Rooftop Films: Making the Mission
June 16, 2008
Filed under Media & Music, Review
June 12th: The Rooftop Films series started out quite small. In 1997, filmmaker Mark Rosenberg started giving private screenings of short films to friends on the rooftop of his tenement apartment. While the idea caught on right away, it also got him evicted from his apartment.
Still, Rosenberg saw the great potential of the idea and never let it die. In the years since his eviction, his makeshift little rooftop screenings have grown into an established film screening series with a ton of great films, a host of incredible rooftop locations and big-time sponsors like the Independent Film Channel. The one screening I attended on Thursday was not actually on a rooftop, which is good because I have terrible vertigo. This screening on the lawn beside the Brooklyn Automotive High School, which had all the cozy hipster charm of the surrounding Williamsburg neighborhood.
In the age of watching movies at home on your laptop, there is something incredibly refreshing about sitting out on the lawn on a cool summer night and watching a series of incredibly surreal films with hundreds of other people. You may get less mosquito bites with YouTube, but the cinematic magic of enjoying or detesting a movie with other people is lost. And that is what I personally like most about the Rooftop Films event – the liberating sense that this casual get-together is more than just going to the movies, it is a chance to share an experience.
The screening I attended on Thursday was called ‘Making the Mission‘ and featured a series of short films about adventure, alienation and risk. The evening began with live music by a band which aptly named itself O’Death. They are one of those crazy hipster groups that meld electric guitars with fiddle players, ukuleles, accordion players and probably would have had a sitar player if they could find one. They seemed to have many fans in the audience and even a small group of people who tried to form a mosh-pit in front of the band but soon disbanded, perhaps because moshing and fiddles simply do not go together.
But on to the night’s films. The screening began with an incredibly stark black and white animation called “L’Evasion (Breakout)” from French director Arnaud Demuynck. It was the story of a prisoner on what one can only assume is death row, who makes a mad dash to escape from prison only to be corned by prison guards on the rooftop of the prison. Convinced that there is nowhere to go, this rebellious Frenchman decides to challenge the repression of the state by performing one last passionate dance routine before the monstrous guards gun him down. I can only assume he choreographed this last dance all the years he awaited execution instead of plotting a decent escape plan. Still, I loved this movie.
The next film and my personal favorite was a surrealist animated short that looked as though Dr. Suess and David Lynch had collaborated on a movie with the goal of scarring kids beyond the ability of therapy to cure them. “The Tale of Now” by animation collective The Blackheart Gang was an absolutely incredible piece of animation – a creepy musical which told the dark tale of a group of Dodo birds whose island habitat is being destroyed by an octopus with an insatiable appetite. The perfect film for any babysitter to show the kiddies.
The most noteworthy film of the night, “Glory at Sea”, was produced and partly financed by the Rooftop Filmmakers fund. It told the story of a group of people struggling to survive on the outskirts of post-Katrina New Orleans who come up with the idea of building a makeshift raft out of whatever they can find so they can sail out to sea, sink themselves and join their lost love ones who all drift in limbo at the bottom of the sea.This film played like a weird dream to me, where you watch it from a distance and don’t quite grasp every moment. Still, the overall portrait of love and desperate hope in the face of desperate times was the only message it needed to get across.
Some of the last few films were cute, some were utterly inane. “The Joshua Tree Launch Series” was seriously just a series of clips of some guy trying to launch huge paper airplanes across the desert with as much success as Wiley E. Coyote had in his attempts to kill the Road Runner. To quote an audience member sitting next to me, “These last few films aren’t exactly blowing my mind, but I am going to stick around for the free beer at the after party.”
If you have the chance this summer, go to at least one of these screenings. You will catch a few good films at any one of the amazing rooftop venues they have lined up. Oh yeah, and they usually have free beer afterwards…
For more information on future movies check out the Rooftop Films website.
Written by Adam
Photos by Sarah Palmer
Special Thanks to Genevieve DeLaurier
Comments
Tell us what you're thinking...