This week, I plan to watch five depressing films.
And I’m looking forward to it.
The Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis is one of nearly 100 theaters worldwide screening downer movies during “Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair,” a film festival sponsored by the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles.
In a radio story I produced for NPR’s Here and Now, Grant Moninger, Cinematheque artistic director, told me not many people were showing up for the really cool Russian movies the theater was programming.
He knew they needed a hook.
“I had always wanted to do a Shark Week, but with art house,” Moninger said. “And I was always thinking, ‘What is our Shark Week?”
His answer: Bleak Week.
Millions watch Shark Week.
Millions won’t be buying tickets to Bleak Week.
But when the Cinematheque screened Come and See, a 1985 Belarusian, Russian and German production about a 14-year-old boy who joins the resistance during World War II, about 500 people watched it at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. He knew they were on to something.
As of this writing, four of the seven Bleak Week 2026 screenings at the Trylon are sold out, including a seven-hour celebration of slow cinema called Sátántangó.
Not every film is bleak in obvious ways. The Beverly Theater in Las Vegas is showing Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, circa 1971. Chris LeMaire of the Cinemateque told me this was a “a bizarre and amazing choice. It speaks to how personal the programming can become. If that happened to traumatize a programmer and (they want to) inflict that on future generations, that’s really fun.”
I guess it’s bleak cause kids almost die in the chocolate factory? (I always thought August Gloop kinda deserved it.)
Many people are feeling bummed out these days. But that feeling is not unique to today or the United States.
“It may feel like this is the bleakest time,” Moninger said. “But the late 60s weren’t so good. The Great Depression wasn’t so good. And the Civil War was really not so good. So it’s not a new thing. So you find a little bit of hope in the fact it’s always going to be bleak. And you find a little hope in the fact that we’re all going through the same thing across the globe.”
Again, here’s the five-ish minute radio story.