Sundance quartet and new Linklater short also featured
The East Village Film Festival, to be held August 20-26as part of the
HOWL! Festival of East Village Arts, will kick off with Luis Fernandez de la Reguera’s award-winning documentary Rockets Redglare! the story of the life and times of the eponymous actor, whose life was a thrill ride of fame, decadence, and self-destruction. Rockets Redglare! features interviews with many including Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, Jim Jarmusch, and Julian Schnabel as well as footage of Rockets performing his trademark irreverent stand-up comedy.
Rockets Redglare! will be accompanied by the world premiere of a short film about the East Village by actor/writer/director Steve Buscemi, one of 13 short films being compiled for EV/DV, a compilation film of five-minute portraits of the East Village made by local filmmakers including Buscemi, Michael Almereyda, Larry Fessenden and Nick Zedd.
The EV/DV series will be shown as trailers before our festival features, and combined together for the final night program.
Also highlighted in the festival are four films made available by the Sundance Channel and Loew’s Theaters: Charles Busch’s comic melodrama Die Mommie, Die! starring Philip Baker Hall, Natasha Lyonne, Jason Priestley and Six Feet Under’s Frances Conroy and directed by Mark Rucker; Spanish sensation The Other Side of the Bed, a raucous romantic comedy with a musical twist; Michael Winterbottom’s In This World, the true story of two Afghan boys who travel through Pakistan through Iran, Turkey, Italy, France and the UK in search of refuge in London; and Dopamine, Mark Decena’s high-tech contemporary love story.
The EVFF is also proud to present Richard Linklater’s new short film, Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor, starring New York City philosopher/tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, who waxes philosophical on the events of 9/11, concluding with a unique proposal for a memorial on the WTC site.
The fest will also include a new documentary by Robert Maass called Gotham Fish Tales, the buoyant and inspiring story of the fishermen who ply New York City’s waters from Hell’s Gate to the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, catching and eating! fish of surprising abundance and variety.
Other featured films include The Technical Writer, Scott Saunders’ comedy starring Michael Harris as an agoraphobic writer and Tatum O’Neal as the glamorous new neighbor who changes his life; the premiere of The Morrison Project, Amy Williams’s moving portrait of a countercultural family torn apart by tragedy on the Lower East Side in the 1970s.
Other EVFF events include SCOWL, a two-week festival of anti-social film favorites from Freaks to Gummo, programmed by musician/writer Richard Hell and featuring a plethora of celebrity introductions including appearances by Jim Jarmusch, Thurston Moore, and Nick Tosches, and Avant Garde(n), an open-air film series held in our local community gardens to be programmed by filmmaker M.M. Serra and sponsored by Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project.
The festival will also feature retrospectives of the work of Taylor Mead, Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, and Shirley Clarke, as well a series of programs about the history of the East Village and the Lower East Side.
The EVFF will screen over 75 films at seven local venues including the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, Anthology Film Archives, City Cinemas Village East, Cinema Classics, Loew’s Cineplex Village, Millennium Film Workshop and Landmark Sunshine Cinemas.
FEVA · Federation of East Village Artists
539 East 6th Street #1d · New York, NY 10009
Phone 212-505-2225· Fax 212-505-3099
info@howlfestival.com· www.howlfestival.com
