Nitehawk Cinema & Tribeca Film Institute Summer Documentary Series begins with a presentation of LIVE FROM NEW YORK, the film that opened the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.
Q&A following the screening with Director Bao Nguyen and Producers JL Pomeroy and Tom Broecker, moderated by Alex Hannibal (Manager of Documentary Programming, Tribeca Film Institute). Introduction by Caryn Coleman, Senior Film Programmer, Nitehawk Cinema.
A New York institution and comedy powerhouse, “Saturday Night Live” has been reflecting and influencing life in the United States for 40 years. “Live From New York!” Saturday Night Live has been reflecting and influencing the American Story for 40 years. Live From New York! explores the show’s early years, an experiment from a young Lorne Michaels and his cast of unknowns, and follows its evolution into a comedy institution. The film looks at SNL as a living time capsule, encompassing decades of American politics, media, tragedy, and popular culture with an irreverent edge. goes deep inside this cultural phenomenon exploring the laughter that pulses through American politics, tragedy and popular culture. Archival footage is interwoven with stolen moments and exclusive commentary from SNL legends, journalists, hosts, musical guests, crew and others influenced by the comedy giant.
Live From New York! captures what has enabled SNL to continually refresh itself over nearly 800 episodes and keep America laughing for 40 years.
Part of the 2015 Nitehawk Cinema and Tribeca Film Institute Summer Documentary Series. Visit the film page for LIVE FROM NEW YORK.
Nitehawk Cinema & Tribeca Film Institute Summer Documentary Series presents VERY SEMI-SERIOUS, an offbeat meditation on humor, art and the genius of the single panel.
Q&A following the screening with Executive Producer Deborah Shaffer and graphic novelist Liana Finck, moderated by Jose Rodriguez (Director of Documentary Programming, Tribeca Film Institute). Introduction by Caryn Coleman, Senior Film Programmer, Nitehawk Cinema.
The New Yorker is the undisputed standard bearer of the single panel cartoon. Whether they leave us amused, inspired, or even a little baffled, the iconic cartoons have become an instantly recognizable cultural touchstone over the past 90 years.
With Very Semi-Serious, viewers get an unprecedented glimpse into the process behind the cartoons. Legends Roz Chast and Mort Gerberg submit their work alongside hopefuls like graphic novelist Liana Finck. While on the other side of the desk, Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff sifts through hundreds of submissions every week to bring readers a carefully curated selection of insightful and humorous work, striving to nurture new talent and represent the magazine’s old guard, while also considering how his industry must evolve to stay relevant. Leah Wolchok’s light-hearted and sometimes poignant debut film offers a window into The New Yorker’s signature brand of subtle, contemplative humor, and perhaps also onto what it means to laugh at ourselves. – Cara Cusumano
Part of the 2015 Nitehawk Cinema and Tribeca Film Institute Summer Documentary Series. Visit the film page for VERY SEMI-SERIOUS.
Nitehawk Cinema & Tribeca Film Institute Summer Documentary Series presents (T)ERROR, a film that illuminates the fragile relationships between individual and surveillance state in modern America.
Q&A following the screening with Co-Director David Felix Sutcliffe along with Ramzi Kassem and Diala Shamas, attorneys with Project C.L.E.A.R. (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility). Moderated by Cara Cusumano (Senior Film Programmer, Tribeca Film Festival). Introduction by Caryn Coleman, Senior Film Programmer, Nitehawk Cinema.
(T)ERROR is the first documentary to place filmmakers on the ground during an active FBI counterterrorism sting operation. Through the perspective of Saeed “Shariff” Torres, a 63-year-old Black revolutionary turned informant, viewers get an unfettered glimpse of the government’s counterterrorism tactics and the murky justifications behind them.
Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, (T)ERROR follows a 63-year-old FBI informant from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh on an assignment to befriend a suspected Taliban sympathizer. Yet first-time filmmaking team Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe soon conducts an investigation of its own. Without notifying their subject or the FBI, they interview the suspect and set the statements of the watched against the opinions of the watchers, until that inevitable moment when the Feds decide how to act on their information. A rare inside look at FBI undercover tactics in progress, (T)ERROR offers a thought-provoking analysis of the FBI as crime stoppers rather than investigators in post-9/11 America. Cabral and Sutcliffe create an impressive and courageous documentary that underlines the troubling results of an all-anti-terror mandate: a reliance on past offenders for access and new agents, a growing tendency to equate suspicion with guilt, a scandal-driven press, and methods that stretch the definition of entrapment. Intense and intricately crafted, (T)ERROR explores just how far we are going to prevent terror and exactly what liberties we are sacrificing to get there. —Arthur Ryel-Lindsey
Part of the 2015 Nitehawk Cinema and Tribeca Film Institute Summer Documentary Series. Visit the film page for (T)ERROR.
ART SEEN presents PIERCING BRIGHTNESS, the British science-fiction film by internationally acclaimed artist Shezad Dawood. Q&A with Dawood following the screening.
Two youths land in a spaceship outside Preston. Their mission: to re-establish contact and affect the retrieval of the ‘Glorious 100’ sent to earth millennia ago in human form to study and observe the development of another race. After making contact with one of the 100, now a Pakistani shopkeeper (Bhasker Patel), they discover that many of their kind have become corrupted, forgetting their original purpose and slowly becoming influenced by and in turn influencing their adopted home.
Inspired by Lancashire having the highest rate of UFO sightings in the UK, as well as hosting one of the earliest splinter Mormon communities in the world, Piercing Brightness uses Preston and its inhabitants as a springboard to investigate religious, racial and class-based social hierarchies. Eerily beautiful, the film employs different formats and archival footage of UFO sightings to create a film that is as experimental as it is entertaining.
Piercing Brightness utilizes science fiction as a backdrop from which to contest fixed notions of race, migration and identity. It addresses issues of time, memory and belonging through a careful interplay of mainstream science fiction and its ongoing relationship to more experimental modes of film making. It is the debut feature film directed by acclaimed visual artist Shezad Dawood, scripted by cult novelist Kirk Lake with an original score by Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple (Japan) and featuring music by Alexander Tucker.
ART SEEN is in partnership with frieze.
Nitehawk’s LIVE SOUND CINEMA presents DADA BRUNCH: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY and short films featuring a live score by PARLOR WALLS!
Artist Hans Richter, a pioneer in cinematic exploration, was an important Dadaist figure in the early 20th Century. His feature film, Dreams that Money Can Buy, involves contributions by a “who’s who” of important artists of this time period: Man Ray, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, and Alexander Calder.
Made shortly after the end of the Second World War, at a time when the compulsive madness of the Dadaist and surrealist movements had been overtaken by even more darkly irrational events, the film reflects an unease amongst contemporary artists about their role in the world and their relation to the dominant art form of the time, popular cinema. Richter’s main narrative concerns a down-on-his-luck artist named Joe who discovers that he has the ability to show individuals their innermost dreams, and sets about trying to turn his talent into a profitable business (somewhere between entertainment and therapy) so that he can win back his ‘dream girl’. The rhyming voice-over and film noir stylings become rather twee (even if they are designed to parody as much as exploit the conventions of mainstream cinema), but all this is merely the framing device for the film’s real raison d’être: seven surreal sequences conceived and directed by prominent members of the avant garde as an aesthetic alternative to Hollywood’s dream machine. – Anton Bitel, Film 4 Review
Screening before Dreams that Money Can Buy will be the short films Ghosts Before Breakfast (Hans Richter, 1927) and Symphonie Diagonale (Viking Eggleing, 1924).
Providing the live score to Dada Brunch: Dreams that Money Can Buy is Parlor Walls, an experimental duo formed by singer/guitarist Alyse Lamb (EULA) and drummer/keyboardist Chris Mulligan.
Nitehawk’s LIVE SOUND CINEMA celebrates the films of ALICE GUY BLACHÉ with our special “SHE MADE IT” presentation that features a live score by REEL ORCHESTRETTE.
There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art. – Alice Guy-Blaché, 1914
Alice Guy Blaché is cinema’s first female director who, between 1896 and 1920, wrote, produced or directed more than a thousand films in France and in the United States. A profound influence upon the evolution of cinema, she was a pioneer whose works stands alongside that of the Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès, and Edwin S. Porter, in cinema’s rapid growth from an optical illusion to a storytelling medium to an art form. For this special Live Sound Cinema presentation, we will be screening Kino’s “Gaumont Treasures” which features her work for the French Major Film studio Gaumont (1897 – 1907) and will include hand-colored, comedies, social commentaries, early “trick” films and the 33-minute religious epic, The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906).
Reel Orchestrette (Bradford Reed & Geoff Gersh) is dedicated to the art of live musical accompaniment to silent films. Reed & Gersh have been collaborating together for almost 20 years, they formed Reel Orchestrette in 2012.
Part of Nitehawk’s September SHE MADE IT brunch, midnite, and special event series.
CHEECH AND CHONG’S NEXT MOVIE: just what we all need… a really good hit. A 35mm presentation.
Jobless and penniless is the standard state of being for fully-baked L.A. duo Cheech and Chong. In Next Movie, they try their best to get back on a payroll of some kind: they write a couple of songs, they steal some gas, they even apply for unemployment; but when all that goes up in smoke, the two of them go back to doing what they do best: hustle suckers, chase skirt, and smoke grass. Who needs work anyway? Responsibility is a heavy responsibility, man.
Bigger and weirder than their first feature, Next Movie sets the dank dyad up with a host of L.A. oddballs, including Cheech’s identical cousin Red, a couple of toked out space aliens and Pee-Wee Herman himself.
Part of Nitehawk’s August WAKE AND BAKE brunch series.
Starring: Jason London, Wiley Wiggins, Sasha Jenson, Rory Cochrane, Milla Jovovich, Marissa Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, Parker Posey
It’s the last day of school in the summer of ’76, and the kids of Lee High school are busting loose. Like most high school kids, they’re a cliquey bunch – there’s the jocks, the burnouts, the geeks, the mean girls, the freshmen, the gearheads – but if there’s one thing that unifies the lot of them, it’s the need for some good ol’ worthwhile visceral experience. As the long Texas night settles in, the kids bounce from a busted house party, to a pool hall, to a field-kegger for the ages all while debating life’s immortal questions: Who am I? When will I get out of this podunk town? Where’s the beer?
Starring: Ice Cube, Chris Tucker, Nia Long, Tommy “Tiny” Lister, John Witherspoon, Anna Maria Horsford
After Craig gets unceremoniously dumped from his job, he and his boy Smokey ease the pain with a little herbal therapy. The two spend the rest of that unremarkable Friday kicking it on the porch, dealing with a murderer’s row of the neighborhood’s weirdos, girls and wannabe hoods. All that changes when Smokey’s supplier rolls up demanding $200 for the weed they smoked. The two spend the rest of the day scrapping together cash by any means necessary, even if it means taking down the neighborhood tough, Deebo.
Nitehawk’s BOOZE & BOOKS presents a special preview screening of the new film TEN THOUSAND SAINTS. Introduction by author Eleanor Henderson with directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini! Henderson will sign copies of the book following the screening in Nitehawk’s Lo-Res!
Adapted from the 2011 novel by Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints is a coming-of-age story about three messed up teenagers in late 1980s New York City — Jude (Asa Butterfield), new to the city from Vermont, “straight-edge” musician Johnny (Emile Hirsch), and troubled, rich uptown girl Eliza (Hailee Steinfeld) — who break away from their equally messed up parents to form their own surrogate family.
Set in 1988, a time of great cultural upheaval — against the excesses of the decade, the AIDS epidemic and the gentrification of the city culminating in the infamous Tompkins Square Park riots — this film is a nostalgia trip to a bygone era of New York City. The official theatrical release of Ten Thousand Saints is August 14, 2015.
BOOZE AND BOOKS now offers a ticket price that includes a copy of the book, just select the option when purchasing and present your ticket to pick up in our lobby the night of the screening! Also, don’t miss the after-party in Nitehawk’s Lo-Res bar where you can get your book signed by Eleanor Henderson and an inspired Ten Thousand Saints cocktail!
Part of Nitehawk Cinema’s BOOZE AND BOOKS signature series.
