NOIR CITY Xmas 2024!

Join host Eddie Muller on Wednesday, December 18, 7:30 pm, at Oakland's historic Grand Lake Theatre for NOIR CITY XMAS! To darken your yuletide spirit, the Film Noir Foundation is presenting Who Killed Santa Claus? (L'Assassinat du père Noël), a 1941 French mystery. The evening will also feature the unveiling of the program (and poster!) for NOIR CITY 22, the 22nd year of the world's most popular film noir festival, coming to the Grand Lake Theatre January 24 - February 2, 2025.

Tickets for NOIR CITY Xmas are now available online from Eventbrite for $15 and can also be purchased at the theatre box office on the day of the show. Doors will open at 6:30 pm on the day of the event.

BUY TICKETS

NOIR CITY 22 Passports now on sale!

Join us at Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre for NOIR CITY 22, January 24 - February 2, 2025. There's something for everyone at 2025's festival as we screen double bills featuring the winsome and wicked women of film noir. Eddie Muller, FNF founder and host of TCM's Noir Alley, will be your guide through a 10-day filmic feast featuring the women who made film noir fatale!

Secure your spot at NOIR CITY 22 with an all-access PASSPORT for $200. This all-access festival pass grants the bearer:

✻ Entry to all films during the 10-day NOIR CITY 22 film festival

✻ Separate passport holders' queue for early admittance to the theater for all shows

✻ $40 savings over individually purchased double-feature tickets.

PURCHASE PASSPORT

→ Festival program to be announced, along with individual tickets for purchase, December 18, 2024, 7:00 pm here on NoirCity.com.

THE PERFECT HOLIDAY GIFT

Proceeds from the NOIR CITY festival help fund the FNF's restoration and preservation efforts year-round. Remember — the NOIR CITY Passport makes a perfect holiday gift for the film lover in your family, too!

NOTE  NOIR CITY Passports are non-transferable. All sales are final. Patrons MUST arrive 30 minutes before show time to be guaranteed a seat!

2025 NOIR CITY ACCOMMODATIONS

Courtyard by Marriott Oakland Downtown

If you're an out-of-towner looking for lodging in Oakland, the Courtyard by Marriott Oakland Downtown is offering discounted room rates for NOIR CITY 22 festival guests. For the dates Thursday, January 23, through Sunday, February 2, you can get a room with a King bed or two Queen beds for $149/night plus tax. Located at 988 Broadway in downtown Oakland, the hotel is 2 miles from the Grand Lake Theatre.

⚠ To take advantage of this special $149/night room, your booking must be made on or before Friday, December 20, 2024.

NOTE  For a stay of seven or more days, the Courtyard is offering a rate of $139/night + tax. For a long-term stay, please contact the hotel at 510-625-8282 and mention the NOIR CITY 22 special festival rate.

RESERVE YOUR ROOM

NOIR CITY 21 • JANUARY 19-28, 2024

In a move taken in opposition to the nation's current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, the venerable NOIR CITY film festival, celebrating its 21st year in the Bay Area, has declared "Darkness Has No Borders." The 10-day festival will feature a dozen thematically linked double bills, pairing foreign language films with movies made in the United States and United Kingdom. The festival runs January 19–28, 2024 at Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre.

NOIR CITY honcho and FNF president Eddie Muller, familiar to a national audience as the host of Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), credits preservation efforts by film archives worldwide, and the advent of digital distribution, as the reason "we're now able to recognize the global scope of film noir." At this year's NOIR CITY, he notes, audiences will experience familiar noir tales … but half will be from Argentina, Egypt, France, South Korea, Italy, Mexico, and Japan presented alongside English-language offerings. "Some are cultural one-offs," he explains, "like the 1958 Egyptian offering Cairo Station (shown with the 1950 Paramount thriller Union Station), while others are examples of noir from countries with a dark wellspring of films still waiting to be discovered." The 24-film program of thematically linked double bills includes heists, prison breaks, missing persons, cultural alienation, love triangles, and lots of plain old-fashioned murder.

Kicking off the collection of rarities is the FNF's most recent restoration — 1952's Argentine film Never Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta) — based on two short stories by American master of suspense fiction, Cornell Woolrich. The picture was preserved by the Film Noir Foundation in 2013 and has now been completely restored by the FNF through UCLA Film & Television Archive, thanks in part to a grant from the Golden Globe Foundation (formerly HFPA). Fernando Martín Peña, Argentina's pre-eminent cinephile, will be on hand to introduce the film with Eddie Muller.

Included on the 2024 schedule are English-language rarities such as Black Tuesday (1954), Plunder Road (1957), Across the Bridge (1957), and Strongroom (1962). Little-seen international titles include The Human Beast (France, 1938), Aimless Bullet (South Korea, 1960), Bitter Rice (Italy, 1949), Four Against the World (Mexico, 1950), Zero Focus (Japan, 1961), and Smog (1962), a forgotten surrealist masterpiece by Italian director Franco Rossi freshly restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive.

☇ DIRECTIONS TO THE GRAND LAKE THEATRE

All you need to know about the NOIR CITY Film Festival ↓