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With films ranging from fuzzy eight-minute clips, to 90 minute-long scratchy features, a festival of New York’s cinema of transgression started Tuesday night at Glasshouse (246 Union Ave.) in Williamsburg.
A tribute to underground filmmaker Nick Zedd, Tuesday night’s opening attracted a large crowd of viewers, where seats ran out and some had to pull their coats tighter while viewing the films from the street under a canopy of cold drizzling rain.
Movie still from David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” Photo courtesy of GFF
Did you know that the Little Rascals was set in Greenpoint? It’s one of the screenings for the upcoming Greenpoint Film Festival, the first of what will become an annual affair organized by Woven Spaces, a local nonprofit public arts group. Taking place October 27 – 30 at Broadway Stages in Greenpoint, the line-up includes favorites and lesser-known experimental, avant-garde shorts and feature-length films.
A main attraction is the premiering of a new Jonas Mekas film, “My Mars Bar Movie,” about the old New York City dive bar, which kicks off the festival. The Lithuanian-born filmmaker who is known as ‘the godfather of American avant-garde cinema’ became a Greenpoint resident a few years back. He will be in attendance during the opening night, and will also participate in a couple of panels—still in the planning stages. Panels will include other well-know directors as well, says Rosa Valado, festival director.
The Vanishing City (2010)
Battle For Brooklyn (2011)
The Domino Effect (Fall 2011)
A compelling documentary, “The Vanishing City,”contains a startling quote from Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “If New York is a business it’s a high-end product, it isn’t Wal-Mart…It’s a luxury product. New York offers tremendous value, but only for those companies able to capitalize on it.” The statement stings like a slap in the face to tax-paying residents, be they renter or owner, who thought the City was first and foremost a place to live and work. Or are we all meant to shop Fendi and lunch at the Oak Room?
So, what’s wrong with a plutocracy? Winning Best Short Documentary at the 2010 Harlem International Film Festival, and, closer to home, Best Feature Documentary in the 2010 Williamsburg International Film Festival, filmmakers Fiore DeRosa and Jen Senko go back to the economic downturn of the 1970s—and the proposed recovery that became the model for today’s New York open for-global business. The likes of J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch were offered sweet tax deals to stay in town. But, many jobs were outsourced anyway, and some corporations left New York for cheaper pastures. The policy model that big business would save New York translated into trouble for small businesses serving communities. And, as soon became clear, the mega-corporate model put all the city’s economic eggs in one undiversified basket, as small businesses suddenly faced real estate values and taxation that ripped them apart.
In the documentary "Hood To Coast" Thunder N' Laikaning's Jason running his last leg of 197-mile relay race.
Hood to Coast | Dirs. Christoph Baaden & Marcie Hume | 102min | Doc | 2011 | US
Hood to Coast, a documentary playing through Thursday at indieScreen, follows four 12-person teams as they participate in a 197-mile relay race in Oregon. The event, which began in 1982 and attracted 12,000 runners in 2008, has evolved into what one commentator calls a “Woodstock on wheels” (the teams travel in vans). A Phish show in running shoes would be just as accurate: preppy fraternity brothers, friendly punks with dyed hair, Old & in the Way men, and lots of other unpredictable characters crowd the gorgeous roads of the route.
Because we weren’t bringing you enough initials already, the WG News + Arts will be covering SXSW (South By Southwest) this week, straight from the eye of the cultural hurricane.
In our fair Brooklyn neighborhood, the birthplace of many a fine musician, filmmaker and media innovator, we are constantly barraged with more entertainment than we know how to process on a single Saturday night. But nothing can quite prepare someone – even a savvy Williamsburgian – for the storm of cultural/entertainment/informational offerings to be found at the nothing if not immense, South By Southwest.