Mala Noche - Criterion Collection

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 handsome 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.