“What modern movies lack [...] is the wind in the trees.”
D. W. Griffith
The first things that one notices at the Rockway Film Festival are the trees. And the wind and the sand and the sunset and the stars and the water. And the airplanes that sometimes seem to fly nonstop overhead, oftentimes a complete nuisance, drowning out the sounds of the cinema, but other times a sort of ethereal industrial accompaniment to what’s on screen, perfectly placed and timed, accentuating the rhythms of the film with their ambient droning. It can sometimes feel, if you’re lucky, as if the entire world were in tune with what was going on at one tiny, sandy, roofless lot behind a closed brewery in the peninsula of Rockaway, Queens.
In its 8th year, the Rockaway Film Festival has firmly established itself as a venue for seeing and discovering films. In the over-saturated, highly cosmopolitan, perpetually tired, jaded, and wired New York City film landscape it’s managed to carve out a niche for itself, not by going bigger or better, but by remaining firmly rooted. The festival privileges the regional, the undiscovered, the up-and-coming, and the environmentally-curious over the attention-grabbing or sleekly sophisticated. With the sea and the bay each a 10-minute walk away and the flagship sand-floored outdoor cinema draped by a massive willow tree, one senses immediately that the world around and under the cinema is just as important as the films themselves.
That’s not to say that the films are second-place or that us cave-dwelling creatures who call ourselves cinephiles find less than we desire. The difference is that one finds a sensibility in the programing, almost a philosophy, that’s particularly attuned to what’s outside the cinema as well as what’s on screen at Rockaway. It’s a pleasurable alternative to the hype-machinery of the festival world or endless canon-consumption of the repertory cinemas. A typical Rockaway film is one that cultivates an open and drifting attention span. It exhibits a focus on understanding, indulging in, and building the world around itself. Narrative is often less important than wandering and relating. Alain Tanner’s In the White City (1983), which headlined the second night of the festival, is a perfect example. It’s a film about a sailor (Bruno Ganz) who jumps ship in Lisbon to go on one long, endless and pointless holiday spent wandering the city, seducing chambermaids, and filming 8mm diary films to send back to his other lover in Switzerland. It’s a movie that takes its character’s flâneur-ship to heart, drifting alongside him and circling around the city with him with very little sense of forward momentum. “I know no more than before,” Ganz says to himself about his journey near the film’s end, but fortunately, as the film subtly suggests, knowledge might be less important than simple experience.
It’s experience and the endless sensory impressions that make up a lifetime that also motivated the festival’s closing night selection, Paul Clipson’s Zebulon Footage and Hypnosis Display (pictured at top). Abstract arrangements of footage that Clipson recorded over decades, the films, true to their name, instantly put me in a trance through their undulating rhythms, gorgeous compositions, and overwhelming juxtapositions. Clipson not only cycles through all sorts of natural and artificial sites—from the ocean to the subway tracks to a flower garden to a neon-filled cityscape to the interplay of light and shadow on a woman’s hand—but also often overlays the images, dissolving and looping various moments into stunning sensory collages. Late in Hypnosis Display, a female voice begins recounting nightmares in a mumbly, uncertain voice. She talks of dreaming of running away from words. In the somnambulistic state the films left me, aided by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s wonderful live ambient score and an endless gentle breeze, I too found myself running away from words. It was too internal and meditative an experience to do much more than simply absorb.
In the numerous programs dedicated to contemporary cinema, one could sense an appreciation for regionalism, environmentalism, and experimentation. A personal highlight, the world premiere of Kevin Bewersdorf’s diary film, New Kingston (2025), felt particularly attuned to what makes the festival so special. Shot on an iPhone over the course of five years during whatever downtime Bewersdorf had on his construction job in New Kingston, NY, the film is an achingly sincere compendium of all the little moments that make up a life. Opening with a montage of Bewersdorf’s own hand opening and closing in various work sites and landscapes, this is a film that foregrounds its own deeply personal construction in a manner not far from the diary films of Jonas Mekas. Through long associative montages we watch as seasons pass, houses get built, friends chatter endlessly, money is exchanged, and Bewersdorf’s dog runs back-and-forth across the same environments during various seasons. There is a sequence of men constructing a septic tank that almost moved me to tears. It’s a film too earnest, small, rural, and unmarketable to be widely appreciated and it could easily get overlooked at any other film festival. It’s a beautiful film to be cherished that exemplifies what the Rockaway Film Festival can do best.
Small films predominate during the festival; big premieres and stars are essentially non-existent. If there are buzzy titles, they’re more likely to be niche-fare, the stuff of local Brooklyn filmmakers like James N. Kientz Wilkins’s The Misconceived, which drew a palpable sense of pre-screening excitement and a very cinephilic crowd when it was presented in work-in-progress form as Under Construction. Equally as excited was the family-friendly audience for a 10 AM screening of William Wegman shorts starring his own Weimaraner dogs dressed up in human clothing and puppeted with human hands. Many of them made for Sesame Street, the films have a playful, stoic surrealism to them that one would be very hard-pressed to find in popular television today. I could think of few things I’d detest more than to start my Sunday morning surrounded by screaming children—they practically stole the mic from programming director Courtney Mueller during the introduction—and few film festival experiences I could cherish more.
Rockaway artistic director Sam Fleischner began many screenings with a rhetorical question: “What is cinema?” He would then define it as three things: a place, an audience, a movie. The order he gave those three elements is a large part of what makes the festival an exciting experience. New York is the greatest city in the world for cinema. What we don’t need is more cinema, although it’s always welcome. What we do need is more than cinema. What’s needed is a greater relationship between the cinema house and the world. At the Rockaway film festival one can feel this expansion happening, an effort being made to draw that relationship between place, audience, and cinema closer together in fresh and stimulating ways. You can sense the beach under the paving stones. You can feel the wind in the trees.
