Little Rock’s Cinema I/O — a “nomadic, non-profit microcinema” founded by Arkansas Times Film Series curator Omaya Jones, among others — is celebrating Art House Theater Day with a series of screenings. The holiday, which over 85 theaters across the country are participating in, is technically on July 25, but Jones and company will be showing two features and two shorts at various times on Wednesday, July 24; Thursday, July 25; Saturday, July 27; Sunday, July 28; and Wednesday, July 31.
Tickets (free, with a suggested donation of $7.50) and showtimes for each screening, held in an eight-seat black box theater at Good Weather art gallery (420 Byrd St.), can be found on Cinema I/O’s website.
Here’s a bit about what’s on the docket:
WEST INDIES: FUGITIVE SLAVES OF LIBERTY dir. by Med Hondo
“Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty proved a watershed event for African cinema—the continent’s first musical as well as a sui generis amalgam of historical epic, Broadway revue, Brechtian theater, and joyous agitprop. Using an enormous mock slave ship as the film’s only soundstage, Hondo mounts intricately choreographed reenactments and dance numbers across his multipurpose set to investigate more than three centuries of imperialist oppression. The story traverses the West Indies, Europe, and the Middle Passage; jumps across time to depict the effects of official French policy upon the colonized, the enslaved, and their descendants; and surveys the actions and motivations of the resigned, the revolutionary, and the powers that be (along with their lackeys). No mere extravaganza, West Indies is a call to arms for a spectacular yet critical cinematic reimagining of an entire people’s history of resistance and struggle.”
JULIA’S STEPPING STONES + GROWING UP FEMALE dir. by Julia Reichert
“Julia Reichert grew up a working-class girl in the 1960s, before the Women’s Liberation movement. She went on to become a pioneering Oscar & Emmy winning documentary filmmaker. Julia passed away in December 2022, but before her death, she recorded the story of how she became a filmmaker. Her partner in film and love, Steven Bognar, spent 2023 crafting Julia’s story into a film, which premiered in April at the Full Frame Film Festival. This short is the couple’s final collaboration. JULIA’S STEPPING STONES ends with Julia making her first film, GROWING UP FEMALE, a landmark documentary which is on the National Film Registry and still in active distribution over 50 years later.”
SUBURBIA dir. by Penelope Speeris
“The narrative directorial debut of Penelope Spheeris (WAYNE’S WORLD, THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION), SUBURBIA will kick your ass. Made for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures after Spheeris’ phenomenal success with DECLINE, this nuanced look at a patchwork family of punks banded together against their bad parents + shitty authority figures is made even radder by hammering live sets from SoCal hardcore squads D.I. and TSOL. Fuck the world.”