A pyrotechnics addict in love, a moody French-Canadian out to save a Palestinian refugee, and a trailblazing dolphin. They’ll all hit the big screen at the third annual Greenpoint Film Festival next month.
Woven Spaces, a Greenpoint-based arts organization that has been working out of Brooklyn since 1996, will screen four days worth of animations, docs, narratives, and experimental films at venues around the neighborhood, including the Greenpoint Boathouse.
The festival’s first year, in 2011, saw the premiere of Jonas Mekas’s Mars Bar movie. This year, feature films include a French-Canadian drama titled La Vallée Des Larmes (Valley of Tears) and The Pyrotechnician’s Daughter, an animated love story about “a nuclear weapon engineer with a taste for pyrotechnics.”
In the addition to the regular lineup, which was chosen by judges out of a pool of submissions, GFF will also screen curated programs of indie music videos, performance videos, films about the poverty-relief tactic of micro-budgeting, and environmental films, which is the main program event at GFF and has been expanding exponentially each year.
“You could say the the Environmental Program was one of the main reasons for founding the festival,” said Rosa Valado, director of Woven Spaces. “Since this neighborhood is such a fertile laboratory for possibilities for regeneration and renewal, and since we live in an area that has such a vibrant film and art world, we see GFF at this time as a strong combination of the two.”
GFF’s nomenclature might not be totally accurate, since films from all over the world will be screened, but the environmental program this year will feature a series of hyperlocal shorts about the wilds of Greenpoint, including a doc on the North Brooklyn Boat Club and footage of one very stalwart dolphin that a filmmaker spied swimming in the East River.
Another Brooklyn-centric film that’s been gathering buzz is At the Corner of 3rd and 3rd, a doc about the historic Coignet Stone Company building, which the Whole Foods bound for the Gowanus Canal will “hug,” to the dismay of preservationists everywhere. See the full festival line-up here.
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