Film Club: THE DOOM GENERATION
About this Video
Indie film renegade Gregg Araki has screened nearly all of his films at the Sundance Film Festival, from 1992’s The Living End to 2026’s I Want Your Sex. The second film of his so-called “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” The Doom Generation premiered at the 1995 festival, where it scandalized critics and audiences. The film languished in studio-censored form for decades until 2023, when Araki released a director’s cut to a new generation of viewers. It has since become one of Araki’s signature works: a queer, sexy cult classic steeped in ’90s nihilism.
The Film Club event series is proud to devote its September session to the meth-fueled madness of The Doom Generation. A monthly, community-driven deep dive into the soul of the Sundance Film Festival, Film Club highlights one film each month from the recently-published Sundance Film Festival 101 Watchlist.
In this free, online event, Film Club host Kiva Reardon leads a discussion on this gleefully profane road movie starring Rose McGowan and James Duval. Reardon is a film producer (Sorry, Baby), critic (cléo journal), and programmer (Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, TIFF) who serves as the lead lecturer and host of Film Club on Sundance Collab. Reardon analyzes how the hallmarks of an Araki movie cohere in The Doom Generation: the anarchic tone, the shoegaze soundtrack, the stylized set and costume design, the nihilistic worldview, and the quotable obscenities.
Araki’s relationship with the Sundance Institute is a long and storied one. The Sundance Institute Labs helped launch Araki's career by supporting his early indie work, which led to the premieres of The Living End and Totally F*ed Up at the 1992 and 1994 festivals. Decades later, the Institute helped fund the 4K restoration of Araki’s 2004 film Mysterious Skin, which screened at the festival earlier this year.
This online session includes clips, discussion, and an audience Q&A in which attendees ask questions about Araki’s work.
Visit JustWatch to learn where you can stream or rent the film in your region.
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Kiva Reardon
Kiva Reardon is a producer, writer, and programmer working across fiction and non-fiction. Previously, she held the positions of: Vice President of Film at Barry Jenkins’s production company PASTEL; Associate Director of Film Programs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures; and Lead Programmer of Contemporary World Cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
She founded cléo journal, a publication dedicated to film and feminism, which ran from 2013 to 2019. Under Kiva’s leadership, cléo became an internationally-respected outlet that helped launch a new generation of film writers. IndieWire called cléo an "essential source for smart, fresh, and feminist perspectives on film and media." Its print compendium was published in 2020.
Her writing has appeared in Filmmaker, Sight & Sound, MUBI Notebook, Cineaste, and many others. She writes a newsletter on movies and motherhood, Care Takes. She has acted as an advisor at screenwriting labs and served on festival juries at Locarno, Jeonju, Palm Springs, Aspen, and more. She has spoken at film and art institutions around the world. She is on the founding Advisory Board of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies.