The Queer Cinema and the Movies of Gus Van Sant Film Club

Gus Van Sant’s debut feature Mala Noche (1986), set in his hometown of Portland, Oregon with its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film.  The film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day-shifters, bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound night time as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating capsule from a time and place that continues to haunt its director’s work. 

The Queer Cinema and the Movies of Gus Van Sant Film Club is a nomadic project and porous collective founded by Round dedicated to queer filmmaking.

This is the first of three screening events and was programmed with Lucia Pietroiusti and Kostas Stasinopoulos.