Dallas' USA Film Festival - Picture Preview

A spokesperson describes the event as follows:

The 2025 USA Film Festival Official Selections:

SPECIAL OPENING NIGHT SCREENINGS

The Last Rodeo

Director: Jon Avnet
Country: USA, Running Time: 118min
A retired rodeo legend risks it all to save his grandson. Facing his own painful past and the fears of his family, he enters a high-stakes bull-riding competition as the oldest contestant ever. Along the way, he reconciles old wounds with his estranged daughter and proves that true courage is found in the fight for family.

Memento (2000) 25th Anniversary Screening

Director: Christopher Nolan
Country: USA, Running Time: 113min
A landmark film from acclaimed director Christopher Nolan, Memento is a mind-bending thriller whose mesmerizing power grows with every viewing. Guy Pearce stars as Leonard, a man with a bizarre disorder: the inability to form new memories. Ever since that fateful night when his wife was murdered, anyone Leonard has met, or anything he has done, simply vanishes from his mind. Who are his friends? Who are his enemies? What is the truth? The answers change from second to second as Leonard seeks vengeance for his wife’s murder… and sinks into an abyss of uncertainty and danger.

SPECIAL CLOSING NIGHT SCREENINGS

Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got (1985) 40th Anniversary Screening

Director: Brigitte Berman
Country: USA, Running Time: 116min
Outspoken, manipulative, independent thinking and oftentimes controversial, Artie Shaw (1910-2004) was one of the most popular stars of the Swing Era, who famously broke the color barrier by hiring the legendary Billie Holiday, Hot Lips Page and Roy Eldridge for his bands. Shaw’s complex love-hate relationship with his own celebrity caused him to walk away from performing almost as many times as he walked away from his marriages. Winner of the 1986 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Brigitte Berman’s insightful documentary portrays the restless life and five-decade career of the gifted bandleader known as the “King of the Clarinet.”

Tonic

Director: Derek Presley
Country: USA, Running Time: 104min
Sebastian Poe (Billy Blair), a washed-up piano player, spends his days and nights performing low paying gigs in Jazz Clubs and dive bars. Sebastian is also in debt to a corrupt police detective Terry (Jason Coviello), who he owes eight-thousand dollars. When Terry asks for his debt to be paid and Sebastian can’t come up with the cash, he tasks Sebastian with killing someone that needs to be taken out. He gives him the rest of the night to complete the job. Over the course of the night, Sebastian’s plight plunges him into the dark streets of Deep Ellum where he comes across an odd assortment of characters all while battling with his conscience and his desire to just f-ing play the piano.

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Death Race 2000 (1975) 50th Anniversary Screening

Director: Paul Bartel
Country: USA, Running Time: 84min
In the year 2000, hit-and-run has become the national sport. Paul Bartel directs the no-holds-barred cross-country thrill-and-kill race with gleeful aplomb where drivers garner points by trying to knock out their opponents along with as many pedestrians as possible, while a resistance group plans to kill the drivers using obstacles sedulously placed along the main course.

ADDITIONAL NARRATIVE FEATURES

Hancock Park

Director: Christina Beck
Country: USA, Running Time: 84min
Fifty-something Ruby Lewis (Christina Beck) is an aging actress who has spent years taking care of her dying father, an alcoholic who earned his living playing cowboys in Hollywood Westerns. Forced to sell the family’s palatial Pasadena home, Ruby puts on her fraying designer gown and straps on her gold heels. Into her Louis Vuitton knockoff duffle bag, she packs a stack of legal documents, her father’s favorite boots, and a box from the crematorium. After a fruitless audition for a role she is wrong for, Ruby arrives in Hancock Park for an extended stay with her younger sister, Sara, and Sara’s injured stuntman husband, Andy. Hotheaded Andy is sure Ruby is withholding their father’s fortune from Sara, while Sara tries her best to stay sober and keep everyone happy. Sara introduces her sister to the downstairs neighbor, Jason, a permanently high, eye-patch-wearing, Telsa-driving, reiki-certified massage therapist, who takes a shine to Ruby. While refusing to admit she’s on the brink of homelessness, Ruby’s theatrical presence and blatant lies quickly cause problems for everyone in the Hancock Park apartment complex. In survival mode, Ruby goes to extremes as she plays the role of her lifetime, weaving a tale of woe while she’s secretly sly as a fox.

Long Shadows

Director: William Shockley
Country: USA, Running Time: 104min
When a young boy’s mother and father are savagely murdered, he ages out of an orphanage intent on revenge, but the love of a young woman and psychological trauma lead him down a mystifying path.

Love, Danielle

Director: Marianna Palka
Country: USA, Running Time: 79min
When Danielle (Devin Sidell), a happily married thirty-something, tests positive for a BRCA1 gene mutation she learns that this puts her at high risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer. Thanks a lot, DNA! She now struggles with daily life, working at her bakery with her hubby Pat (Michael Roark) and hanging out with slightly clueless best buds on game night (Marianna Palka & Ian Owens), while supporting her older, smart-alecky sister Amy (Jaime King) who is already undergoing chemotherapy for a breast cancer diagnosis. Danielle now contemplates preemptively removing her “ticking time bomb” breasts and reproductive organs before cancer can get her, too. Her decision-making process involves flashbacks of her screwed up childhood with absent parents, anesthesia-induced dreams, and stressful confrontations with her recovering alcoholic mother (Lesley Ann Warren) and self-absorbed 70’s western TV star father (Barry Bostwick). Ultimately, Danielle must figure out how to prioritize her health and well-being by putting herself first in this scorchingly intimate and humor-filled triumph.

Magic Farm

Director: Amalia Ulman
Country: USA, Running Time: 93min
When a misguided American documentary crew in search of their next viral segment ends up in the wrong town in rural Argentina, chaos ensues. As they collaborate with locals to fake a new music trend, unexpected relationships form and an unfolding health crisis becomes apparent.

Mistura

Director: Ricardo de Montreuil
Country: Peru, Running Time: 96min
Set against the rich cultural backdrop of 1960s Lima, Ricardo de Montreuil’s compelling drama tells the story of Norma Piet, a woman in her mid-30s whose life is upended when her husband abruptly abandons her. Left to face the scorn of high society and the burden of personal betrayal, Norma’s world collapses as she grapples with isolation and self-doubt. However, her story takes an unexpected turn when she embarks on a journey of self-discovery through the vibrant and diverse world of Peruvian cuisine as she forges an unlikely friendship with the family’s chauffeur, Oscar. As they explore Peru’s culinary heritage together, Oscar helps Norma rediscover her identity and appreciate the beauty in the country’s diversity. Through food, she reclaims her sense of self, transforming her passion into a thriving restaurant business that defies societal expectations.

On Swift Horses

Director: Daniel Minahan
Country: USA, Running Time: 117min
Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her husband Lee (Will Poulter) are beginning a bright new life in California when he returns from the Korean War. But their newfound stability is upended by the arrival of Lee’s charismatic brother, Julius (Jacob Elordi), a wayward gambler with a secret past. A dangerous love triangle quickly forms. When Julius takes off in search of the young card cheat he’s fallen for (Diego Calva), Muriel’s longing for something more propels her into a secret life of her own, gambling on racehorses and exploring a love she never dreamed possible.

Sharp Corner

Director: Jason Buxton
Country: USA, Running Time: 110min
Based on the short story from Russell Wangersky’s Giller Prize-nominated collection “Whirl Away,” Sharp Corner is the story of a man’s spiral as he tries to find greater purpose in his life. Josh (Ben Foster), a hapless family man, and his wife, Rachel (Cobie Smulders), escape the city for an idyllic country home -- the perfect setting to raise their six-year-old son, Max (Will Kosovic). But on their first night, a fatal car accident on the sharp corner in front of the house disrupts their plans, and Josh finds himself drawn into saving the lives of the car crash victims. As his obsession takes hold, he places his wife and son in jeopardy, setting in motion a series of events that threaten to break his family apart.

Village Keeper

Director: Karen Chapman
Country: USA, Running Time: 83min
Karen Chapman’s directorial debut is a captivating drama which follows a family grappling with secrets that uphold domestic abuse and unresolved rage. After life’s precarious scale tips her fortune back into poverty, Jean relocates her children to move in with their grandmother to the community housing project where she grew up. Jean lives in constant fear of everything that could go wrong, going to great lengths to shelter her children. So when a spree of violence comes to her doorstep, she secretly cleans an abandoned crime scene, which unknowingly leads her on a path that exposes generational chains of silence, self-discovery and finally putting herself first.

ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTARY FEATURES

Housewife of the Year

Director: Ciaran Cassidy
Country: Ireland, Running Time: 81min
Ciaran Cassidy’s Housewife of the Year tells the story of Ireland’s treatment of women through the prism of a unique, surreal, live televised competition, that has to be seen to be believed, where a generation of Irish women competed in front of a live audience for the title of ‘Housewife of the Year.’ Former contestants share their direct experiences of marriage bars, lack of contraception, Magdalene laundries, financial vulnerability, boredom and shame, and of course, of being contestants in the competition.

Hunt For the Oldest DNA

Director: Niobe Thompson
Country: USA, Running Time: 84min
Hunt for the Oldest DNA tells the story of a maverick gene hunter, whose single-minded pursuit of an improbable scientific vision would tease and torment him before ending with a stunning triumph: a lost world recovered from a spoonful of dirt. Two decades ago, Eske Willerslev had a radical idea: Could DNA, the fragile chemical code of life, survive intact in frozen sediment for millennia? Fellow scientists called him crazy. But the Danish biologist set out to prove everybody wrong, and his perseverance paid off with a landmark breakthrough -- with massive implications for how we understand the deep past. After many years of failure, Willerslev recovered the genetic traces of a lush forest ecosystem from before the Ice Age, more than two million years ago. The species identified from their DNA lived during the last hot epoch on Earth. Signaling a new era in DNA research, scientists can now use DNA to travel back millions of years and piece together vanished ecosystems. Today, they are poised to harvest the genetic secrets of these ancient worlds to help us adapt to our own climate future.

Rebel with a Clause

Director: Brandt Johnson
Country: USA, Running Time: 85min
One fall day in 2018, Ellen Jovin set up a folding table on a Manhattan sidewalk with a homemade sign that said “Grammar Table.” Right away, passersby began excitedly asking questions, telling stories, and filing complaints. What happened next is the stuff of grammar legend. Ellen and her filmmaker husband, Brandt Johnson, took the table on the road, visiting all 50 states as Brandt shot the grammar action. But this story transcends grammar. It’s the story of an epic quest in a divided time to bring us all closer together.

The Stones Are Speaking

Director: Olive Talley
Country: USA, Running Time: 86min
Olive Talley’s fascinating documentary tells the inspiring story of how archaeologist Mike Collins, at great risk and personal sacrifice, saved 30 acres of looted land deep in the heart of Texas and revealed it as one of the most significant sites in the Americas. Collins and his team changed history when they found evidence of people living in Central Texas 20,000 years ago. The film is more than a simple tale of discoveries at the Gault Archaeological Site. It illustrates the power of an individual to make a difference and what people can accomplish when they come together for the greater good.

UnBroken

Director: Beth Lane
Country: USA, Running Time: 96min
The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, filmmaker Beth Lane, embarks on an international quest to uncover answers about the plight of her mother and six siblings who escaped Nazi Germany. The powerful documentary chronicles the seven Weber siblings who evaded certain capture and death, and ultimately escaped Nazi Germany following their mother’s incarceration and murder at Auschwitz. After being hidden in a laundry hut by a benevolent farmer, the children spent two years on their own in war torn Germany. Emboldened by their father’s mandate that they ‘always stay together,’ the children used their own cunning and instincts to fight through hunger, loneliness, rape, bombings and fear. Their journey culminates with a painful ultimatum, when, separated from their father, they are told that they must declare themselves as orphans in order to escape to a new life in America. Unbeknownst to them, this salvation would become what would finally tear them apart, not to be reunited for another 40 years.

Whatever It Takes

Director: Jenny Carchman
Country: USA, Running Time: 93min
In the summer of 2019, a seemingly ordinary couple became the unsuspecting victims of a campaign of cyberstalking that spiraled out of control. Their quiet lives were shattered by sinister threats, grotesque deliveries -- such as a bloody pig mask -- and mounting paranoia. As the terror escalated, law enforcement, including the FBI, traced the trail back to an unthinkable source: eBay, the global giant famed for its motto that “people are basically good.” What they uncovered was a surreal tale of power, obsession, and desperation, driven by senior members of the company’s security team, who were attempting to protect their CEO from a feared corporate raider.

SHORT FILMS

I Got This

Director: Ken Mandel
Country: USA, Running Time: 30min
In 1975, Dr. Tony Herring started working with young children who had amputations or were born missing limbs. Not knowing anything about prosthetics, Dr. Herring was told “don’t worry, the kids will teach you everything you need to know” -- and they did. The clinic at Scottish Rite For Children became an exciting place for the kids and their families to come to get help and meet other families in the same situation - making their lives better while having fun along the way.

Watching Walter (Screens prior to UnBroken)

Director: Mitch Yapko
Country: USA, Running Time: 17min
Set in both 1995 Philadelphia and World War II Nazi occupied Poland, and based on the true story of Holocaust survivor-turned watchmaker Wladyslaw “Walter” Wojnas, Watching Walter is a slice of life story that touches on several poignant moments in Wojnas life during those times. It’s a story of triumph over tragedy and is all too relevant in today’s turbulent international climate.

Narrative Short Films Program (In Competition)

TRT: 98min

Amarela

Director: André Hayato Saito
Country: Brazil, Running Time: 15min

High Spirits

Director: Faek Falak
Country: Germany, Running Time 14min

Mother

Director: Sebastian Kwidziński
Country: Poland, Running Time: 29min

Mrs. Faiza & Dr. Love

Director: Anissa Daoud
Countries: Tunisia/France/Qatar, Running Time: 25min

Once More, Like Rain Man

Director: Sue Ann Pien
Country: USA, Running Time: 15min

Texas Short Films (In Competition)

TRT: 75min

Dynasty and Destiny

Director: Travis Lee Ratcliff
Country: USA, Running Time: 7min

The Number Thirteen: A Tattoo History

Director: Justin Wilson
Country: USA, Running Time: 22min

Storage Fees

Director: Nicholas Michael Buck
Country: USA, Running Time: 15min

The Ugly Chickens

Director: Mark Raso
Country: USA, Running Time: 29min

Weasel

Director: Hisham Iyad Hajir
Country: Mexico, Running Time: 2min

Student Short Films (In Competition)

TRT: 93min

All Beauty Queens Have Broken Bones

Director: Max Tullio
Country: USA, Running Time: 7min

Amphibian

Director: Zhihao (Dino) Zheng
Country China, Running Time: 13min

Mint Condition

Director: So Man Tsoi
Country Hong Kong, Running Time: 24min

Punter

Director: Jason Adam Maselle
Countries: South Africa/USA, Running Time: 14min

Shaolin Office

Director: Alexis Bouillé
Country: France, Running Time: 14min

Syncope

Director: Linus von Stumberg
Country: Switzerland, Running Time: 21min

Reel Owl Cinema Shorts Program

TRT: 60min
(Film Lineup TBA)

Sachse High School Shorts Program