Mala Noche [Blu-ray] [US]

With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature, Mala Noche, heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a younger Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating time capsule from an era that continues to haunt the director’s work.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• High-definition digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Gus Van Sant, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Interview with Van Sant
• Walt Curtis: The Peckerneck Poet, a documentary about the author of the book Mala Noche, directed by animator Bill Plympton
• Original trailer, edited by Van Sant
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim
  
  Cover by Steve Chow