The Rooftop Films 2009 Summer Series

A fun, frantic, fantastical program of films about losing your grip on reality, and reality losing its grip on the world.
FREE OPEN BAR after the films
 
Venue: on the roof of the Open Road Rooftop
Address: 350 Grand Street @ Essex (Lower East Side, Manhattan)
8:00PM: Doors open
8:30PM: Sound Fix presents live music
9:00PM: Films
11:30PM - 1:00AM: Open Bar at Fontana’s (105 Eldridge St), courtesy of Radeberger beer
Tickets: $9-$25

No refunds. In the event of rain, the show will be indoors at the same locations. Seating is first come, first served. Physical seats are limited. This means you may not get a chair. You are welcome to bring a blanket and picnic.

MAP | SOUND FIX

There you are. Living a quiet, suburban, stick-figure life. Watching TV. Waiting for a promotion. Coolly cruising the galaxy at something less than light speed. But things are not quite right. This simple pencil is leading you astray. That promotion’s not coming, and you snap. A fungus in the shower compels you to perform diabolically crass comedy. And pretty soon you’re lost in a world of cinema semiotics, upside-down in a confusion of water and air, and pregnant with the illegitimate love child of an indifferent red cube.

Why did this happen? What does it all mean?

These films—comedies, dramas, animations, visual experimentations and mental games—highlight some of the wild, weird and wonderful ways that cinema can alter your world. There are times when freaking out is better than calming down. Times when the madness of the world is best met by individual psychosis. Times when the machine’s got you trapped, and you’re either the madman running it or the wrench inside of it, because someone’s getting sent back in time, shrunk down to snail size, and suckered into an endless pit of pixels, and hell, it might as well be you. Beats striking out on an alien date with a spaceship full of dreary Canadians.

FILMS:
Pure (Jacob Bricca | Hamden, CT | 5:00)
A masterpiece of montage, Pure smashes the action movie genre into its constituent parts then glues them back together again for a thrilling, funny, and thought-provoking ride. It is a meditation on genre, a commentary on visual clichés, and a celebration of the visceral pleasures of cinema.

The Control Master (Run Wrake | United Kingdom | 7:00)
Halftone City, USA. A peaceful metropolis of family values and space-age dreams. Mild-mannered blonde Dorothy Gayne secretly protects its citizens from harm. But dangerous new technologies abound. What happens when a powerful device falls into the hands of scientist-turned-villain Doctor Moire? Who will rescue Halftone City from this oversized creep? runwrake.com

Funny Guy (Frank Rinaldi | Singapore | 15:00)
Alone in a foreign country, Jamie Dent tries comedy as a way to connect with strangers. But his routine goes beyond shocking and offensive, to downright demented and dangerous. Still, in a painfully uncomfortable situation, sometimes it takes just one joke to break the ice (or the fungus).

Pencil Face (Christian Simmons | Savannah, GA | 4:00)
“He’ll help you draw, he’ll help you erase. Waste not, want not, he’s Pencil Face.” A simple pencil can be the key to realizing your dreams (and the gaping voids within them). dandydwarves.com

E.L.A.: Love at First Byte (Fernando Sarmiento | Argentina | 10:00)
A hilariously disquieting 1980s-style mash-up of sci-fi kid’s shows, video games and Euro soft core porn, featuring pop culture references as playfully childish but resolutely indefinable visual signifiers, creating a story that’s essentially indecipherable yet achingly familiar, effective and fun. peppermelon.tv

Teaching the Alphabet (Volker Schreiner | Germany | 4:00)
Classic Hollywood cinema was filled with symbolism, and in this brilliant and playful mind game, Schreiner recasts the signifiers as the basic building blocks of communication, creating an interplay between language, image, and psyche. volkerschreiner.de

Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight (Felix Massie | United Kingdom | 6:00)
A stick-figure having a very bad day. worldofarthurcox.com

Captain Coulier (Space Explorer) (Lyndon Casey | Canada | 13:00)
Lured to space by the promise of action, adventure and glory, Coulier now battles space travel’s greatest obstacle: boredom. This sly comedy is kind of like Barbarella without the sex. captaincoulier.com

Hirsute (A.J. Bond | Canada | 13:45)
Struggling to invent time travel, a young scientist stumbles upon a self-fulfilling prophesy as the solution to his problems. Now he has to deal with the fact that in the future he’s become condescending, fey and semi-suicidal. hirsute.thesiblings.ca

Coagulate (Mihai Grecu | France | 6:00)
Coagulate presents “a world where liquids don't follow physical laws, where air and water are unstable. I wanted to place characters in this world—man and fish—and imagine them reacting to this modified state of being. . . . A world where water itself is breathing.” –Grecu.mihaigrecu.org

Rooftop Films is a non-profit organization whose mission is to engage and inspire the diverse communities of New York City by showcasing the work of emerging filmmakers and musicians. In addition to our Summer Series – which takes place in unique outdoor venues every weekend throughout the summer – Rooftop provides grants to filmmakers, teaches media literacy and filmmaking to young people, rents low-cost equipment to artists and non-profits, and produces new independent films. At Rooftop Films, we bring the underground outdoors. For more information and updates please visit our website at www.rooftopfilms.com.