JAN 19-28, 2024 

NOIR CITY 21

In a move taken in opposition to the nation's current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, the venerable NOIR CITY film festival, celebrating its 21st year in the Bay Area, has declared "Darkness Has No Borders." The 10-day festival will feature a dozen thematically linked double bills, pairing foreign language films with movies made in the United States and United Kingdom. The festival runs January 19–28 at Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre.

NOIR CITY honcho and FNF president Eddie Muller, familiar to a national audience as the host of Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), credits preservation efforts by film archives worldwide, and the advent of digital distribution, as the reason "we're now able to recognize the global scope of film noir." At this year's NOIR CITY, he notes, audiences will experience familiar noir tales … but half will be from Argentina, Egypt, France, South Korea, Italy, Mexico, and Japan presented alongside English-language offerings. "Some are cultural one-offs," he explains, "like the 1958 Egyptian offering Cairo Station (shown with the 1950 Paramount thriller Union Station), while others are examples of noir from countries with a dark wellspring of films still waiting to be discovered." The 24-film program of thematically linked double bills includes heists, prison breaks, missing persons, cultural alienation, love triangles, and lots of plain old-fashioned murder.

Kicking off the collection of rarities is the FNF's most recent restoration — 1952's Argentine film Never Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta) — based on two short stories by American master of suspense fiction, Cornell Woolrich. The picture was preserved by the Film Noir Foundation in 2013 and has now been completely restored by the FNF through UCLA Film & Television Archive, thanks in part to a grant from the Golden Globe Foundation (formerly HFPA). Fernando Martín Peña, Argentina's pre-eminent cinephile, will be on hand to introduce the film with Eddie Muller.

Included on the 2024 schedule are English-language rarities such as Black Tuesday (1954), Plunder Road (1957), Across the Bridge (1957), and Strongroom (1962). Little-seen international titles include The Human Beast (France, 1938), Aimless Bullet (South Korea, 1960), Bitter Rice (Italy, 1949), Four Against the World (Mexico, 1950), Zero Focus (Japan, 1961), and Smog (1962), a forgotten surrealist masterpiece by Italian director Franco Rossi freshly restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive.

TICKET INFO

Purchase advance tickets through Eventbrite with any of the ticket links in the program guide above. Doors open at 6:00 pm for evening shows; noon for matinées.

☇ DIRECTIONS TO THE GRAND LAKE THEATRE

NOIR CITY 21 PASSPORT

Secure your spot for the 10-day/24-film festival with an all-access pass for $200—a $40 savings over the regular ticket price! The Grand Lake Theatre will have a Passholders' queue for early admittance. → MORE INFO HERE

All you need to know about the NOIR CITY Film Festival ↓