New York Non-Fiction

“To film is a necessity. It’s like eating, sleeping, breathing.” Throughout the seven decades since his arrival in New York from Lithuania, Jonas Mekas has trained his camera on every nuance of daily life in his adoptive home. Embedded with the Fluxus circle in the 1960s and the scene that grew around Warhol’s Factory, Mekas’s film diaries are no less fascinated with a cat stalking an insect than with Salvador Dali making art on a city street, or John and Yoko cooking dumplings.

Now 95 and recognized as a major pioneer of American independent cinema, Mekas’s playful, mischievous spirit continues to pour forth a torrent of work. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive review of his art, or to fix him in the context of American film history, this small lyric film is a portrait of Jonas Mekas the poet - of memory, displacement, friendship, loss, and above all, joy.