In the early 1980s, long before Brooklyn was synonymous with indie cool, a small dive bar on Prospect Avenue became the unlikely heart of a musical revolution. Lauterbach’s was no glamorous venue. Its low ceilings and makeshift stage were more grit than glamour, but what emerged inside its walls was extraordinary: a fiercely creative community of musicians inventing “The Brooklyn Beat.”

Before It Was Cool: The Brooklyn Beat from Lauterbach’s retraces this forgotten chapter of New York’s music history through the eyes of Rachel Cleary, host of Radio Free Brooklyn. While interviewing musicians for her show, she uncovers a hidden thread: band after band had roots in Lauterbach’s, a scene held together by passion, experimentation, and an almost family-like bond. Figures like Bob Racioppo of The Shirts and Chemical Wedding helped book shows and nurture the scene, while a constellation of indie, punk, and alternative bands turned competition into collaboration.

When Lauterbach’s abruptly closed for renovations, the scene teetered on collapse — but instead of vanishing, the artists carried their sound and spirit into the wider world. They proved that the bar was not the movement’s end, but its spark.

Through intimate interviews, archival footage, and vibrant animation, the film resurrects a scene that never sought the spotlight but left a lasting imprint on Brooklyn’s identity. This is not the story of overnight fame or commercial success, but a love letter to a borough before its reinvention. Before It Was Cool captures the beat of a time when art was survival, and community was everything.

The story of two accounting students from Trinity University in San Antonio who found solidarity in their shared strangeness, gathered a tribe of like-minded outsiders – queers, weirdos and nonconformists, including the unforgettable naked performance artist/dancer Kathleen Lynch– and launched one of the most radical and unpredictable paths in rock history. Against all odds, and with a proudly unmarketable name, they became a legendary psychedelic punk band: unlikely icons who inspired acts like Nirvana and even landed a number one hit. Butthole Surfers’ live shows were one-of-a-kind events – communal rites of passage for band and audience, and the antithesis of the digital isolation of our modern age.

The film also goes deep on the personal lives behind the chaos, with intimate portraits of lead singer Gibby Haynes, guitar wizard Paul Leary, drummers Teresa Nervosa and King Coffey, and bassist Jeff Pinkus: uncompromising originals whose lives took extraordinary turns.

Starring: Fredric March, Claudette Colbert, Elissa Landi, Charles Laughton

Hosted by Caroline Golum and Cristina Cacioppo. Followed by an afterparty in Trees Lounge with a DJ set of pre-code era tunes from Owen Kline plus our signature cocktail special “Blonde in Hell.”

Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross is one of the most notorious spectacles of the pre-Code era, blending religious melodrama with lush, barely veiled decadence. Openly reveling in Rome’s sensual excess, DeMille fills the screen with opulent baths, languid banquets, and orgiastic court entertainments meant to show the moral rot of pagan Rome. With Charles Laughton as a yawning, sadistic Emperor Nero (often flanked by his scantily clad boy toy) and Claudette Colbert as the conniving Empress Poppea, the movie is full of provocative imagery, climaxing with a Colosseum scene that manages to be outrageous without the aid of CGI.

Starring: Tessa Strain, Theodore Bouloukos, Isabel Pask, Mary Jo Mecca, Inney Prakash, Hanna Edizel, Samantha Steinmetz, Valéry Lessard, Ayanna Dozier, Abraham Makany, Marit Liang, Pris McEver

An irreverent biopic vividly realized through fantastic psychedelia and handmade sets with an ever-topical feminist approach, Revelations of Divine Love is inspired by and adapted from the memoir of 14th-century mystic and philosopher Julian of Norwich and an account of religious ecstasy, plague, and revolt considered to be the first book to be authored by a woman in English. The film envisions the life of Julian in the lead up to her anchorage—through her illness and the onset of her godly visions—and follows her through the years as she indulges in her desire to write and becomes a revered and holy figure to those in her town and beyond the city walls.

Childhood friends and future filmmakers Darren Stein and Adam Shell revisit camcorder movies they made as kids, unpacking the heavy topics they once giggled their way through. Interviewing friends and family members, all reminisce about the time in their lives when glimpses of the people they would become were shining through. 

Starring: Zahara Jaime, Alli Logout, Lila Doliner, Daria McKnight, Gregory Barnett

The FOFIF presents the New York premiere of Pavli Serenetsky’s sophomore feature, a queer coming-of-age ecologically conscious film, More Beautiful Perversions. It is the first of a series of screenings culminating in an Earth Day event. This screening includes the short film Gussy by Chris Osborn and a Q&A with Serenetsky moderated by actor Sadie Scott. We’ll also be partnering with Video Store.Age where you can get your own copy of MBP!

To make an additional $10 donation to The Future of Film is Female, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.

An eco-parable produced by the mutual aid collective Purpose Repair Shop, in collaboration with land stewards, underground music legends, and over 15 co-directors. Shot on 16mm and portions hand-processed with plants, this sophomore feature of filmmaker and environmental educator Pavli Serenetsky (winner of The Grand Jury Prize for their debut Firstness at Outfest 2021) reimagines “getting lost in the woods” as a queer coming of age to connect us closer with Earth.

A Future of Film is Female Release.

Gussy. 2022. USA. Directed by Chris Osborn. 19 min.
With Cole Doman, Tyler Knowles, Michael Patrick Nicholson, Christopher Riley.
As children, Miles and Rocky hunted a monster they thought they saw in the woods. Twenty years later, they’re still searching.

Starring: Vivian Wu, Haoyu Yang, Meng Li, Mason Lee, David Rysdahl, Zazie Beetz

The fates of an unlucky pig farmer, a feisty home-owner defending her property, a lovestruck busboy, a disenchanted rich girl and an American expat pursuing the Chinese Dream converge and collide as thousands of dead pigs are found floating down the Huangpu River, towards a modernizing Shanghai in Cathy Yan’s (Birds of Prey) debut feature.

Starring: Fumi Hirano, Toshio Furukawa, Akira Kamiya, Kazuko Sugiyama, Saeko Shimazu, Mayumi Tanaka, Shigeru Chiba

Before storming the globe with sci-fi blockbuster Ghost in the Shell, director Mamoru Oshii started off in the anime industry as chief director of romantic comedy series Urusei Yatsura, an adaptation of writer Rumiko Takahashi’s popular manga about a high school boy and his hot alien girlfriend.

Oshii thrived in the role, but the director longed for greater creative heights than a silly teenage romcom. When the chance finally came to direct the series’ second feature with complete creative control, Oshii ran wild. More Tarkovsky than Takahashi, Beautiful Dreamer marked a massive shift for the series, a loopy, visually formal meditation on time and consciousness that sets the series’ characters adrift in a dream that won’t end.

When it hit theaters in 1984, reception was chilly (fans sent Oshii razor blades in the mail), and Oshii lost his gig at the helm of the series. The movie lingered, though, and as it eventually made its way over to Western markets on home video, Beautiful Dreamer became quite a cult sensation. Today, fans reference the film as the high point for the series, and it frequently draws comparisons to Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as a breakthrough for anime as a legitimate cinematic form.

A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home: these scenes and others are woven into Cameraperson, a tapestry of footage captured over the twenty-five-year career of documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. Through a series of episodic juxtapositions, Johnson explores the relationships between image makers and their subjects, the tension between the objectivity and intervention of the camera, and the complex interaction of unfiltered reality and crafted narrative. A work that combines documentary, autobiography, and ethical inquiry, Cameraperson is both a moving glimpse into one filmmaker’s personal journey and a thoughtful examination of what it means to train a camera on the world.