The Greenpoint Film Festival is back this week for its 8th edition with four days of film screenings — spanning topics from environmentalism to displacement and gentrification — and panel discussion with directors and local experts. Tickets are available here, along with the festival schedule which runs May 2nd – May 5th.
This year the festival kicks off on Thursday May 2nd, at the Wythe Hotel (80 Wythe Ave.) with a 7 p.m. screening of “100/100” and “Rodney Dickson,” which invites the view to “look inside the studio, routines and life of Brooklyn-based artist Rodney Dickson as he works “along the edge” of art and seeks to push the boundaries of how it can and should be experienced.” A kickoff party will follow at the Wythe Hotel from 9 p.m. – 12 p.m.
On Friday night, a focus on experimental film brings screenings of “Proliferation,” an isometric animation short, “Blue Reverie,” which presents commentary on internet personas, and “The Washing Society” an “intimate sociohistorical portrait of an urban laundromat using the people who worked there for decades,” from filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
The narrative feature “Doing Money,” kicks things off on Saturday at 2 p.m. with a drama based on a true story that tells the story of a Romanian Woman who is “snatched off the streets of London in broad daylight, trafficked through a series of pop-up brothels in the UK.”
The narrative shorts “Picket Fence” and “You Look Great” follow ahead of “Barney’s Wall” that recalls the life of Barney Rosset, “the American publisher of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, among hundreds of other subversive, radical and vital literary works.”
Saturday’s programming at the Wythe Hotel wraps with the documentary feature “Jacob,” that follows Jacob M. Appel, who “is a recognized professor, doctor, lawyer, bioethicist, and published creative writer.”
Also happening on Saturday as part of the festival is the Pratt student film screenings taking place at Film Noir Cinema (122 Meserole Ave.) starting at 7 p.m.
The spotlight turns to the festival’s namesake neighborhood on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. with the screening of a short on Manhattan Avenue’s Cato’s Army and Navy Store that owner Ed Veneziano opened over 40 years ago, and “A Letter From Greenpoint,” which traces Jonas Mekas move from SoHo after 30 years in the neighborhood to Greenpoint.
Environmental programming with a focus on Greenpoint follows beginning at 3 p.m. with “Maria El Diablo,” “Historic Bushwick Inlet Stream Painting,” “The Science of Collective Discovery and “Greening Brooklyn – “Kingsland Wildflowers Green Roof.”
The festival will culminate with a screening of Diego Echeverria’s “Los Sures,” which documents the South Williamsburg Peurto Rican and Dominican communities during the late 1970s when it was one of the poorest neighborhoods in NYC.
Los Sures Trailer from UnionDocs on Vimeo.
Minor correction — my parents opened Cato’s Army & Navy in 1975, I would have been a little too young. Lol. Thanks for the mention!