The Film Festival: A Theater Festival

FREE EVENTS
Free Preview Cabaret and Opening Night PARTY!
Five-minute sections from plays and films in the festival are previewed for opening night. SEATING IS FREE! Stay after for the opening night party. Film installations, experimental music and mayhem abounds! Did we mention it’s free!?

Special performance by Glissando Bin Laden and His Musichideen with Video by ( ).
Glissando Bin Laden is an improvising sextet based in New York City.

( ) is a sound artist essentially, but also works with video and sound in performance and installation settings. ( ) uses a laptop computer and other instruments and sources to create a variety of sound and image.
Fri, May 30 at 8:00pm

$20.00 EVENT

Suspicious Package
The Fifth Wall
Created by Gyda Arber
In this Brooklyn Noir, you are the Detective, the Starlet, the Heiress, or the Producer in the mean streets of Williamsburg, where technology, reality, theater and film meet. Are you a victim of circumstance or the guilty party? Personal video players accompany you through the mystery and prompt you through your lines, as you star in the show.
Saturdays and Sundays by appointment, starting at 4:00pm

FILMS or FILM SERIES for $10.00

The 72-Hour Films
Participants will be challenged to shoot, edit and score a short film in 72 hours, based on the themes of the festival. Qualifying entries will be screened during the opening weekend at The Brick.
Saturday, May 31 at 8:00pm

Unloosened and Root
DD Art Enterprises
Written, Directed and Live Spoken Commentary by David Dixon
Writer/director David Dixon will give a live commentary while his elegiac, sometimes cryptic, feature film, Unloosened and Root, is projected, adding another layer of meaning (and convolution) to an already highly personal, multi-layered documentary/fictional film. Viewers will be able to leave the theater knowing that they are now prepared to watch the film on their own having received most, if not all, the director’s insights and anecdotes.

Depraved Indifference
Performed by Kenneth Shorr
Depraved Indifference is a series of monologues, ruminations, and jokes starring Kenneth Shorr.
“The tragicomic world that Shorr creates is filled with faux pas, traumatic scenes and surreal glimpses of life in the American Southwest. His themes are self-deception, racism, disease, social inequality and the difficulty of negotiating a media landscape that blends banality and terror. Shorr has been concerned with such subjects for some time, but it is only the medium of videotape, it seems, is able to give his genius for gothic satire the full scope it deserves.”
— Art in America, review, Raphael Rubinstein, May 2002.
June 4, 7:00pm

Horrible Child
A TK Film from Best Ten Dollar Suit Pictures.
Written and Directed by Lawrence Krauser.
Designed and Edited by Larissa Tokmakova.
Starring Mike Daisey, T. Ryder Smith, and Paul Willis.
Mr. and Mrs. Child (T. Ryder Smith & Mike Daisey) live in perpetual enmity with their only mistake: Horrible Child (Paul Willis). Their world is a bodyless echo-chamber of memory and hostility, honed into baroque linguistic ritual. Mother and father have a dream: that one day The Exterminator will arrive to cap H.C. and set them free. A visually minimal, sonically lush, perversely comic talk-opera catalog of human dysfunction from Lawrence Krauser and Larissa Tokmakova. Q&A WITH DIRECTOR AND CAST TO FOLLOW!
June 11 at 7:00pm

Late Bloomer
Written by Clay McLeod Chapman
Directed by Craig Macneill
Original Music by One Ring Zero
Northlake Films
Official selection at the Sundance Film Festival, “Late Bloomer” is compelling and humorous short film about 7th grade sexual education class gone horribly wrong. Based on the short story/performance piece by Clay McLeod Chapman, we take our love for HP Lovecraft where no one has ever taken before…into the schools. To be followed by a live performance by Clay McLeod Champman! 13 minutes

FILM Vs. Theater/Theatre
Joyce S. Miler
In “FILM Vs. Theater/Theatre” Joyce Miller practically hand-forges a new genre of minimalist film dubbed “The Readies”, bringing the ritual of communal reading to new heights. In her film making debut, she explores the freedoms, and stifling, stifling limitations, of creating a film out of nothing more than letters against a black screen, and how it can illuminate certain intersections of film and Theat(er/re). 12 minutes
June 18 at 7:00pm

Walkouts…HENRY IV: BAM
produced and directed by: 31Down and The Unseen Machine
www.31down.org
A 30 minute video work that documents audience reactions to The New York City Players’ production of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV, Part One’for the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2003). An audience of 21st Century theater-goers immediately became the restless
mob of groundlings that one might associate with Shakespeare’s time, getting up and leaving the theater as soon as they could. On closing
night, they were greeted by an interviewer, eager for their thoughts. This work includes a 2008 interview with director Richard Maxwell. 30 minutes

Melon of the Sky
Produced and Directed by Art Wallace
Melon of the Sky is a movie about a play. It is an Off Off Broadway masterpiece created by the hottest new hot director, Blayton Renior. Originally written in Old Norse, Blayton interprets and directs, driving his talented actors through a regimen of strange theater games of his own invention. Along the way there are scandals and death and the learning of lines. 75 Min.
June 25 at 7:00pm

PLAYS FOR $15

Birthtaint
Written by Andrew Gilchrist
Directed by Julie Rossman
Dawn sees promise in the grandiose fantasies of her large-faced friend Daniel, who dreams of one day building a theater on a cliff. She also knows scant time remains before she’s lost him to the loose and cocksure girls of the Cabaret Magnifique. But will Dawn’s confidence avail her? Or will she find herself in a struggle for which she’s not yet prepared? In her dreams, she was special… In reality, it was always her Birthtaint… 80 minutes
Tue, June 17 at 8:00pm
Sat, June 28 at 10:00pm
Sun, June 29 at 2:00pm

Bring Me the Head of John Ford
written by Casey Wimpee
directed by Cole Wimpee
produced by Aztec Economy
Bring Me The Head of John Ford is a one-man, one-act production that uses video projection and live performance to examine the effects of isolation, obsession, and the relationship between fantasy and reality, voyeurism and spectacle, and the psyche in crisis. Like a director’s commentary gone mad, Bring Me The Head of John Ford is both a humorous and dark examination of cinephilia and the oedipus complex on the frontier of culture in America. 30 minutes
Sat, May 31 at 5:00pm (with Code Alpha)
Sun, June 1 at 5:00pm (with Code Alpha)
Thu, June 5 at 10:00pm (with Code Alpha)
Sat, June 14 at 1:30pm (with Code Alpha)

Code Alpha
Directed by Judson Kniffen
There has been an outbreak of an acute intestinal virus on a cruise ship, and it is damage control time! The “powers that be” are producing a video to send to the press, but for now, all are quarantined until proper medications can be secured. The PR director coaches the ship’s head male nurse what to say – despite contradicting the actual facts and evidence. As the filming progresses, the symptoms of the nurse and the ship as a whole go from mild to extreme. The final product, though, covers up the truth and a marketing video for the cruise line has been created. 30 minutes
Sat, May 31 at 5:00pm (with Bring Me the Head of John Ford)
Sun, June 1 at 5:00pm (with Bring Me the Head of John Ford)
Thu, June 5 at 10:00pm (with Bring Me The Head of John Ford)
Sat, June 14 at 1:30pm (with Bring Me the Head of John Ford)

Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Eddie Eisenberg, Prop.
a reading
Written by Robert Saietta
A doc style play of the life of Eddie Eisenberg, a 50-something Brooklyn everyman who has lived in the same neighborhood all his life. For the past 15 years, he has made his living as a Crime Scene Cleaner. The play takes place on Eddie’s last night on the job. 120 minutes
Fri, June 27th at 10:00pm

Death at Film Forum
Old Kent Road Theater
Written and Directed by Eric Bland
Death at Film Forum follows four young auteurs-in-training as they fight and flail their way through a Project Runway-style art-house film competition. The impulse to create, the impulse to destroy, and the impulse to carry on (despite everything) wind through this film/theater hybrid that offers a send-up and celebration of both the cinematic auteurs of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s and our generation’s would-be artistes. 105 minutes
Sat, June 7 at 7:00pm
Sun, June 8 at 5:00pm
Thu, June 19 at 7:00pm
Sat, June 28 at 2:00pm

Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing
Piper McKenzie Productions
Written by William Peter Blatty
Directed by Jeff Lewonczyk
In this world-premiere concert reading, the author and screenwriter of The Exorcist spins a behind-the-scenes tale of madness and mayhem in a Hollywood feature engineered for failure. In a deal that whiffs of brimstone, art-house director Jason Hazard has been hired to film an expensive big-screen adaptation of the hit horror novel The Satanist. Things, needless to say, go horribly, horribly wrong, in ways that include demonic possession, Himalayan cats, unhinged Jesuits, and bad acting. Jeff Lewonczyk, who staged the premiere of Blatty’s musical John Goldfarb, Please Come Home in the 2007 FringeNYC, directs. 120 minutes
Fri, June 20 at 9:00pm
Sunday, June 22 at 5:00pm

I, Object!
Adhesive Theater Project
It is very likely that I, Object! is a story about three obsessive individuals and the objects they keep. However, it may be that it’s actually a story about objects and the people they keep. Whichever perspective you take, I, Object! unleashes the power of our everyday belongings and asks the question, if we can’t get rid of our possessions, who is really the possessed? 60 minutes
Sat, June 14 at 9:00pm
Sun, June 15 at 2:30pm
Thu, June 19 at 10:00pm

It’s Gonna Be A Cold Night
Written and Directed by Keith Biesack
How does one become a zombie? And once a zombie, does one still dream? This fleshy play examines the world of watching and listening through the rotting body of Lance: a late night talk show host who’s in love with world, loved by his audience and assured by his dentist that things look good. But Lance feels something lurking in his own dark blood. Some strange jazz rhythm. Something that will transform him into a being unknown. 80 minutes
Sun, June 1 at 3:00pm
Sat, June 21 at 9:00pm

Kill Me Like You Mean It
Stolen Chair
Kill Me Like You Mean It is a timely absurdist film noir as Ionesco might have imagined it, creating comic chaos out of the possibility that American life might be pointless. After a 100% sold-out critically acclaimed run in 2007, this production will be restaged as a fully costumed radio play with live (and absurdist) music and sound effects. 85 minutes
Thu, June 5 at 8:00pm
Sun, June 8 at 8:00pm

The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage
Gemini Collisionworks
Adapted and Directed by Ian W. Hill
An exact theatrical recreation of the butchered Orson Welles film adaptation, as Welles had intended it to be seen. 120 minutes
Sun, June 1 at 8:00pm
Fri, June 6 at 8:00pm
Tue, June 10 at 8:00pm
Thu, June 12 at 8:00pm

The Paranoid’s Guide to History
Presented by J. W. Regan
A Paranoid’s Guide to History is documentary theatre that combines spoken word, music, and video. From Tom Paine to Tom Cruise, from James Bond to Global Warming, the Guide examines the broader implications of seemingly incidental events and practices from a deeply suspicious perspective. The show leads the audience through an unexpected cultural landscape that is continually dissolving the conceptual boundaries of being and identity. There is something weird going on, we help make sense of it all.
Fri, June 13 at 7:00pm
Sat, June 28 at 5:00pm

Q&A: The Perception of Dawn
The Fifth Wall
The question and answer session for the independent film, The Perception of Dawn, rapidly devolves into a grudge match between the writer, director, producer, and actors…will anyone make it out unscathed? The audience determines how it all goes down, as they ask the questions in the question & answer session.
75 minutes
Sat, June 21 at 7:00pm
Tue, June 24 at 8:00pm
Fri, June 27 at 7:00pm
Sun, June 29 at 5:00pm

The Stubborn Illusion of Time
Bone Orchard
This theatre piece interweaves the fate of six characters: a delusional soldier, a pedophile/transvestite, a photographer (Diane Arbus), a super who straddles the line between life and death, a spirit girl and a Belarussian homeless man…. The piece moves freely between the daily, the dream and the departed and follows a kind of intuitive logic more like music than theatre. Very minimal lighting is used inventively and much of the action takes place in a tense silence. We re-imagine the piece in relation to the film we made of it – and explore the two different mediums on the same stage: playing with ideas of tempo, motion and repetition – exploring what it is to be live and what it is to be captured on film. 75 minutes
Sat, June 21 at 2:00pm
Sun, June 22 at 3:00pm
Sat June 28 at 7:30pm

Tod & I
Piehole Productions
Directed by Tara Ahmadinejad
Puppets, shadows, and sounds remind us what it is to encounter the strangeness of death for the first time, and show us why the woods beyond the funeral home can be the perfect place to play hide and seek. Get away from the flowers and formaldehyde and come out into the dusk with Tod and I. 70 minutes
Sun, June 8 at 2:00pm
Sat, June 21 at 4:30pm

What I Took In My Hand
The American Story Project
Directed by Jess Chayes
Beginning inside the Spirit of St. Louis, play follows Charles Lindbergh juxtaposing historical news footage with private moments. 60 minutes
Sat, June 14 at 7:00pm
Thu, June 26 at 7:00pm

You Bet Your Life LIVE! Film Trivia Edition
Lisa Levy Industries
Created by Lisa Levy
Updated riff on Groucho Marx’s 1950s TV Game Show. Lisa Levy banters with contestants to see if they will say the “secret word” for the episode and then provides opps for them to win money and prizes by answering Film trivia questions. 60 minutes
Sat, June 7 at 10:00pm
Fri, June 13 at 10:00pm