Green Screen Film Series

Dirt!
Directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow
Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis
Thursday, September 23



Join us for a screening of DIRT! with special guest Bill Logan.

Dirt feeds us and gives us shelter. Dirt holds and cleans our water. Dirt heals us and makes us beautiful. Dirt regulates the earth's climate. Dirt is the ultimate natural resource for all life on earth. Yet most humans ignore, abuse, and destroy our most precious living natural resource. Consider the results of such behavior: mass starvation, drought, floods, global warming, and wars.

Dirt! is an insightful and timely film that tells the story of the glorious and unappreciated material beneath our feet. One teaspoon of dirt contains a billion organisms working in remarkable balance to maintain and sustain a series of complex, thriving communities that impact our daily lives.



Inspired by William Bryant Logan’s acclaimed book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, Dirt! the movie takes a humorous and substantial look into the history and current state of the living organic matter that we come from and will later return to. An eclectic group of participants ranging from biologists to prisoners incarcerated on Rikers Island offer answers to problems and inspire us to clean up the mess that we’ve created. Dirt! will make you want to get dirty.


Bill Logan is an award-winning natural history writer and environmental columnist. He wrote the Cuttings column for the New York Times and helped launch Garden Design magazine. His book on gardening tools won the Best Book of the Year award from the Garden Writers Association of America. In 1992, Logan founded Urban Arborists to care for trees in New York City. Three years later, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, was published. It was named Book of the Week by Entertainment Weekly and received a glowing front-page review in the Sunday Los Angeles Times Book Review section. Logan's most recent book, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, published in 2008 by W.W. Norton.



Doors open at 6pm
Film starts promptly at 6:30pm
Admission is FREE
RSVP to gpisegna@hsny.org or (212) 757-0915 x115




Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Directed by Jessica Oreck
Thursday, October 21


Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo delves into the ineffable mystery of Japan's age-old love affair with insects. A labyrinthine meditation on nature, beauty, philosophy and Japanese culture that might just make you question if your 'instinctive' repulsion to bugs is merely a trick of western conditioning.

Imagine cramming 128 million people onto an island the size of Montana - you would be pretty close to replicating the density of Japan. Not surprisingly, space is at a premium and ergonomic design is right up there next to godliness. Yet even in Tokyo, the pinnacle of this figurative “can of sardines,” people of all ages still make room for a tiny bit of wilderness. It is only fitting that they have become captivated by nature’s most efficient invention in space, design and function – insects. Sold live in vending machines and department stores, plastic replicas included as prizes in the equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal and the subject of the No. 1 videogame, MushiKing, from the smallest backyard to the top of Mt. Fuji, insects inspire an enthusiasm in Japan seen nowhere else in this world. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo discovers why Japan developed this rich and enriching social relationship with insects.

About the Filmmaker:
Jessica Oreck [producer/writer/director] works as an animal keeper and docent at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. When not at the museum, Jessica spends her time inventing new ways to create a sense of wonder in the world. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is Jessica’s first feature film. She is currently in production on several animated science shows, building her own museum exhibition, and research for her next feature film.

Doors open at 6pm
Film starts promptly at 6:30pm
Hort members $5; Non-members $10
RSVP to gpisegna@hsny.org or (212) 757-0915 x115




Past Films


Sweetgrass
Directed by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing‐Taylor
Thursday, August 19


An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern‐day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s Absaroka‐Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

A paean to the Old West: Sweetgrass captures modern cowboys’ overland journey, wrangling thousands of sheep, as they move across Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, amid sweepingly dramatic vistas and endless skies. Ronnie Scheib in Variety describes the film as “a mad cross between Howard Hawks’s RED RIVER” and an anthropological account of vanishing nomadic traditions, with “a dash of Tex Avery’s DRAG-ALONG DROOPY.” Twenty-first century cowboys call their mothers on cell phones and complain about rainy weather, ornery sheep and exhausted horses. A strikingly beautiful film, Sweetgrass is at once funny, awe-inspiring and endearing. At first the passive, fuzzy sheep seem utterly adorable; over time we come to understand the exasperated cowboy who screams profanities at this sea of stubborn, bleating beasts over which he struggles to reign.

About the Filmmakers:
Barbash and Castaing‐Taylor’s work seeks to conjugate the ambiguity and provocations of art with a documentary attachment to the immediate flux of lived experience. Working in Montana since 2001, they have deployed different stylistic registers in film, video, and photography to evoke at once the attractions and the ambivalence of the pastoral by juxtaposing monumental and mythological Western landscapes with multiple tracks of subjective synchronous sound. Forthcoming works in 2010 include Hell Roaring Creek, Coom Biddy, Into‐the‐jug (geworfen), Turned at the Pass, Breakfast, Daybreak on the Bed Ground, Bedding Down, and The High Trail.






Our Daily Bread
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Thursday, July 15



Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming, to the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines. Our Daily Bread looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cold, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living.

Our Daily Bread is a wide-screen tableau of a feast which isn’t always easy to digest - and in which we all take part. A pure, meticulous and high-end film experience that enables the audience to form their own ideas. Note: slaughterhouse scenes contain graphic material.


About the Filmmaker:
Producer, director and cameraman Nikolaus Geyrhalter was born in Vienna in 1972. At the age of twenty-two he founded his own production company (Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion). Among his films are the award-winning Pripyat, Our Daily Bread and Elsewhere. His latest film is 7915 KM. In 2003 Nikolaus Geyrhalter received the Austrian State Award for Film Art.












Beautiful Losers
Directed by Aaron Rose
Thursday, May 20



In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, came together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine, and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Over the years, the group has matured, and many have become more establishment-oriented; but no matter, their independent spirit has remained steadfast. The story of the Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit.

About the Filmmaker:
Aaron Rose is an artist, film director, curator and writer currently living in Los Angeles. He was co-curator of the Beautiful Losers touring art exhibit, and edited the collected art book released in 2004. Rose is also the director of the documentary film Beautiful Losers (2008) and recently completed the short documentary film Become A Microscope based on the life of 1960's artist/activist nun Sister Corita. His publishing imprint, Alleged Press releases hardcover books by contemporary artists. He is also co-editor (along with Ed Templeton & Brendan Fowler) of RVCA's ANP Quarterly magazine.




Garbage Dreams
Directed by Mai Iskander
Thursday, April 22



The Oscar-nominated documentary Garbage Dreams is a film that sees global issues at an absolutely grassroots level. It shows how international companies and the desire for modernization lead to the marginalization of the poor and the inconvenience of the general population. But it focuses on Adham, 17, Nabil, 18, and Osama, 16, three Zabbaleen youths, and Leila, a social worker and teacher of the community's new recycling school. The film is about the "Zabbaleen" - Arabic for "garbage people" - whose community collected and recycled trash in the city of Cairo for many generations. Far ahead of any modern Green initiatives, the Zaballeen survive by recycling 80 percent of the garbage they collect. When their community is suddenly faced with the globalization of its trade, each of the teenage boys is forced to make choices that will impact his future and the survival of his community.


At left: Vice President Al Gore presents Reel Current Award to Director
Mai Iskander

About the Filmmaker:
Shortly after graduating from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Mai Iskander started working as a camera assistant for the Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek (Amadeus; Ragtime). As a camera assistant, she worked on over a dozen features, such as Men in Black and As Good as it Gets, and over a hundred commercials and music videos. Since then, Mai shot numerous shorts, TV shows for A&E, PBS and LOGO, commercials and documentaries. She has had the opportunity to work with some great documentary filmmakers, such Academy Award nominees Edet Belzberg and Albert Maysles.



LaLee's Kin: The Legacy Of Cotton
An Academy Award-nominated Film by Susan Froemke,
Deborah Dickson and Albert Maysles, Director of Gimme Shelter
 & Grey Gardens
Tuesday, March 23



LaLee's Kin explores the legacy of generations of African-Americans who toiled in the cotton industry in the Mississippi Delta — a hardscrabble life of poverty and virtual illiteracy. LaLee Wallace, a former cotton picker retired on disability, is a great-grandmother struggling to support and encourage her family, while Reggie Barnes, a crusading superintendent, strives to save the failing West Tallahatchie school system from takeover by the state. LaLee's Kin adheres to the rigorous and sober-minded Maysles tradition of presenting things as they are without editorializing.

LaLee "Laura Lee" Wallace passed away in 2008. Albert Maysles said of her, "LaLee was a most caring, devoted mother and grandmother, taking extraordinary responsibility in tending to the needs of both immediate and extended family. As a maker of the film I felt totally obligated to give her the kind of care she gave her children extending as best I could my heart and talent behind the camera. Once the film was finished we brought the film to her trailer for her viewing. Upon seeing the film she commented, 'That's the truth.' And had just one complaint: 'couldn't you have made it longer?'"




About the Filmmaker:
Albert Maysles is an award-winning documentarian and a Guggenheim fellow. Along with his brother David, he brought us the cult classics Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1976). The Maysles have also worked extensively with celebrated artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose monumental environmental projects were documented in Academy Award-nominated Christo's Valley Curtain (1974), Running Fence (1978), Islands (1986), Christo in Paris (1990), and Umbrellas (1995).

In addition to being nominated for an Academy Award in 2001, LaLee's Kin received the Sundance Film Festival 2001 Cinematography Award for Documentaries and the DuPont Columbia Gold Baton Award in 2004.



Act of God
A Film by Jennifer Baichwal
Thursday, February 25



Act of God is a feature documentary about the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning. The event represents the paradox of being singled out by randomness, and so precipitates questions about chance, fate and meaning in life. The film explores seven stories from around the world that raise and respond to these questions, while keeping the sky and what comes out of it as a central visual metaphor and thread. Paul Auster, who was struck as a teenager, philosophically anchors the film, along with Fred Frith, the improviser, who both imaginatively underpins it and personally demonstrates the ubiquity of electricity in our bodies and the universe.


About the Filmmaker:
A decade and a half ago, Jennifer Baichwal completed
a master's in philosophy and theology at McGill University, with a thesis titled Reinhold Niebuhr, Sin and Contextuality: A Re-evaluation of the Feminist Critique. Her debut film, Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, won a 1999 International Emmy for Best Arts Documentary; her next, The Holier It Gets, won Best Independent Canadian Film and Best Cultural Documentary awards at Hot Docs 2000, and Geminis for Best Editing and Best Writing. She also won a 2007 Best Documentary Genie for Manufactured Landscapes, which followed Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky as he photographed the impact of industry in China.

But it's in her latest work, Act of God, Baichwal's philosophical leanings come most boldly to the fore. Having spent two years immersing herself in the topic, interviewing victims and shooting lightning storms with her husband and cinematographer Nick de Pencier, Baichwal says the only conclusion she's come to is that "narrative is, perhaps, the most basic meaning that we give to things that happen to us that we can't really understand."





Visual Acoustics
A film by Eric Bricker
Narrated by Dustin Hoffman
Thursday, January 21



Visual Acoustics celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the world's greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream. Shulman, who passed away this year, captured the work of nearly every major modern and progressive architect since the 1930s including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, and Frank Gehry. His images epitomized the singular beauty of Southern California's modernist movement and brought its iconic structures to the attention of the general public. This unique film is both a testament to the evolution of modern architecture and a joyful portrait of the magnetic, whip-smart gentleman who chronicled it with his unforgettable images.

Visual Acoustics won the Mercedes-Benz Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Austin Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize at the Lone Star International Film Festival and Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking from the Newport Beach Film Festival.

About Eric Bricker, Director:
Upon graduating from Indiana University where he received his B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Theatre, Eric moved to Los Angeles and turned his focus toward film and television production As his passion for filmmaking grew, so too did his art consultation firm, Artistic Designs Unlimited, which was formed in 1996. Developing an understanding of client's spatial needs and translating those specifics into original works of art enabled Eric to develop a greater visual vocabulary and sense of design.

Eric is currently at work on a narrative feature film exploring the contemporary art world while running Kaleidoscope Mediaworks. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and son.