The City Dark

(Ian Cheney | Brooklyn, NY)

The night filmmaker Ian Cheney moves into his apartment in New York, he pulls his grandfatherʼs old telescope onto a Brooklyn rooftop to survey the night sky. But bathed in its glow of orange streetlights, the City that Never Sleeps only has five stars to see. What begins as a disappointing autumn evening becomes a journey to answer a simple question: do we need the dark? From Mauna Kea to Death Valley to Paris, THE CITY DARK explores the world after dusk, capturing a planet increasingly shrouded in light. Featuring a lively soundtrack, engaging animations and a cast of quirky characters, THE CITY DARK is the definitive new film about light pollution and the disappearing dark. Rooftop Films and Edgeworx are proud to support the new film from the makers of King Corn (screened at Rooftop in 2007).

www.thecitydark.com

www.wickedelicate.com

ROOFTOP FILMS & EASTERN EFFECTS EQUIPMENT GRANT

Beasts of the Southern Wild

(Benh Zeitlin | New Orleans, LA)

In this mythological epic inspired by the costal erosion crisis in Southern Louisiana, Hushpuppy, a 9-year old Bayou Don Quixote, lives in "The Bathtub," the hardest drinking, fastest sinking island on the planet. Nested in the crumbling swamps of the delta, our ferocious heroine lives with Wink, her beloved yet volatile and hostile father. Reality crashes down on Hushpuppy's world when her father comes down with a mysterious illness, and nature begins to spiral out of control. With spectacle, humor and a blitzkrieg pace BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD takes on the real life tragedy of land-loss on the Louisiana coast through the lens of little girl who is losing not just the place that made her, but the parent who made her as well. Operatic in its scope, bursting with fireworks, humor, and utter mayhem, from the makers of the award-winning (and Rooftop co-funded) Glory at Sea, BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is an epic tale about the end of it all.

www.court13.com

2008-2009 ROOFTOP FILMS AND THE CHICKEN & EGG FUND SHORT FILM GRANT

Sara Zia Ebrahimi:
Norman Schwartzkopf Made Me Gay

A personal film that recounts how "Stormin'" Norman Schwartzkopf's life has influenced Ebrahimi's. Norman Schwartzkopf Made Me Gay humorously weaves together personal history with world events in an effort to increase the audience's knowledge about US foreign policy relations with Iran over the past century. The film draws on a variety of events in Ebrahimi's life that parallel or directly intersect with Schwartzkopf's--everything from his childhood memories of Iran where his father was stationed to being arrested by secret service agents for asking him a question. The film will utilize experimental film techniques to add a visually engaging approach to this historical recounting to accompany the unique storyline.

2008-2009 ROOFTOP FILMMAKERS' FUND SHORT FILM GRANTS

Underwritten by Cinereach

Moon Molson: Crazy Beats Strong Every Time

The story is about an African-American twenty-something, Markees, who finds his Nigerian-immigrant stepfather passed out drunk in his building hallway one night. Motivated by shame and the restraining order his mother has placed on his stepfather, Markees and his friends drag the unconscious man into his car in order to find him a more suitable place to sleep. But as the night dwindles on, the young men become increasingly aware of the futility of unloading the stepfather. Tensions build and frustrations mount, forcing the situation toward a violent end. Crazy Beats Strong Every Time will show how in a world where being "hard" is the ultimate masculine value, a basically decent young man—if humiliated, taunted and pushed far enough—can do the unimaginable in the name of "saving face."

James M. Johnston:
Knife

Knife is a searing portrait of vengeance. Set in rural Texas, the story chronicles an unnamed man with a broken spirit. He returns to his family from an unknown place—maybe prison, maybe war. In spite of his family's warm welcome, the man can't shake an anger that builds in him, returning to the land that was once theirs, a land that had been in the family for generations, a land that has been stolen, plundered, and sewn with seeds of greed. There's a force at work, a corruption that destroys homes, nature, families, memories. Told entirely in silence, Knife explores the details, textures, physical actions of his ruinous mission to sate the hatred in his heart with the knife he carries in his hand.

Dustin Guy Defa:
We Have No Home

A personal documentary in which Defa will return to his hometown to explore his family's long history of violence, substance abuse, and heartache, including two cases of manslaughter, an attempted suicide, a shooting, a fatal overdose, and a death from alcohol poisoning. Defa says he feels detached from his family, yet concerned with their endless suffering. The recent arrest and conviction of the family's "baby," Defa's uncle Billy, has caused him to take action. The film will approach the interviews and new footage in a verite style, interspersed with old home movies and the filmmaker's voice-over to guide the audience through the past and present. Defa says, "By asking tough questions to family members, discovering things I don't know about them and about Billy, and illuminating some of the reasons we are the way we are, my objective is to lighten the tragic element of our lives, to observe it as a storyline that is still alive and changing."

2008 EASTERN EFFECTS EQUIPMENT GRANT

Lee Isaac Chung (director of the acclaimed Munyurangabo, screened at Rooftop on August 23, 2008) received a fully-loaded lighting and grip truck for 30 days for his feature narrative Lucky Life.

Rooftop Films is committed to helping emerging filmmakers in a variety of ways, from providing large and diverse audiences for underexposed films at our screenings and online, to helping artists produce new films through the Rooftop Filmmakers' Fund. In 2008, Rooftop Films and Eastern Effects, a film equipment rental house in Brooklyn, inaugurated an Equipment Grant, lending one Rooftop alumni filmmaker a two-ton lighting and grip package for 30 days, to be used on a feature-length film. Dozens of excellent filmmakers submitted their treatments and screenplays in the hopes of receiving the package, valued at approximately at $15,000.

Lee Isaac Chung was the recipient of the 2008 Rooftop Films and Eastern Effects Equipment Grant. Chung screened his short film Sex and Coffee at Rooftop in 2006, and will use the grant for a drama entitled Lucky Life, about four friends on a poignant road trip. Mark and Karen are preparing for the birth of their first child, while Jason is coping with his recent diagnosis with terminal cancer. A meditation on life, death and spirituality, Chung says the film, which will begin production in September, was inspired by his trips to Spanish cathedrals, and the revelation of "cinema as a medium for creating spiritual space." The title comes from a book of poetry by Gerald Stern: "Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors / and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows."

Lucky Life will be Chung's second feature film, following on the tremendous success of his debut Munyurangabo, which screened festivals including Berlin, Toronto, and Cannes, where Variety praised the film as "flat-out, the discovery of this year's Un Certain Regard [section]."

Munyrangabo screened at Rooftop Films on Saturday, August 23 2008,, at the Old American Can Factory, in Gowanus (near Park Slope), Brooklyn.

2007-08 ROOFTOP FILMMAKERS’ FUND RECIPIENTS

Heidi Brandenburg & Matt Orzel
Untitled Peruvian Rainforest Documentary

Heidi and Matt are a pair of German and Welsh filmmakers who created “Sonneman,” an astonishingly lovely and insightful documentary about a man who pursues his dream of living a life with nature, away from the conventions of Western society, discontent with the trappings of the modern world. For their new film, Heidi and Matt have been traveling through the Peruvian Rainforest, spending time with the indigenous peoples and watching as their lives are changed by the increasing pace of oil and gas mining. “The film will show the relationship between the land and its inhabitants, exposing the disruptions to their traditional way of life and their spiritual connection to the land, due to oil extraction. The film will subtly capture the dangers of destroying the Amazon Rainforest with links to global warming and the world’s dependency on oil, expressing the relevance of this situation not only as Peruvian concern, but also as a global problem.” www.yachaywasifilms.co.uk

Bill Brown
Cumberland

Utilizing his unique and fascinating first-person experimental documentary style, Bill is making “a landscape film about torture.” Bill will be reconstructing the lives of the 7 members of the 372 Military Police Company who were convicted of abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He will spend time around Cumberland, MD, where these reservists were from, a place that has been transformed from a place that once exported manufactured goods into a place of tremendous economic hardship which now exports soldiers to fight faraway wars. Bill hopes to replace the iconic images of the distant and repellent abused detainees with images that are close-by and recognizable: to trace the line of inquiry from Iraq to the private prisons, fast-food restaurants and big box stores of Cumberland. “I am interested how in a global economy, a small American town is an extension of the global marketplace, and how in a global war on terror, it is an extension of the battlefield. I hope to understand a little better how seven representatives of America’s battered working class came to bear the responsibility for the failure of America’s foreign policy and moral authority.” Bill hails from Lubbock, TX, and Rooftop screened his films “Mountain State” and “Roswell” in 2004 and 2005.

Don Hertzfeldt
“I AM SO PROUD OF YOU .”

Don premiered the first chapter of his triptych “Everything Will Be OK” at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where the film won the Grand Jury Prize for Short Film. The film follows a stick-figure named Bill as he grapples with depression and madness, and in the new chapter will find Bill struggling with the death of a loved one, the ever-present question of his health, and the apparent unraveling of time. Don has a magically deadpan narrative style, and his elegantly simple drawings, mixed with a dazzling array of direct-animation effects and an ingenious sound design, create an astonishingly moving film. Don lives in Goleta, CA, and is the youngest non-actor ever to be nominated for an Academy Award. Throughout his career he has turned down commercial jobs and lucrative TV deals in order to retain creative control over his animations. www.bitterfilms.com

Melanie Shatzky & Brian M. Cassidy
The Blessing of the Animals

Brian and Melanie created the eerie documentary “God Provides,” about people in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and Brian co-directed “Fish Kill Flea,” a feature-length film about a dying mall in upstate New York. Their work “forgoes conventional storytelling methods in order to accommodate stark imagery, elusive characters and a deadpan realism” in a manner which Filmmaker Magazine described as “cogent and sickly surreal.”  Their new film will be a “portrait of love, death and devotion, as witnessed on the day of Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.” The footage is moving and disturbing, subtly raising questions about both secular and religious faith in a very personal manner. This stand-alone short is also part of a longer piece they are making titled "The Patron Saints," a project about faith and uncertainty. Brian and Melanie work out of Brooklyn, NY, and you can read more about their work at www.pigeonprojects.com

Spencer Parsons
“Chainsaw Found Jesus.”

Spencer’s various films—including “Resolution,” “Once and Future Asshole,” and the upcoming feature “I’ll Come Running,”—utilize a kind of hyper-reality which blends unexpected narrative techniques with a dynamic flair for poignant dialogue and insightful characters. This new film is “a melancholy comedy about two fathers, two sons, and the cocaine sale that brings them all together for an everyday adventure.” Far from your standard drug movie, the sad but hilarious and bizarre script is about “the moment before making a change, and maybe worrying that change just means trading up one sorry addiction for another.” Spencer is one of the co-founders of CinemaTexas, a professor at University of Texas, and, as a crucial member of the vibrant Austin film scene, has been a long-time collaborator with Rooftop Films.