Bleak Week, a film festival celebrating “cinema of despair,” started as a contrarian response to cries for feel-good movies after the pandemic. Programmers at the American Cinematheque, a nonprofit arts group that curates for several historic theaters in Los Angeles, heard the cries for comedies and thought: What if we did the opposite? Bleak Week, which would conveniently coincide with the city’s June Gloom, could be the art house version of Shark Week. “We didn’t know how it was going to go,” Grant Moninger, the group’s artistic director, tells the AP. “People may like this … or people may look at it and somehow be offended.”
In 2022, Moninger and Chris LeMaire programmed wall-to-wall selections of world cinema’s most austere offerings, from Elem Klimov’s anti-war epic Come and See, to Bela Tarr’s 439-minute Satantango. Five years later, Bleak Week has gone global. Across June, there’ll be Bleak Weeks taking place in 100 theaters in 73 cities spanning eight countries, from the United Kingdom and Canada to Puerto Rico and Latin America. In the US, it’s not just the biggest cities, either: There are versions in Columbia, Missouri; Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; Brookline, Massachusetts; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to name a few.
It’s not uncommon to see famous people both on the stage and in the audience for Bleak Week: Filmmaker Sean Baker and actor Mikey Madison were spotted at a screening one year of In a Glass Cave, about an ex-Nazi pedophile, and even Tarr, the great Hungarian filmmaker who died earlier this year and once said he’d never come back to the US, made an exception and attended Bleak Week in its second year. “I just really love [Bleak Week]. I see stuff that I would never ever see elsewhere,” says Los Angeles-based film critic Katie Walsh.
There are more than 300 movies set for Bleak Week 2026, with the fifth edition already underway in Los Angeles at the Egyptian Theatre, the Aero Theatre, and the Los Feliz 3. On the schedule are appearances by the likes of French actor Isabelle Huppert, who’ll do Q&As for several films; filmmaker Ari Aster, showing his director’s cut of Midsommar; and Denis Villeneuve, on behalf of his breakout film Incendies. “Although Bleak Week sounds depressing, it’s really a celebration of the human experience,” Moninger says. “It’s really what cinema is about: empathy and understanding the world.” More here, including some theaters where you can catch a bleak flick.