Sidewalk brings Mulholland Drive back for SHOUT Spotlight Weekend

Sidewalk’s SHOUT Spotlight Weekend turned Mulholland Drive into a Birmingham repertory event, with screenings on June 27, June 28 and July 1 built around David Lynch’s 25th-anniversary title. The run gave the film a place in the city’s calendar that felt more deliberate than a nostalgia booking, with multiple showtimes spread across the weekend and into the following week.

Sidewalk framed the movie through the same surreal setup that made it endure: Betty Elms arrives in Hollywood hoping to become a movie star, meets a brunette with amnesia and gets pulled into a stranger and stranger mystery as filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into trouble casting his latest project. That dream logic is part of why the title still works as a draw for repertory audiences, especially in a room where the point is not just to revisit a classic, but to watch how a movie keeps unfolding in real time with other people.

For Alabama independent film, the booking mattered because Sidewalk is not just a place that screens movies. It is a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging filmmaking in Alabama and building audiences for independent film, and SHOUT Spotlight Weekend kept that mission visible outside festival season. With Birmingham AIDS Outreach attached as sponsor, the screening sat at the intersection of film history, LGBTQ+ audience engagement and local arts support, giving the program a clear community identity rather than a loose theme.

That kind of programming gives Birmingham filmmakers something practical to hold onto between productions and festivals. It shows how a specialty title can be scheduled like a real audience draw, how a theater can keep repertory cinema active without treating it as an afterthought, and how context can make an old film feel current inside a local scene. For the people who build Alabama’s indie film culture, that matters as much as the title on the marquee.

Mulholland Drive’s return was not just a 25th-anniversary rerun. On a SHOUT weekend, it became another reminder that Sidewalk can still make a room feel like the center of the city’s indie film conversation, one screening at a time.