Saturday, October 4, 2025, 8:00 pm, classic-editor
KNIGHT: MANN’S SPARKS + MASH-UPS
Now in its eighth edition, Oakland‘s Drunken Film Fest remains committed to bringing the year’s most creative shorts, too often excluded by traditional industry-centered festivals, to where people are–in bars. Nested in a cozy alt-space with our own modest canteen, OC is honored to host this year’s opening event, a “special” West Bay pop-up promising a sumptuous spread of four resonant remixes of contemporary film, TV, and internet material…alternatively cool, clever, and critical. The centerpiece is Ryland Knight‘s 50-min. homage to the luscious imagery of feature auteur Michael Mann (ten of his titles sampled, from Thief to Blackhat), whose big-budget scenes are here married to the hypnotic dream-pop of Beach House‘s Depression Cherry–each track of the album supporting a pastiche from another of the ten Mann productions. The opening set is a witty threesome of rather different, “collage-y” pieces: Drew Durepos‘ evil-bird bricolage Animal Trials, Jordan Wong‘s Mountain Lodge–a send-up of inane online commodity fetishism, and Neozoon‘s A Little Lower than the Angels–a comic cut-up skewering religious propaganda. DFF director Arlin Golden is here in person to introduce the artist behind our evening’s anchor–Knight (Cherokee) is an East Bay writer/director and 2024 Sundance Native Lab Fellow. $10