Stray Cat Film Center’s ‘Bleak Week’ offers a buffet of dark cinematic delights

Stone Wedding // Courtesy Stray Cat

From June 7-13, the Stray Cat Film Center will look bleak.

Bleak Week is an annual film series that started in 2021 at Los Angeles’ American Cinematheque as a way to bring attention to films on the more serious end of the spectrum — great films that, due to their subject matter or reputation, didn’t always drive strong ticket sales. Five years on, the programming series has turned into a multi-city celebration of downer dramas, with nearly 100 theaters around the world taking part. This year, Kansas City’s own Stray Cat gets to join that illustrious list for the first time.

“As soon as I saw an email that said ‘Bleak Week at Stray Cat,’ I got really excited,” Stray Cat programmer Andrew Linn says. “It’s a chance to show a lot of things we’ve wanted to show, and highlight a type of programming that may not get that much of a concentrated programming in Kansas City.”

Starting June 7, the theater will feature daily Bleak Week programming, from classics like Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (screening on 16mm) and Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, to contemporary hits like First Reformed to genre-adjacent picks like Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day.

Linn says he’s particularly excited to show a new restoration of the 1982 animated film The Plague Dogs, a tale from Watership Down’s Richard Adams and Marten Rosen. The film follows a pair of dogs who escape from a research facility and try to evade capture by the military.

“It has an uplifting ending for all its depressing nature,” Linn says. “It’s got a contrast of dark thoughts with hopefulness. One helps to highlight the other in a lot of ways.”

Trouble Every Day. // Courtesy Stray Cat

To that end, you might be wondering what the appeal is of an entire week of movies dedicated to bumming you out. Don’t worry. Just because these movies take themselves seriously doesn’t mean the Stray Cat team is subjecting audiences to a parade of cruelty.

“It’s not all sad and depressing,” Linn assures. “A lot of the movies we have lined up are, if not all optimistic, have transcendent elements to them as well.”

For example, Taste of Cherry, the first Iranian film to win the Palme D’Or at Cannes, is about a man who wants to commit suicide—a taboo under Islam—and is looking for someone to bury him after he kills himself. That undeniably sounds like a downer. But through his quest, the main character, Mr. Badii, converses with a series of characters who turn his journey into a philosophical discussion about the value of life. The film itself may be sad, but it ultimately leaves its central question—What makes life worth living?—up to us to answer.

Plague Dogs. // Courtesy Stray Cat

“Bleak movies, in their own way, can be life-affirming,” Linn says. “They help highlight the things that are good in life. Ikiru has a sense of despair to it, but there’s a genuinely uplifting element to it that’s life-affirming. Taste of Cherry explores dark thoughts in an open and empathetic way, acknowledging those dark thoughts instead of refusing to engage with them.”

If you’re not in the mood for existential conversations about the meaning of life, Stray Cat’s Bleak Week lineup also offers plenty of other flavors. The 2001 movie Trouble Every Day is an early, artsy example of New French Extremity, the intense, often transgressive horror cinema movement that also brought us Alexandre Aja’s High Tension and Pascal Laugier’s 2008 endurance test Martyrs.

If Cold War-era paranoid thrillers are more your thing, consider The Ear, a Czech film Linn describes as “Coppola’s The Conversation and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in one movie.” This one also comes with extra street cred; originally completed in 1970, it remained unscreened until after the collapse of communism.

Linn says the lineup contains plenty of treats for adventurous filmgoers looking to expand their boundaries.

Stone Wedding. // Courtesy Stray Cat

“The thing I’ve always liked about movies is that they help you inhabit a life, if it’s fiction or nonfiction, in an intimate way,” Linn says. “Sometimes that’s not a pretty thing. But having that experience in a theater is worthwhile, because even if it’s with a few people, that’s a communal experience that’s really interesting. You get out of it what you bring to it. Showing less than happy stories is always a good thing in art.”

The full lineup of Bleak Week programming is currently available on the Stray Cat Film Center website.