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Tribeca Buzz: A Talk with Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot’s Melissa Friedling

Published on April 17, 2011

by Mary Iannone

“Definitions are hard – especially when it comes to documentary. My interest is more specifically in the “found” media - removing it from its original context and reusing it to produce new meanings or alternative readings.”

Filmmaker Melissa Friedling hesitates to classify her short documentary Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot as an experimental film. The film started as many conventionally do – out of pure curiosity. Year after year, her Bangladeshi neighbors in Brooklyn constructed and dismantled an elaborate garden as a way to provide food for their multi-generational family.

“It was always a pretty fantastic display of urban agriculture with elaborate hand-made trellis supporting robust climbing vines that sprouted vegetables I only recognized from all the Pakistani and Bangladeshi markets on Coney Island Avenue,” Friedling recalls. “One year, the overhead lattice support for the new bean, cucumber, and bitter melon plants was woven out of a 35mm feature film. As a filmmaker interested in “found film,” it was beautiful and shooting it was sort of irresistible.”

Such a discovery prompted a long-term plan to document the evolution of her neighbor’s work from season to season. Friedling optically printed the filmstrips that had been used in the garden, which were “brittle and eroded” from months of exposure. While examining the strips, Friedling’s husband peered closely – “Isn’t that Eddie Murphy’s brother Charlie Murphy?” They ultimately discerned that the film that had been used was the “2005 retro urban teen” movie Roll Bounce.

Ironically, just as the nostalgia-filled town roller rink is torn down in Roll Bounce, the garden Friedling was eager to document was paved over as a parking lot the following spring. In addition, her original question was never fully answered – when asked where the 35mm film came from, the children of the household simply said their father “found it.” She instead found herself with new material. “There was a big outcry from many of the newer residents in my building – that they were taking away curb space that was going to reduce street parking, and were additionally creating an eye sore.”

But Friedling recognized that the family’s garden had been purely “subsistence agriculture; the parking lot was perhaps going to better provide for this family.” What resulted was Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot; the family’s look back at their garden’s final season and its incorporation of found media.

Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot makes its New York Premiere as part of the Shorts: Impressions of Memory series at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

For more information on Friedling’s company Slouch Productions, go to www.slouchproductions.com.

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