Kansas City Underground Film Festival returns Sept. 12-20 with weird, wild, and fascinating ultra-indies

The Garden Sees Fire. // Courtesy KCUFF

There are lots of places you can go in Kansas City if you want to see studio blockbusters or buzzed-about arthouse movies (and that’s a great thing!). But if you want to see strange, funny, and fascinating films you can’t find anywhere else — and see them for free — there’s only one game in town: The Kansas City Underground Film Festival.

For the last five years, KCUFF, as it’s lovingly referred to, has focused on bringing ultra-independent films to the Kansas City community, treating adventurous audiences to everything from an awkwardly funny roommate comedy (Dog Movie) to an intensely serious political drama (The Pool of the Nobodies) to Kaiju hijinks (Yuzo The Biggest Battle in Tokyo) and beyond.

This year’s festival, taking over the two weekends from Sept. 12-20 at Charlotte Street Art Center, boasts a total of 88 features, documentaries and short films from all over the world, including a block of shorts from local filmmakers here in Kansas City. Festival co-founder Willy Evans walked us through this year’s program and gave us a preview of what to expect.

Heads or Fails. // Courtesy KCUFF

Friday, Sept 12

The headliner on opening night is Heads or Fails, a new movie from the Belgian filmmaker brothers who are decidedly not Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Lenny and Harpo Guit. The pair’s previous movie, Mother Schmuckers, was part of Sundance’s Midnight program, where its over-the-top shock humor got mixed reviews from festgoers more attuned to low-key indie drama.

Evans describes the brothers’ latest, about a Brussels-based gambling addict on a winning streak, as Gummo meets Uncut Gems. “It’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen all year, but in that very intentional, trying-to-make-you-squirm way,” he says. If you’re a fan of movies like Jim Hosking’s gross-out cult classic The Greasy Strangler, this may be the movie for you. It screens with the short Beethoven’s Great Great Great Great Great Grandchild, about an untalented descendant of the famed composer desperate to cash in on that connection.

Jit, a weirded-out Florida-set Southern gothic feature about a recently-released ex-con investigating his brother’s disappearance, which is somehow connected to a senior citizen trailer park. The film comes from KCUFF returning favorites Mirror Ghost Films (the collective’s feature Ultimate World was a favorite at the 2023 fest), and screens with the shorts Lupe Q and the Galactic Corn Cake and the Mirror Ghost-produced short Don’t Buy the Liverwurst.

All Beauty Queens Have Broken Bones. // Courtesy KCUFF

Saturday, Sept. 13

The first full day of KCUFF programming offers a bevy of delights, including a horror shorts block and an animation showcase. There are also three standout features on offer, including a hard-to-classify French film called Méchant, which follows strange happenings after a chemical spill in a small French town. “It’s ultra-independent guerilla filmmaking, really funny and unique,” Evans says. “I’m pumped to be screening that one.”

If mumblecore is more your style, Evans recommends My Friend, Chevy, a “found footage hangout movie” about a guy’s camping weekend that goes awry when one of the attendees brings along his girlfriend. “It has the dirtbag core that KCUFF is so often looking for,” Evans says. “Expect classic midwest dirtbag energy with a great heart and focus and human dynamics.”

Also offering heart (and brains and guts): Infernal Flesh, a surreal, low-budget (as in, shot for $400) splatter flick 12 years in the making, about a birthday party gone horribly, horribly wrong. “Infernal Flesh is a movie I adore, and I think it’s exactly the kind of thing KCUFF lives for,” Evans says. “It’s this super bizarre, hilarious, nonsensical movie. You see characters age 10 years from one shot to the next.” Check it out if you like goofy Sam Raimi-esque gore, bizarro experiments where seeing the seams is the point, like Too Many Cooks, or adventures in indie ingenuity like Strawberry Mansion.

Thursday, Sept. 18

The Indonesian documentary A Distorted Individual, which Evans describes as having “an otherworldly quality” and compares to the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, is among the highlights of KCUFF’s second weekend block of programming. The movie follows an experimental noise musician who goes by Individual Distortion, as he documents his own attempt to gain a bigger following by drastically changing his style in pursuit of the Indonesian equivalent of a Grammy. “It’s got impeccable construction, does cool formal things, and the editing is incredible,” Evans says.

Saturday, Sept. 20

Documentary highlights continue through the weekend with May the Soil Be Everywhere, a movie that was also a standout of this year’s True/False film festival in Columbia that Evans says “I love, love, love.” like A Distorted Individual, this is a semi-autobiographical film, with director Yehui Zhao turning the camera on her grandmother. It’s a surprisingly playful movie that also experiments with form, folding poetry, theater and animation into a story about ancestry and the concept of home.

The closing night of the festival also includes KCUFF’s annual local showcase, which this year carries an unexpected theme. “This year we had two different documentaries submitted about the leather community in Kansas City,” Evans says. “So we’ve titled the block ‘The KCUFF Grand Finale: A Leatherbound Showcase.’” The two documentaries in question are Bound in the Heartland and Leather-Bound, which bookend a set of creative, but decidedly less kinky shorts.