7TH ANNUAL
DAYBREAK TO DEAD-OF-NIGHT HUGO FILM FESTIVAL
Cowpokes & Frontiers
Official Selection
Each film is linked to a subscription or rental service where it can be streamed. For Kanopy and Hoopla, you can usually gain access through your local public library.
Meek’s Cutoff, 2010 (US) [PG]
103 min
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Starring Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson
“MEEK'S CUTOFF, from acclaimed director Kelly Reichardt (WENDY AND LUCY, OLD JOY), is a stark and poetic drama set in 1845, the earliest days of the treacherous Oregon Trail. A wagon train of three families (including two-time Academy Award® nominee Michelle Williams) has hired mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a shortcut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst, and their own lack of faith in each others' instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as their natural born enemy.” - Oscilloscope.com
Mubi(sub), Kanopy(free), Fandango(rent), Prime(rent), AppleTV(rent), many more
Dead Man, 1995 (US) [NR]
121 min
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Starring Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Crispin Glover, Lance Henriksen
“With Dead Man, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death. Accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in the middle of a fatal lovers’ quarrel. Wounded and on the lam, Blake falls under the watch of the outcast Nobody (Gary Farmer), who guides his companion on a spiritual journey, teaching him to dispense poetic justice along the way. Featuring austerely beautiful black-and-white photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.” - Criterion.com
CriterionChannel(sub), HBOMax(sub), Fandango(rent), Prime(rent), AppleTV(rent), many more
Buck and the Preacher, 1972 (US) [PG]
103 min
Directed by Sidney Poitier
Starring Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Cameron Mitchell
“With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier, alongside actor-producer Harry Belafonte, helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous Belafonte star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulous, pistol-packing “preacher,” who join forces in order to take on the white bounty hunters threatening a westward-bound caravan of people recently emancipated from slavery. A superbly crafted revisionist landmark, Buck and the Preacher subverts Hollywood conventions at every turn and reclaims the western genre in the name of Black liberation.” - Criterion.com
The Furies, 1950 (US) [NR]
109 min
Directed by Anthony Mann
Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, Walter Huston, Judith Anderson, Gilbert Roland
“Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston are at their fierce finest in master Hollywood craftsman Anthony Mann’s crackling western melodrama The Furies. In 1870s New Mexico Territory, megalomaniacal widowed ranch owner T. C. Jeffords (Huston, in his final role) butts heads with his firebrand of a daughter, Vance (Stanwyck), over her dowry, choice of husband, and, finally, ownership of the land itself. Sophisticated in its view of frontier settlement and ablaze with searing domestic drama, The Furies is an often-overlooked treasure of American filmmaking, boasting Oscar–nominated cinematography and vivid supporting turns from Judith Anderson, Wendell Corey, and Gilbert Roland.” - Criterion.com
Black God, White Devil «Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol», 1964 (Brazil) [NR]
118 min
Directed by Glauber Rocha
Starring Geraldo del Rey, Yoná Magalhães, Othon Bastos, Sonia dos Humildes
“Myth, mysticism, and revolution collide in a blistering existential western from Glauber Rocha, a pioneer of Brazil’s socially committed Cinema Novo movement. After killing his swindling boss, ranch hand Manoel (Geraldo Del Rey) goes on the run with his wife, Rosa (Yoná Magalhães). In the stark hinterlands, they join forces with armed bandits and pledge allegiance to a self-styled holy man who preaches revolt against rich landowners while perpetrating unspeakable acts of violence against the innocent. Suffused with antiauthoritarian fervor and the intensity of life in the desert, this landmark work of radical cinema is a scorched-earth allegory about mindless fanaticism and the allure of dead-end ideologies.” - Criterion.com
CriterionChannel(sub), Fandango(rent), Prime(rent), AppleTV(rent)
Walker, 1987 (US) [R]
94 min
Directed by Alex Cox
Starring Ed Harris, Richard Masur, René Auberjonois, Keith Szarabajka
“A hallucinatory biopic that breaks all cinematic conventions, Walker, from British director Alex Cox, tells the story of nineteenth-century American adventurer William Walker (Ed Harris), who abandoned a series of careers in law, politics, journalism, and medicine to become a soldier of fortune and, for many months, the dictator of Nicaragua. Made with mad abandon and political acuity—and the support of the Sandinista army and government during the contra war—the film uses this true tale as a satirical attack on American ultrapatriotism and a freewheeling condemnation of “manifest destiny.” Featuring a powerful score by Joe Strummer and a performance of intense, repressed rage by Harris, Walker remains one of Cox’s most daring works.” - Criterion.com
El Topo, 1970 (Mexico) [NR]
125 min
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Mara Lorenzio, David Silva
“It was the landmark cult film that began the Midnight Movie phenomena of the counterculture crazy 1970s. Classic Americana and avant-garde European cinema sensibilities meet Zen Buddhism and the Bible as master gunfighter and cosmic mystic El Topo (played by writer/director Alejandro Jodorowsky) must defeat his four sharp-shooting rivals on an ever-increasingly bizarre path to allegorical self-enlightenment and surreal resurrection.” - ABKCO.com
