One of the rare American indie films to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and the latest from a longtime indie director combine for this double feature.

An astonishing visual achievement, Two Gates of Sleep tells an elemental tale of two brothers, who live in isolation on the Louisiana-Mississippi border, as they travel downriver to bury their mother. Using almost no dialogue, director Alistair Banks Griffin is able to convey a mythic, meditative grandeur. These men and the nature that surrounds them bring to mind such influences as William Faulkner, Terrence Malick, and Andrei Tarkovsky. The title references Homer's Odyssey. (78 mins., video)

Veteran filmmaker Pat O'Neill is one of the great iconoclasts in American cinema. For five decades, his work doing special effects for big-budget commercial films (such as Return of the Jedi and Poltergeist) has allowed him to pioneer innovative and expressive techniques in his personal independent film projects. Decay of Fiction, his longest film to date and eight years in the making, is a brilliant, experimental take on film noir set in the decaying remains of Los Angeles's now-demolished Ambassador Hotel. Ghosts of the hotel's long history (from the first Academy Award ceremony to Robert Kennedy's assassination) glide through the ruined rooms and halls in fragmented, haunted storylines straight out of pulp fiction nightmares with a touch of old Hollywood myths. (74 mins., 35mm)

Decay of Fiction begins at 8:30 pm.