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November 8: A Screening of 5 Shorts by Sam Green in New York, NY

Join us tonight for the November installment of the Flaherty NYC monthly screening series, where The Flaherty will present an evening of short films by Sam Green including: Utopia Part 3: World’s Largest Shopping Mall; Pie Fight 6; lot 63, grave c; Clear Glasses; and The Universal Language.

There will be a post-screening discussion with the filmmaker Sam Green, moderated by Ed Halter, programmer of the 2002 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and the founder and director of Light Industry. Flaherty NYC is programmed by Penny Lane, an independent filmmaker, video artist, educator and writer.

Join us after the show for happy hour prices on beer and cocktails at The Scratcher (209 E. 5th St.), where we invite the conversation to continue in a more relaxed environment.

Monday, November 8, 7:30 pm
Anthology Film Archives

Films to be screened:

Utopia Part 3: World’s Largest Shopping Mall (2009, 13 mins, co-director Carrie Lozano)
More than twice the size of the Mall of America, the South China Mall in Dongguan, China, seems to have it all: gondolas, carnival rides, palm trees, Teletubbies. It has everything. Everything but people. This short takes us on a tour of the empty hallways and lonely storefronts of this 7 million square foot failed monument to consumerism.

Pie Fight 69 (2000, 10 mins, co-director Christian Bruno)
The 1969 San Francisco International Film Festival opens on the steps of City Hall, but people walking in are unexpectedly attacked by independent filmmakers with pies. This footage was long lost until the filmmakers found it and made it into a movie in the late 1990s.

lot 63, grave c (2006, 10 mins)
The name of Meredith Hunter, the man killed in front of the stage at Altamont, has been almost totally forgotten. Green seeks out what may be the final reminder of Hunter’s existence, an unmarked grave.

Clear Glasses (2008, 3 mins)
A pair of glasses and their strange power as a historical artifact.

The Universal Language (work-in-progress, 2011, 32 mins)
An exploration of Esperanto, the language created in the late 19th-century to foster peace, prosperity and goodwill by providing a common language for all humanity. This is the most recent iteration of Sam Green’s poetic investigation into the battered state of the Utopian impulse at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

“[I]ntellectually compelling but also gut-wrenching, entertaining, and even funny at times. Sam makes for an engaging tour guide through a century that we can now see as remaking the human outlook. To be in his company for this one hour is to come to grips with what it is to be on this earth at this point in time, and it feels essential.”
- Paul Sturtz, True/False Film Festival

Sam Green is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker. His film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the Whitney Biennial. Green’s most recent documentary Utopia in Four Movements premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and is currently screening widely. Green received his master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. He has received grants from the Creative Capital, Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.

TICKET INFORMATION:
General admission tickets to the Flaherty NYC series at the Anthology Film Archives are $9, and $6 for Anthology members. Tickets can be purchased at the Anthology box office the day of the show. For more information, call the Flaherty at 212-448-0457

Anthology Film Archives is located in the old Second Avenue Courthouse building in the East Village at 32 Second Ave. at the corner of 2nd Street. For subway take F, V to Second Ave., B, D, F, V to Broadway-Lafayette, 6 to Bleecker.