Rockaway Film Festival Begins!
By Katie McFadden
The seventh annual Rockaway Film Festival is here! From August 17 through August 25, all are welcome to enjoy a full lineup of films, shorts, workshops, performances and more.
The festival opens this weekend at the Arverne Cinema at 72-02 Gouverneur Avenue on Saturday, August 17, with a free bio-art workshop at 4 p.m. Led by Rockaway artist Karen Ingram, participants will create living artworks from gene edited microbes in Petri dishes, to be incubated and photographed over the following days. The photos will then be pieced together to make an animated clip of collaborative bio-art that will be displayed in the Arverne Cinema installation window from August 22-25. This workshop will be followed by a screening of short films “Belong Where,” described as, “a collection of intergenerational memories, these personal poems linger in a limbo between places of belonging.” The full-length feature of the evening at 7 p.m. will be “Alice in the Cities,” with a live music performance before the film. This 1974 German road film by Win Wenders features an opening sequence shot on the old Rockaway boardwalk.
On Sunday, August 18, the Win Wenders love continues at 5 p.m. with “Report from Hollywood,” in which visionary cinematographer Ed Lachman provides a behind-the-scenes account of Wenders’ production of “The State of Things.” This will be followed by “My First Film,” an ultra-meta auto-fictional account of Zia Anger’s experience creating and abandoning her first film, and a live music performance before the screening at 8 p.m.
The films will continue every night throughout the week, into next weekend. Other highlights include the world premiere of “Jetty,” on Tuesday, August 20, an observational process story about the installation of new jetty infrastructure in the Rockaways, preceded by a music performance by Deakin & Geologist of Animal Collective. The program on Friday, August 23, features documentaries about communities experiencing flooding in other parts of the world with “Rising Up at Night” in the Congo and “As the Tide Comes In” on an island off of Denmark (NY premiere).
The workshops continue on Saturday, August 24, at 1 p.m. with a free stop motion animation workshop led by Buena Onda Collective in partnership with Materials for the Arts. Following that workshop, at 3 p.m., there will be a free children’s screening followed by a program of short films about animal companions at 5 p.m. There will also be a live music performance at 7 p.m. before the U.S. premiere of “Sleep With Your Eyes Open,” with the filmmaker in person for a Q&A. It’s a film about a woman visiting a coastal tourist city in Brazil, and her experience navigating language barriers. According to the Film Fest organizers, “It’s funny and original and feels uniquely relevant to Rockaway.”
The festival wraps up on Sunday, August 25, with a program of art-adjacent short films centering on coastal mythologies at 6 p.m. At 7 p.m., the Film Festival will be presenting a rare screening of artist Agnes Martin’s only film, “Gabriel,” with a live score performed by Rockaway Chamber Music.
Food will be available for purchase at the various screening events. Some events are free while others are $10. Hardcore film buffs or those wanting to attend multiple screening might be interested in purchasing a $75 all access shell pass. All tickets and the full schedule are available at: www.rockawayfilmfestival.org/
