Bedford + Bowery
May 2, 2018
By Libby Torres
The Tribeca Film Festival may be over, but another homegrown flicks fest is just beginning. The 7th Annual Greenpoint Film Festival will take over North Brooklyn this weekend, with four days of films and panel discussions.
Produced by Brooklyn non-profit arts organization Woven Spaces, the festival kicks off with a slew of screenings on Thursday, May 3, focused on the ideas of immigration and community within Greenpoint. Several of the films scheduled to be screened highlight the experiences of Polish immigrants, who’ve long called Greenpoint home and have turned the neighborhood into a bustling ethnic enclave; Past States documents the struggle of Polish immigrant Martynka to find a home in the neighborhood, while Ziemia focuses on public art within the community. A Q&A with most of the filmmakers is also a part of the evening.
Only one screening (the documentary United States of Detroit) is scheduled for Friday, but the last two days of the festival are packed with interesting films. On Saturday, catch Amy Jenkins’s documentary Instructions for Parting, chronicling the birth of her first child while three family members battle terminal cancer. And if you consider yourself an amateur cultural critic, check out the curated program for that evening, which focuses on visual art and the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s; the program includes a documentary on Elaine de Kooning, as well as a short on lesser-known Ab-Ex artist Pat Passlof. A panel with the filmmakers follows the program, and Q&As are also part of the other film screenings that night.
Sunday’s schedule is lighter in content but not in impact: the festival concludes with another curated program, this time focusing on the environment. Drawing on Greenpoint’s context as a former site of rampant pollution, the short films screening in the program explore “the relationship between humans and the natural world in order to question how we can ‘green’ our urban environments,” according to the festival’s website. A panel with the filmmakers and other environmental advocates follow the screenings.
The Greenpoint Film Festival runs from May 3-6 at the Wythe Hotel. More information can be found on their website. Tickets range from $10-$56.