2024
Series
Local Filmmakers' Showcase
Rockaway Film Festival #7
DUNES IN THE DUNES
Rockaway Chamber Music 2024
LOCAL FILMMAKERS SHOWCASE
ROCKAWAY FILM FESTIVAL #6
BOARDWALK SUMMER SERIES
Science Fictions and the Puerto Rican Future
Rockaway Chamber Music 2023
Rockaway Film Festival #5
FAR ROCKAWAY SUMMER SERIES
Rockaway Film Festival #4
O'Donohue Park Sunset Series
End of Summer Film Series
Under the Lip: Dispatches from Beyond the Whitewash
Borough to Borough
Rockaway Film Festival #3
Rockaway Film Festival #2
Rockaway Film Festival #1
Individual Events
a powerful family drama about three estranged sisters who come together to care for their ailing father during his final days.
a moody, anti-authoritarian coming-of-age story and a cautionary tale about the abuses committed by those in power. Guest presented by Azazel Jacobs.
a love triangle between a repo man, his globetrotting girlfriend and Marijuana.
two buddies in South Central L.A have one day to pay the local bully the money he’s owed, or they’re dead. This iconic comedy is guest presented by Shaka King.
an intimate and deeply moving chronicle of a teenager’s struggle to get an abortion.
a deadpan love story between two misfits from the Long Island suburbs. Guest presented by Eliza Hittman.
a shoreline cleanup, cyanotype workshop & free screening of Deborah Stratman's LAST THINGS, a glittering view of life on Earth from the perspective of rocks.
performing two back-to-back solo sets.
a sensory experience that navigates the cosmos through live music and liquid light.
a 16mm film and projection performance co-presented by PICTOBEACH.
Agnes Martin's anomalous only completed and rarely-screened film with a live score performed by Rockaway Chamber Music.
In otherworldly rituals and inventive parables, these coastal mythologies offer alternate visions of the future.
A fresh and clever comedy of misunderstandings, this film explores how people become connected or separated on the basis of language. U.S. premiere. Plus a live music performance.
A collection of documentary portraits, fictional narratives, and philosophical fables about our unusual relationships and desired closeness to the animal world.
Light Industry’s ongoing program for kid cinephiles returns for a special edition with Marie Menken's DWIGHTIANA and Charlie Chaplin's THE GOLD RUSH.
A free, all-ages stop-motion animation workshop led by Buena Onda Collective in partnership with Materials for the Arts.
A gorgeous and sweeping portrait of the two dozen remaining inhabitants of the tiny Danish island of Mandø and their reckoning with the rising tides. New York premiere.
Congolese director Nelson Makengo documents his hometown’s remarkable resilience and resourcefulness in a surreal nocturnal portrait that locates alternate sources of light.
Reaching across real and virtual worlds, our digital devices become modes of connection and mirrors of perception. These shorts fall into wormholes of self-presentation and online identities, blurring the line between performance and reality.
Sci-fi visions collapse into dystopian realities in these shorts exploring alternate algorithms of navigation on the open road.
Two films exploring the way we look at—or look away from—images of suffering.
Our annual independent animations program guest-curated by Jonah Primiano.
Honduran-American video essayist Adrian Quetzal Randall traces the origins of radio and television across military histories, global politics, and into the human psyche.
An observational process story of the installation of new coastal infrastructure in the Rockaways. Live music performance by Deakin & Geologist of ANIMAL COLLECTIVE before screening.
A girl enters a guided simulation to ease her growing anxiety. In psychedelic sequences combining scripted scenes, found footage, and AI-generated imagery, Baltimore artist Corey Hughes considers virtual space as a site for technological transcendence.
A collection of shorts by trailblazing animator whose joyful and stunning free-form creations marked a new era of independent animation. Live music performance before screening
These new shorts from emerging voices explore impulses of escape, zooming in on moments of clarity from outsiders teetering on the edge.
An ultra-meta autofictional account of Zia Anger's experience creating and abandoning her first film. Live music performance before screening.
Visionary cinematographer Ed Lachman provides a behind-the-scenes account of Wim Wenders’ production of THE STATE OF THINGS.
With the opening sequence shot on the Rockaway boardwalk, we present one of the most breathtaking road movies of all time on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Live music performance before screening.
A collection of intergenerational memories, these personal poems linger in a limbo between places of belonging.
a documentary that follows the lives of Black surfers in New York City, centering on a surf shop in Far Rockaway that fostered a diverse community of surfers that became an aquatic tribe.
Anonymous Ensemble presents a film created live across continents: Rockaway, NY ◦ Hawaii ◦ Venezuela ◦ Australia.
a window into the visionary Chilean provocateur's psychedelic space opera that never was.
the sci-fi saga continues in this year's dark and colossal blockbuster starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.
the cult classic and first cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert's famous 1965 novel.
by Chilean master Patricio Guzmán, with stargazing courtesy of the Amateur Astronomers Association.
performing classical pieces by Michael Nyman, Paul Wiancko, and Arnold Schoenberg.
a newly restored lost gem of American independent cinema, co-presented by ALFREDA'S CINEMA.
by Betzy Bromberg. 2011. 95 min. Co-presented by Prismatic Ground.
performing music by Caroline Shaw, Benjamin Britten, and Antonín Dvořák.
by Guy de la Valdene & Christian Odasso. 1973. 52 min. Presented in collaboration with SURFRIDER.
at the RETI Center barge in Red Hook.
plus a short film by experimental innovator Pat O'Neill, who helped design STAR WARS' visual effects.
SHORELINE CLEANUP AND FREE SCREENING
films by Shannon Morall, Tom A. Capps, Jonah Goldstein, Mori Ortiz, Barrett Shuler + Keith Roenke.
films by Brian Chu + Dylan Case.
films by Lulios Kouroupis + Lee Quinby.
part of PICTOBEACH BAZAAR — an outdoor comic art festival
with a selection of earlier shorts presented by John Wilson, and a ventriloquist performance by Sophie Becker.
a collection of films about trying to get from one place to the next.
with a post-screening DJ set by Justus + Rahill.
a sweeping look at mountains, monuments, trees, and crops – pieces of nature that cannot be owned.
with a live music performance by Surf Jazz Trio.
guest curated by Jessica Beshir, with a live music performance by Kyp Malone.
guest presented by Jake Perlin, with a live projection performance by Duelle Films.
independent animations guest curated by Miranda Javid.
with a live dance performance by Gio Fernandez-Kincade + m i c c a.
New York premiere, with a live music performance by Steve Gunn.
Between rituals and role-play, these shorts linger in the power dynamics of the lonely-hearted.
Plus a live music performance by Rockaway Chamber Music.
Part of the 3rd annual Benny Beya Bash with Kassia Meador + Leah Dawson.
Rockaway Chamber Music returns to the cinema for a concert of string quartets!
An evening of short surf films that showcase the raddest surfing by the best and stylish free-riders of our time.
presented by ALFREDA'S CINEMA
A tribute screening to the iconic singer, actor, and activist Harry Belafonte.
A series of short films concerning new futures and Puerto Rican science fiction, with a DJ set by Gio Escobar and a geodesic dome assembly by artist Matthew Mottel.
by Juan C. Dávila. 2021. 120 min.
a program of shorts by a pillar of American avant-garde cinema.
a fresh music collective bringing classical music to the peninsula.
An epic program of short films, VHS oddities, musical confusion, and iconic DIY cinema.
co-presented by The Infernal Grove & The Film-makers' Cooperative
shoreline cleanup, screening, and expanded cinema performance in collaboration with Laru Beya, Buena Onda Collective + Jamaica Bay Rockaway Parks Conservancy.
Join us for this special screening of recent short films by Rockaway talents.
Five rarely seen shorts by the Iranian master, guest programmed by Jason Evans (This Long Century/Ecstatic Static). Live music performance by Lace Card.
by Pipilotti Rist. 2009. 84 min. Preceded by INTUITION PROPOSITION by Lindsay Packer. 2022. 4 min. Live dance performance by Sigrid Lauren.
by Sam de Jong. 2022. 78 min. Preceded by MY ONLY IDOL IS REALITY by Martine Syms. 2007. 7 min.
A look into the polarizing attributes of Water as a conduit in the Black experience. Guest programmed by Melissa Lyde, co-presented by Alfreda's Cinema.
A map of whispered mythologies and intracoastal histories. These hybrid films shapeshift between fictional performances and documentary traditions, reawakening memories lost at sea. Invoking colonial phantoms, they examine notions of territory and possession. Live music performance by Bass Trio with Michael Isvara Montgomery, Ari Folman-Cohen & Ran Livneh.
by Sean Duggan. 2021. 61 min. Preceded by BERNADETTE by Duncan Campbell. 2008. 37 min.
by Saela Davis & Anna Rose Holmer. 2022. 94 min. Live bagpipes by Rockaway local John F. McManus.