Based on an autobiographical novella by Portland’s Walt Curtis, Mala Noche was the 33-year-old Van Sant’s debut feature. Shot on 16 mm for $25,000, it was the first of his bittersweet odes to tender outcasts, and it remains the simplest and least burdened. With its feet on the ground and its head in the time-lapse clouds, Mala Noche (literally, “bad night”) is the story of liquor-store clerk Walt (Tim Streeter, pictured) and his unrequited love for a young Mexican immigrant, a rhapsodic slacker noir pitched on the edge of physical and emotional darkness. The plot is episodic—almost, as in My Own Private Idaho, narcoleptic, fading in and out of long, dark patches. Heartbreak, sickness, even death come into play, yet tenebrous as it is, Mala Noche has the tone of a daydream and a mildly trancelike effect. This small, sensitive, wondrously likable debut occupies a nook in the DIY pantheon. (Not rated.)

Tue., Sept. 25, 7 & 9:15 p.m., 2007