Entries tagged with “Watch Short Films” from Rooftop Films Blog

ROOFTOP FILMS and VERIZON FIOS present 

Short films and video about moments in time, capturing and imagining what it felt like to be there. 

OPEN BAR AFTER PARTY FOLLOWING THE SCREENING FOR ALL IN ATTENDANCE

   

Venue: On the lawn of Automotive High School Address: 50 Bedford Ave. @ North 13th St. (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) 

Directions: L to Bedford Ave. or G to Nassau Ave. 

Rain: In the event of rain the show will be held indoors at the same location 

8:00PM: Doors open 

8:30PM: Live music presented by Sound Fix Records 

9:00PM: Films 

10:30PM: Filmmaker Q & A 

11:30PM-1:00AM: After-party: Open Bar at Matchless (557 Manhattan Ave. @ Driggs) Courtesy of Radeberger Pilsner

Tickets: $9 at the door or online

Presented in partnership with: Cinereach, New York magazine, City Council Member David Yassky & Automotive High School

Every year Rooftop hosts a program of Home Movies--discovering the forgotten, unmediated moments of people's lives, unfiltered and as they live them. The films reveal textures, patterns, feelings that might go unnoticed, fleeting incidents that would otherwise pass without thought, but when captured on film or video provide an insight into the lives captured, or those recording.

This year's program includes a wide range of techniques and storytelling strategies, displaying the varied forms that biographical documentary (and pseudo-documentary) can take. Filmmakers parse through mysteriously painful childhood memories (Bloomfield or a Childhood Memory; My Rabbit Hoppy); trace their family history (Ten for Grandpa); work through their issues relating to failed romances and short-lived affairs (Men With Girlfriends Later; I Slept With a Cookie Monster); and capture the fleeting impact of politics on the moments of their lives (Hotel Diaries). The details change and the narrative devices are diverse, but the goal of each film remains the same: to express through film or video what happened in that moment, what it meant to the filmmaker, what it felt like to be there.

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Come see more hilarious and strange films like this at Rooftop! 

"Glory at Sea!" plays at SXSW in the Shorts 3 program on March 9, 11th and 14th, at the Alamo Lamar Cinemas.

In the guidelines to the Rooftop Filmmakers' Fund--the grants that Rooftop offers to filmmakers whose work has screened with us--we say "We are more likely to fund films that make the most of their resources and community." We don't have the means to fund big-budget films, so we want to help support filmmakers who are clever and collaborative, and show that they uphold the collective ideals of Rooftop Films.

Last night, I was in New Orleans for the cast and crew screening of "Glory at Sea!," a short film which Rooftop co-funded. The movie is based on the myth of Orpheus, and in this version a man who washes to sea aims to sail back to the underwater Hades that has taken his girlfriend. While he builds a raft, the community watches, and becomes interested, and finally rushes to his aid, carrying with them the busted and rusted icons of their lives--all that remains of their husbands and wives, children and parents--strapping to the boat trumpets and bathtubs, charred church crosses and unspooled mix tapes, in the Bayou-inspired voodoo-like belief that these talismans will lead them to their drowned loved ones. The rickety craft sets sail with a song (fitting for Orpheus and Orleans), and the crew finds salvation in sinking.

The film is an irrational fable, a rich and poetic impossibility, and it gains its power from its myth logic. In dream logic, you do something crazy and need to look at the subtext to understand why. But in myth logic, you do something crazy because you have the tenuous belief that it will help. "Glory at Sea!" captures that pathos perfectly: the filmmaking is stirred with music video madness as it strains at the conventions of traditional narrative filmmaking. The film invokes this need for a community to bond--not a logical need, based on survival or chances of success, but an inherent need which transcends logic and gets to the core of who we are as people, as neighbors, as people who need each other in life and in death. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where all everyone has left is water-soaked memories of missing persons, "Glory at Sea!" is the perfect parable.

The director Benh Zeitlin choked up when he welcomed the crowd, saying that "making this film was the greatest experience of my life, and it's thanks to so many of the people in this room, who bled rust for this movie."

There were 300 people there.

300 people in support of a short film!

They volunteered their time. They lent their own heartbreak to the telling. They literally risked their lives riding this home-made raft out onto Lake Pontchartrain. One guy, Jimmy Lee Moore, a local guy who was cast as an actor, ended up doing much of the complicated welding on the boat. I spoke to him after the premiere, and he was beaming with pride. He told me about how the Coast Guard didn't think the craft was sea-worthy, and no one would take responsibility for towing it out onto the water. But they hooked it up a speedboat, and tore the tail off it in the process, because they had no other option, and for days on end the actors and crew were doing things no one in their right mind would do, all for this film. Now Jimmy wants to modify the boat and make it a Mardi Gras float, to represent the film, and New Orleans independent filmmakers, and the spirit of this project.

Benh was originally going to make this mythical film in Greece, but he told me that when he received funding from Rooftop--where the money comes from ticket sales and submission fees, the fans and filmmakers who make up our community--he knew he had to make a populist film, and that it had to be in New Orleans. Seeing not only the power of the film, but the glorious power of the community that made it, I can't express how proud I am, on behalf of all of us at Rooftop Films, to have had a small part in such an inspiring project.



"Glory at Sea!" plays at SXSW in the Shorts 3 program on March 9, 11th and 14th, at the Alamo Lamar Cinemas.

Here at Rooftop Films, we're thrilled to collaborate with IFC.com to host short films on their website. We've always wanted to put shorts online, and IFC was the perfect platform for the type of creative, unique, daring short films we show, and exposes thousands of new viewers to these distinct movies.

IFC's Media Lab teamed up with Red Bull to create a new web series, and we think they'll come up with some pretty great content. The theme is "After Hours," but they're leaving it pretty open as to what that means to you. Could be late at night, could be after work, could be a universe that operates outside the confines of "hours." One thing they DON'T want is an ad for Red Bull. Make something original, make something cool, make something personal, entertaining and gripping from episode to episode, and you stand a shot. We think the winning entry will be something that will really fit with Rooftop's artistic mission, and that our filmmakers and audience would dig. It's a competition, so I hope all you readers and watchers and filmmakers will enter a chance to get paid to create short films online.

Contest instructions are at www.ifc.com/redbull/

You can enter up till March 31, 2008.

Rooftop alum Casimir Nozkowski has crafted a savvy little promo for the contest all about the nature of internet video. It's a great manifesto. Check it out below.

One of the most beautiful shows Rooftop Films ever hosted was our 2007 edition of Dark 'Toons. The astonishing animator Brent Green showed his films and played live music with Brooklyn locals The Quavers. They are a band whose sound and focus is very much in line with Rooftop--quiet and surprisingly intricate songs about drifting through specific landscapes. I'm a huge fan, and hope to have them back on the roof again.

Vincent Moon on Blogotheque's "Take Away Shows" created a wonderful video with the Quavers playing two songs while floating down the Gowanus Canal (just one block away from Rooftop headquarters). I think it's a fantastic and perfectly executed idea (having Brooklyn indie film legend Jem Cohen piloting the boat adds to the mystique). Watch the video (below) and read the exciting story here.

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THE QUAVERS - Sea Won't Take Long
by lablogotheque

Props to Rooftop's Managing Director Genevieve DeLaurier for digging up this video.

This seems like a good Leap Day Post, a dangerously funny "translation" of a Bollywood musical. "My loony bun is fine, Benny Lava."



"Have you been high today?"

In 11 years, Rooftop has now shown over 1,400 films. Casimir Nozkowski has shown about a dozen, more films than anyone else (or at least the 2nd most; Steve Collins has also shown about that many--statistics from the early days are a little hazy. Historians are arguing over original program note documents now stored at the National Archives.)

One of the reasons Cas is so successful is because he can make a smart, sweet, savvy film with very few resources. His work typifies the Rooftop attitude: a good idea, a simple execution, a unique movie.

His most recent work is a potential New York Non-Fiction candidate, a subtle and fun anthropomorphizing of some bottles on the subway. I'd love to hear what people's thoughts are on this, because I found it alternating touching, inspiring, funny and melancholy.



The song in it is "The Dance Went On Too Long" by The Chief Smiles. Cas writes, "This was not sanctioned by the MTA. Or Snapple. Or many strangers on the subways."

Rooftop Films Artistic Director Mark Elijah Rosenberg (referring to himself here in the 3rd person so as to avoid any hyperbole, positive or negative) recently wrote and directed a music video for the sinister love song "Can't Let Me Go" by the gravel-voiced Brian Grosz, the first track of his album "Bedlam Nights."

I'll try to get a nicer looking copy online somewhere to highlight the enticingly grungy video FX created by Josh Pelzek of Ballooned Eye, and the crisp photography by Sam Cullman (What Would Jesus Buy; King Corn), but for now YouTube will have to do. The clip was produced by Jessica Wolfson (Crazy Sexy Cancer; The Bridge; This Film is Not Yet Rated) and features Shonda Robbins (the upcoming Natural Causes).

We shot on a blustery day and a half in Brooklyn.

Ok, I don't want to name drop too much here, but yeah, Dan and I are dear old college buddies with a guy who is an acclaimed Sundance screenwriter, former bandmate of members of The Bravery, current member of the amazing ukulele rock band The Hazzards, the inventor of the double feature finder, the world record holder in Nintendo Ice Climber, and seen herein as "the man wearing a red pelt."



This gentleman chairperson of the very hoity-toity Red Headed League (who may want to remain anonymous; he can let me know) wrote and directed this series of very funny short Hollywood spoofs called "Casted", which (if my YouTube searches are correct) seem to feature some dudes from "CSI: Miami" and "Die Hard 4."

Just wait till you get to the Parisian haberdasher and the matter duplication ray.

(And really, I love all these guys. Watch more of their stuff here.)

Rooftop Films is truly blessed to work in the The Old American Can Factory (an amazing six-building complex of artists and artisinal manufacturers), surrounded as we are by so many brilliant people. Our friend and neighbor Martin Bisi runs a legendary recording studio in one building, a studio he co-founded with Brian Eno and Bill Laswell. Sonic Youth, Herbie Hancock, John Zorn, Unsane (a personal favorite, back in my angrier days), on up through Serena Maneesh and the Dresden Dolls have all recorded there. That's some heady, heavy music history laying just below the roof you've all stood on.

But no one ever said Martin didn't have a sense of humor too. This hilarious and clever music video fits perfectly with this charmingly bizarre song.



Now you'll know what's going on the next time you come to a show and hear insane sounds floating up from the basement.

One of the most popular films we ever showed at Rooftop was the simple and darkly sweet animation Middle Dog Gets Angry, directed by George Gendi.

George now would like to send you his own bit of melancholy holiday greetings, to be celebrated with a good meal. Eat up!

(Click here to launch the 45 second video.)