The festival Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair started three years ago as a primal scream from a little Los Angeles nonprofit organization.
What has happened since says a lot about the mood in at least one corner of American culture.
The American Cinematheque, a nonprofit that brings classic art films to Los Angeles theaters, was struggling to sell tickets in 2022. Older cinephiles were still spooked by the Covid pandemic; younger ones were glued to Netflix.
At the same time, some Cinematheque staff members were depressed about the direction the world seemed to be heading. It was the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a gunman killed 19 children at a Texas elementary school and Big Tech rolled out artificial intelligence bots.
Out of that somber stew came a programming idea called Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair. Over seven days, the Cinematheque screened 30 feel-bad movies. It called the selections “the greatest films from around the world that explore the darkest sides of humanity.” For the inaugural festival, one centerpiece film was Béla Tarr’s “Satantango” (1994), a seven-hour-and-19-minute contemplation of decay and misery.
“‘Everyone was saying, ‘You should do comedies,’” Grant Moninger, the Cinematheque’s artistic director, said. “But we thought, ‘What if you did the exact opposite?’ We’re not in this to dangle keys at a baby.” (Now might be a good moment to mention that Moninger grew up with a mother, he said, who “only rented movies on VHS in two genres: the Holocaust and slavery.”)
Ticket sales were strong, and the Cinematheque staged Bleak Week again in 2023. Last year, the festival expanded to New York City. This year, the Cinematheque added theaters in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Portland, Ore., and London. (Bleak Week started on Sunday in Los Angeles and Chicago. It runs in other cities later in the month.)
The 2025 program includes about 50 films, including Carl Dreyer’s “Day of Wrath” (1943), about helplessness in the face of growing social paranoia, and Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” (1985), set amid the horrors of World War II. Also on offer are “Miller’s Crossing” (1990), a Prohibition-era gangster movie directed by Joel Coen, and “Sombre,” Philippe Grandrieux’s 1998 film about a sexually frustrated serial killer.
There are bleak rabbits (the animated “Watership Down” from 1978) and an experimental new film from Paul McCarthy described as “an animated image flow of the absurd actions of male tyrants.”
“What really excited us about Paul’s film is how directly it addresses what is on all of our minds right now,” said Chris LeMaire, the Cinematheque’s senior film programmer. McCarthy will appear at a screening in Los Angeles; Robert Eggers, Kenneth Lonergan and Todd Solondz are among the filmmaker participants in other cities.
In a first for Bleak Week, Turner Classic Movies aired tie-in programming on Monday, including Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries & Whispers” (1972), about a dying woman and her emotionally distant sisters. “Sometimes the world is such that you just need to wallow a little bit,” Dave Karger, the TCM host, said in a text message. “I think now is one of those times.”
Moninger credited Bleak Week with helping to turn around the Cinematheque. In 2022, the organization screened roughly 500 films. This year, the total will be more than 1,600. (The Cinematheque’s board includes a who’s who of Hollywood, including Ted Sarandos, the Netflix boss, and David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery.)
Movies that are major downers have a way of reigniting empathy and “getting people back to feeling human,” Moninger said. “There’s also a sense of gallows humor.”
Perhaps to that end, he added: “A.I. can do a lot, but it can’t suffer. That’s still ours, you know?”
Brooks Barnes covers all things Hollywood. He joined The Times in 2007 and previously worked at The Wall Street Journal.
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