Highway’s 3rd Annual
Film Maudit 2.0 Film Festival
Returns with Live and Virtual Screenings
Wednesday January 12 to Sunday January 23, 2022
From January 12-23, 2022, the legendary L.A. Performance Space and Gallery Highways will present its Third Annual Film Maudit 2.0 Festival to showcase and celebrate new outré, unusual and startling films. The Film Maudit 2.0 festival features over 100 works of cinema from 20 countries including films rarely if ever, seen in festivals: works addressing socio-political issues and taboo subject matter that challenges conventional artistic assumptions and sexual mores.
The hybrid festival will present both live screenings @ Highways, as well virtual, online screenings of 8 feature films, 15 shorts programs, specially commissioned sections, and a collection of new scores to silent films starring the iconic Lon Chaney by artists who reflect the diversity of Los Angeles. Included in the festival are a range of narrative, documentary and experimental films that are deliberately bold, extreme, confrontational, and unusual.
Special programs include Behold! Queer Film and Performance Series, featuring multiple feature and shorts programs that showcase works from and about the LGBTQ+ and Latinx communities spread over three curated categories: NSFW’s sex positive works curated by Planet Queer; QLX (Queer Latinx): The Performance of Queer Latinx, curated by Dino Dinco; Transgressive Desire: Body Work from Queer Women, Trans, Nonbinary and Intersex Filmmakers, curated by Gina Young. The festival also features a “from the vault” screening of Lawrence Elbert’s Days of Pentecost, a feature drag action/adventure musical road movie inspired by Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Kill!
Film Maudit 2.0 festival is inspired by French avant-garde filmmaker and writer Jean Cocteau who created the original Festival du Film Maudit (literally “cursed films”) in 1949 aiming to celebrate overlooked, shocking and experimental films.
“There is a connecting spirit to all of the works in Film Maudit 2.0, each selected to engage a different facet of the cinematic imagination,” says Festival Artistic Director Patrick Kennelly. “These radical “cinema-sations” are guaranteed to not just entertain, but to challenge the mind and shock the senses. This year we wanted to acknowledge the dual power of both the theatrical experience and the streaming landscape for independent filmmakers. We’re excited about bringing local audiences back to our space in a safe, Covid-compliant manner (all screenings are vaccination & mask only) to experience the richness of the theatrical filmgoing experience while also giving a platform to films that typically would not screen locally in such a context. At the same time, we’re equally excited about making most of the films accessible to a wider national and international audience in an online setting (as we did last year). We feel this is the exciting future of the festival-going experience, breaking down an exclusivity that has previously ghettoized the indie landscape (and its films/filmmakers) while at the same time allowing the participation and conversation of filmmakers across time-zones who wouldn’t have the ability to travel to festivals.
More Information: www.filmmaudit.org
INSTAGRAM: @filmmaudit2.0 (https://www.instagram.com/filmmaudit2.0/?hl=en)
FACEBOOK: @filmmaudit2.0 (https://www.facebook.com/filmmaudit2.0/)
TWITTER @filmmaudit2 (need to activate this one more): https://twitter.com/filmmaudit2
