In person: filmmaker Gregg Araki.


Totally F***ed Up
Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, a 33-year-old Gregg Araki set out to craft his own 16mm version of Masculin Féminin (1966) with six gay and lesbian youth for his first color film, which features primarily non-professional actors for a piece Araki himself has dubbed “a kinda cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick.” With muse James Duval in his breakout leading role, Araki's Totally F***ed Up is a paean to drifting, queer youth culture, a pseudo-documentary, Gen-X love letter to the “young gays and lesbians who didn’t fit into the cultural stereotype of the ‘gay community’” of the early ’90s.

The Doom Generation
Gregg Araki’s first film that he did not shoot himself—cinematographer Jim Fealy would also lens Araki’s later Splendor (1999)—delivers a vibrant-hued Los Angeles hellscape as experienced by an attractive triad drifting through life, one held-up convenience store at a time. The film’s at-times shocking violence and raw, unfiltered sexual energy are further underscored by a soundtrack jam-packed with songs by Nine Inch Nails, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins, and other tracks from seminal indie and shoegaze artists. A film for a nihilistic generation by one of its most independent voices.