ROOFTOP FILMS

Rural Route Films
Friday, July 2nd, 2004
8:30 - Live Music by slide-guitarist Zeke Healy
9:00 - Movies that take us off the urban path

On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street, in the Gownus Section of Park Slope, Brooklyn.
In the event of rain the show will be indoors at the same location.
Dress warmly (it's cooler on the roof than in the street).

Rural Route Films
Rooftop Films is pleased to co-present this program with Rural Route Films (www.ruralroutefilms.com), a festival based in Brooklyn, but spanning the countryside and wilderness worldwide in search of non-urban movies. The 2004 edition of their festival will take place on Saturday, July 24th and Sunday, July 25th at Galapagos (70 North 6th Street). Films designated with an asterisk were screened at their 2003 festival.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, more people live in New York City than in each of 41 other states, including many of the places featured in this program. With a good crowd at this show, there will be more people on the roof than the entire population of some of the filmed towns. With continuing mass migrations off farms and into cities and suburbs, why does Rooftop Films feel compelled to show a program of films about rural living to a bunch of city slickers in an industrial neighborhood in one of the largest cities in the world? Are there emotions to be revealed other than a vague nostalgia some of us may feel for places we've never been, lives we never lived? These films are funny, sad, and touching; they have drama, daring and political resonance, but is there a reason to show them together? Is there a common theme, beyond a general idea of locale?

These films are all about survival. Whether it's an organic farmer trying to correct rural health care injustice (Dental Farmer), a county preserving its history through roadside memorials and trees full of shoes (South Dakota Trilogy), or a destructive little vermin battling predators (no, not Nutria — Woodbunny), the rural world today is a place of struggle. At the core of this struggle is food. Everyone needs to eat, and with populations growing, we need more food than ever. It is a common myth that large scale, monoculture ("factory/corporate") farms are more productive than smaller, diverse ("family") farms, and that individual farmers still have work when corporations consolidate food production. In fact, because of the inefficiency factory farms can afford to let slip, monoculture farming (production of only a single crop or livestock) generally produces less food per acre than small scale, diverse farming (cf. www.foodfirst.org). And, as you will see exemplified by Iowa hog raisers in As We Sow, what few farmers who are still able to make a living under a corporate cultivation system have had their skills rendered useless. They are no more "farmers" than is someone stamping swooshes on a pair of Nikes a "shoemaker." It's no wonder that so many people are flooding the cities, and that, as in Marathon and Lawrence Station Road, cities and suburbs are encroaching upon rural communities.

In our urbanized society, rural spaces are refuges of raw emotion (Redneck / Redneck) and astonishing visual imagery (Mum). There is a shocking disquiet in these near-empty spaces, and a vigorous struggle in all these films.

THE FILMS:

Marathon (Aaron Valdez, 3:00)*
An impressionistic documentation of a small West Texas town, where the director's great-grandfather lived in a one-room shack while working on the railroad. The film uses black and white Super-8 film to explore the town and many of its old building facades, recording the pathos of the pace before its inevitable homogenous "revitalization."

Lawrence Station Road (Adam Burgess, 8:00)*
Stranded on a dirt island of what was once known as "The Valley of Heart's Delight" are the last two farming survivors in what is now known as "Silicon Valley." Despite pressure to sell and retire, the brothers cling on to all that they know and love.

South Dakota Trilogy (Will O'Loughlin, 3:00)
Three tiny portraits of Big Sky country. O'Loughlin paints a picture in details with simple, lovely color Super-8 film.

Jim From Divernon (Chad Schneider, 4:00)
This unusual narrative takes a ride with a strange man and his "friend" as they pass through rural Illinois. Drifting along, the film becomes uncomfortably funny as we realize Jim may not be all there, and neither is his friend. The concept for the film came to director Chad Schneider during a melancholy moment at an Italian fast food place in St. Louis, where he composed the rough draft on a paper napkin.

Woodbunny: Little Treasures of Love (Jeff Morelli, 16:00)**
The Woodbunny is on the attack, and the only thing that can stop him is love. An absolutely confounding, charming and eye-catching tour of a suburban woodlands, showing us all the shape-shifting creatures who make the woods so damn dangerous. If you don't know what a woodbunny is, it's kind of like a nutria.

Mum (Ritchie Sherman, 6:00)**
What the Woodbunny sees? Nature is anything but "mum" in this babbling, gurgling, crunching experimental romp through the woods shot on lovely 16mm.

INTERMISSION

Nutria (Ted Gesing, 13:38)
Man battles rodent in a struggle for dominance in the Louisiana Bayou in this quirky, comic documentary about the scourge of an imported, disgusting water rat. This film asks the question, What is nutria, and would you eat one?

As We Sow (Jan Weber, 23:00)* As farmers leave the land in record numbers, contract production, marketing and the associated industrialization of agriculture continue to expand. With the consolidation of food production into fewer and fewer hands, farmers are rapidly becoming obsolete. This intimate documentary about Iowa pig farmers shows us city folk why we should care about where our food comes from and how it's produced, revealing a desperate struggle for land itself — who controls it and how, and at what cost to people and communities, to animals and the environment, and to the very essence of our democracy.

Dental Farmer (Ellen Brodsky & Dunya Alwan, 15:00)*
Meet dental farmer Dr. Art Rybeck, a man in West Virginia who combines his passion for organic food production with a community dental practice. Rybeck sees no reason why the less fortunate should go without dental care, so he has set up a clinic in a farmhouse with a barter and work-trade payment policy.

Redneck/Redneck (David Yonge, 9:00)
In the quiet, dense British Columbia rain forest, a man and his doppleganger do battle. This eerie and stark film addresses either an internal battle we all face, or the fact that bearded men in plaid shirts are likely to get into fights.