The Rooftop Films 2008 Summer Series

Matricide gets a modern twist in this bittersweet true-crime story of a Maine boy who believed the family farm was his, right up until the day his mother evicted him. On that day, Mom got shot.

Venue: On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
Address: 232 3rd Street at the corner of 3rd Avenue (Gowanus, Brooklyn)
Directions: F, G to Carroll Street or M, R to Union Street and read here for directions from the train| Map
Rain: In the event of rain the show will be held indoors at the same location
8:30PM: Sound Fix presents live music by She Keeps Bees
9:00PM: Films
Tickets: $6 at going.com for a limited time
Preview: See short films from this and other programs at www.IFC.com
Presented in partnership with: IFC.com, New York magazine, and XØ Projects

PROGRAM NOTES:
“A rural Rashomon, and, like the masterful movie it most resembles, 1992’s Brother’s Keeper, it is up to us to figure it all out. Amazing…mesmerizing…one of the best documentaries on closed off communities and human politics ever mounted.” --Bill Gibron, DVD Talk.

If you travel through Maine and leave behind the familiar coast of summer vacations, you find yourself in a different Maine, the Maine of fields, farms, work and dirt. It’s a place most tourists never see—as the locals say, the real Maine. This is where Josh Osborne was raised, on his family’s third-generation dairy farm in Farmington, with his mother, father, and two sisters. Pulled out of school in the sixth grade, Josh would get lost on the five-mile trip to town and faced a life of hard labor. He worked on the farm every day for a dozen years on the promise that it would someday be his. But things didn’t turn out that way. Which is why on a beautiful summer’s day, this 22-year-old farm boy found himself aiming a rifle at his mother. Drawing from verite footage, home movies, interviews, police tapes, crime scene videos, love letters, and re-creations, Knee Deep asks the question: Why would a son try to kill his mother? The answers are surprisingly tragic and comic.

Knee Deep is certainly the story of Josh and his family, but it is also a portrait of a community in transition and it vividly displays the impact that rapid development has on small towns and big cities the world over. The lure of so called “easy money” lures individuals and city planners to sell their traditional farms and local industrial districts to big developers, re-zoning lands to build condominiums and McMansions, all too often failing to realize that they have traded away the land that sustains their businesses and keeps their economies diverse and their society self-sustaining. Josh’s betrayal by his mother is, in the end, a deliciously melodramatic metaphor for the way that we forsake the future of our society as we shut down family farms and local manufacturers.

Part of Rooftop Films and XO Projects’ INDUSTRIANCE™ Series: films, discussions, installations and more about the changing landscape in industry, architecture, agriculture, labor, and related fields.