie Walsh was one of the early champions of the concept. When it was announced she remembered tweeting the “sickos” meme.
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“I was just like, yes, this is for me, this for the sickos,” Walsh said. “We were really enthusiastic about it online. I think that they were like, OK, great, this is like a concept that is going to translate.”
Five years later, Bleak Week has gone global. Across June there will be Bleak Weeks taking place in 100 theaters in 73 cities spanning eight countries, from the United Kingdom and Canada to Puerto Rico and Latin America. In the United States, it’s not just the biggest cities either: There are versions in Columbia, Missouri (Ragtag Cinema), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Row House Cinema), Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, (Cinema Art Theatre), Brookline, Massaschusetts (Coolidge Corner Theatre) and Albuquerque, New Mexico, (Guild Cinema), to name a few.
“Although Bleak Week sounds depressing, it’s really a celebration of the human experience,” Moninger said. “It’s really what cinema is about: Empathy and understanding the world.”
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Ennui at the movie theater wasn’t niche after all. Those nearly seven and a half hour showings of “Sátántangó” regularly sell out. It’s not uncommon to see famous people both on the stage and in the audience ( Sean Baker and Mikey Madison were spotted at a screening one year of “In a Glass Cave,” about an ex-Nazi pedophile). Even Tarr, the great Hungarian filmmaker who died earlier this year and once said he’d never come back to the United States, made an exception and attended Bleak Week in year two. Expansion soon followed to The Paris Theatre in New York and The Prince Charles Cinema in London.
“The thing about cinema is that you get to experience all the colors of human experience,” said Walsh, who has both attended and served as a moderator over the years. “Bleak Week offers a chance to kind of like revel in this specific feeling in a lot of ways. I just really love it. I see stuff that I would never ever see elsewhere.”
At the end of the movies, Walsh said, “I usually have to go stare at a wall for like 30 minutes.”
The fifth edition is already underway in Los Angeles at the Egyptian Theatre, the Aero Theatre and the Los Feliz 3. On the schedule are appearances by the likes of Isabelle Huppert, who will do Q&As for several films, including “The Piano Teacher” and “Heaven’s Gate,” filmmaker Ari Aster, showing his director’s cut of “Midsommar” and Denis Villeneuve on behalf of his breakout film “Incendies.”
One of the most liberating aspects about the concept is that there’s no genre stranglehold on the idea of bleak cinema. It can be wartime. It can be interpersonal drama. It can be fantasy. It can even be family friendly. They’ve empowered local programmers to make their own selections; This year there are over 300 movies being shown globally.
“They know their audience. They know what films will resonate,” said LeMaire. “It’s fun for us to see all the different approaches.”
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The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago is focusing on animation, playing movies like Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke,” Martin Rosen’s “Watership Down” and Michael Schaack’s “Felidae.” The Argentina program will include both local films and a retrospective of Aster’s works. At Vancouver’s historic Park Theatre, selections were made by local filmmakers and “friends of the venue.” Actor Finn Wolfhard elected “The Celebration,” “Sinners” cinematographer Autumn Durland Arkapaw chose “The Deer Hunter” and “Anora” producer Samantha Quan picked “The Virgin Suicides.”
The most programmed film this year is Isao Takahata’s animated “Grave of the Fireflies,” about a boy and his sister fighting for survival in post-World War II Japan after losing their parents. One movie they make a point to show every year is “Come and See,” which Moninger said is “the bleakest of the bleak experience.”
The concept is open to interpretation, as long as it’s a narrative film. The one thing it can’t be is a documentary.
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“There’s something still yet triumphant about taking horrible experiences or someone’s personal tragedy and being able to turn it into art,” Moninger said. “That’s really one of our only rules is that we just don’t do docs.”
When it’s all said and done, at least in Los Angeles, they make sure to close with something sweet: The three “Paddington” movies. It’s what they like to call a “marmalade chaser.”
