FILM SERIES INCLUDES STRIKING FAMILY NARRATIVES
Teresa Giordano
Katie Cokinos, Curator for ShoutOut Saugerties films, wants you to love movies. She’s been bringing her infectious love of film to the public since she was a college student at Texas A&M, where she founded the Art Film Society and spent her free time lugging a projector to the Animal Husbandry building, which she says had the best theater for her selection of New Wave and Neo Realism films. She then forsook law school for the film business. Ten short films, two features, and five years directing the Austin Film Festival later, Cokinos brings her passion to Shout Out Saugerties. She’s programmed this years’ film event, Cinema Alive; named such because the films’ directors will be at the screenings to introduce their work and answer questions.
The first in the series, October 19th, Cokinos will screen a clip from her latest film, Voice of the Esopus Creek. The Esopus Creek, whose course was set 375 million years ago when a meteor slammed into the Catskills, created Saugerties. The land surrounding the Esopus has been inhabited by Lenape Indians and Dutch and English settlers. The waters fueled iron works and paper mills. The Creek has captured the imagination of industrialist, artists and even engineers tasked with bringing drinking water to millions of New York City residents. The Esopus Creek has stories to tell and Cokinos captures them through captivating images, poetry and interviews. Also on the program that evening, a series of films by young filmmakers from Saugerties High School and Woodstock Day School.
Little White Lie, directed by Lacey Schwartz-Delgado, screens on Sunday, October 20th. Schwartz-Delgado’s documentary, a journey with the director as she questions and searches for her identify, explores the lie at the center of her Jewish, middle class upbringing in Woodstock, New York. The truth doesn’t shock most of the people she grew up with. But still, unravelling it, confronting the keepers of the secret and coming to terms with it is a years long process. Again and again Schwartz goes back to friends and family asking what they knew and how they perceived her, a swarthy young girl with dark curly hair, in the midst of her white Jewish family. Why did someone at her Bat Mitzvah proclaim she was an Ethiopian Jew? Like all families, the Schwartz’s created a narrative they thought best for themselves and their daughter. But the need to know who she is overcame Lacey’s need for simple stories. The resulting documentary is personal narrative at its best: complex, courageous, poignant and redemptive.
On October 23, director Charles Burnett will introduce and discuss his first feature film, Killer of Sheep. Burnett, who now teaches at Bard, wrote, produced, and directed his film to submit to the UCLA School of Film as his Master of Fine Arts thesis in 1977. Filmed in Watts, a primarily African American working-class section of Los Angeles, the film follows Stan, his wife and children, friends and strangers, through day-to-day life in Watts. A series of vignettes shape a stark and intimate portrait of family and community life. Shot with a 16 mm hand held camera, Killer of Sheep has been called “visual poetry,” “neorealist,” and “an American masterpiece.” Despite being relatively unknown for decades, the film was restored and rereleased in 2007 and selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry and chosen by the National Society of Film Critics as one of 100 Essential Films. Burnett, a founder of the L.A. Rebellion, a cohort of Black filmmakers who rejected mainstream Hollywood, was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2017 for a lifetime of achievement in cinema.
Whether you’re a neophyte looking for love or a cinephile in the mood to rekindle romance, Katie Cokinos extends a valentine this October.