Events

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.