Crosstown Theater

Experience a transformative selection of Black, Indigenous, and Queer voices from Bahia, Brazil, through this MicroCinema event curated by the Black Freedom Fellowship’s Odù Film Festival. These films intertwine the preservation of our planet, ancestral heritage, and queer identity to craft an action-inspiring path toward a future vital to our collective survival. This Indie Memphis x Black Freedom Fellowship MicroCinema event happens two days before the in-person “Odù Film Festival” takes place in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, featuring two days of film screenings from all over the world as well as art exhibitions, art markets, and music concerts. 

Glamour has never been more grotesque than in Female Trouble, which injects the Hollywood melodrama with anarchic decadence. Divine, director John Waters’ larger-than-life muse, engulfs the screen with charisma as Dawn Davenport, the living embodiment of the film’s lurid mantra, “Crime is beauty,” who progresses from a teenage nightmare hell-bent on getting cha-cha heels for Christmas to a fame monster whose egomaniacal impulses land her in the electric chair.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival — yet criminally under-seen for over three decades — Chameleon Street recounts the improbable but true story of Michigan con man Douglas Street, the titular “chameleon” who successfully impersonated his way up the socioeconomic ladder by posing as a magazine reporter, an Ivy League student, a respected surgeon, and a corporate lawyer.

Following Jack Nicholson’s breakout supporting turn in Easy Rider,director Bob Rafelson devised a powerful leading role for the new star in the searing character study Five Easy Pieces. Nicholson plays the now iconic cad Bobby Dupea, a shiftless thirtysomething oil rigger and former piano prodigy immune to any sense of responsibility, who returns to his upper-middle-class childhood home, blue-collar girlfriend (Karen Black, in an Oscar-nominated role) in tow, to see his estranged, ailing father. Moving in its simplicity and gritty in its textures, Five Easy Pieces is a lasting example of early 1970s American alienation.

Home from college, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) makes an unsettling discovery: a severed human ear, lying in a field. In the mystery that follows, by turns terrifying and darkly funny, writer-director David Lynch burrows deep beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town life. Driven to investigate, Jeffrey finds himself drawing closer to his fellow amateur sleuth, Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), as well as their person of interest, lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) — and facing the fury of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a psychopath who will stop at nothing to keep Dorothy in his grasp. With intense performances and hauntingly powerful scenes and images, Blue Velvet is an unforgettable vision of innocence lost, and one of the most influential American films of the past few decades.

It's been called “shocking” (Film Comment), “blistering” (Filmmaker), and “a flat-out masterpiece” (The Playlist) yet remained virtually unseen for over 40 years. Now experience this “haunting portrait of juvenile delinquency that ranks among the most powerful in American cinema” (Chicago Reader) from actor/director/co-writer Dennis Hopper as it’s never been seen before: Linda Manz “gives one of the greatest teenage performances of all time” (Film Comment) as a 15-year-old who idolizes Elvis, punk rock, and her ex-con father (Hopper), is surrounded by junkies and predators, and follows them all down a one-way road to oblivion. Sharon Farrell (THE STUNT MAN), Don Gordon (THE LAST MOVIE) and Raymond Burr co-star in “a film about extremes, directed by an extremist” (Time Out) featuring music by Neil Young.

By the mid-’60s, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women undergo a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Performed with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth (Criterion).

An inside look at The Elephant 6 Recording Co., the ’90s rock collective that launched Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Terror Control, The Apples in Stereo, and other bands. Around 1985, a group of Louisiana high schoolers began experimenting with whatever random instruments and gear they could find. Influenced by psychedelia, and with little to distract them, they birthed a musical revolution.

An off-the-wall comedy documentary about the greatest rap band that never was. Documentary filmmaker Nina Blackburn (Kasi Lemmons) infiltrates the behind-the-scenes world of rap's most controversial band. Meet the fast-talking philosophical Ice Cold (Rusty Cundieff), the short-tempered militant Tasty-Taste (Larry B. Scott), and their spiritual center, D.J. Tone Def (Mark Christopher Lawrence). See them in the recording studios, jam with them on stage, hang with them and hear their philosophies on music and life. Featuring hilarious videos of all their biggest hits, plus the “gangstas”, the girls and the guns. A wonderfully funny spoof.