The Cinematheque

“Among the most original, resourceful, and independent of American independents, with an awesome body of work to his credit.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Chicago-born filmmaker Jon Jost, the first director to receive the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award for Lifetime Achievement, is American outsider cinema’s great nomad with a camera. Fueled by an unwavering determination to make films on his own terms, the autodidactic has built a prolific body of challenging, formally experimental works with the liberties afforded by his staunchly independent ethos. His decades-long practice in narrative, essay, and avant-garde forms (which in the mid-1990s deliberately shifted to digital productions) doubles as a veritable travelogue of places his artistic impulses have led him—though few would disagree that the US of A remains his subject of portraiture par excellence.

With Jost passing through the Pacific Northwest on his latest wayfaring excursion in moviemaking, we take the opportunity to screen two of his finest features made in the region: The Bed You Sleep In (1993), set in blue-collar Oregon and presented here in a new restoration; and Blue Strait (2014), set in suburban Washington State and celebrating its tenth anniversary. Jost will join us for both films in the evening’s double bill.

“One of the most fiercely independent filmmakers the US has ever produced … Jost works small, so that he can work true.”

Michael Sicinski, Nashville Scene