Short attention spanners take note, Future Shorts, the largest short-film network in the world, is trying to bring its monthly series of cutting edge, bite-sized cinema to New York. Tonight’s program, which has already found audiences in Australia, Bulgaria, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan features Ramin Bahrani’s Plastic Bag, an examination of one bag’s existential journey, Daniel Wirtberg and Jonas Rudström’s music video for Miike Snow’s “Burial,” and Polish filmmaker Tomasz Wolski’s award-winning documentary The Lucky Ones, about the goings on in the Civil Registry Office of Krakow. Given its worldwide acceptance, we hope this series’ New York existence is also long-lived.
Nocturnalist | At a ’60s Flick, Mod Reigns
By SARAH MASLIN NIR
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
It was a mod night when Future Cinema, an English company that screens films, celebrated its New York opening at the Shangri-La Studio on Sutton Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Up a candlelight-flickered staircase, through a darkroom cobwebbed with clotheslines bearing ruby-lit pictures, past a writer’s desk strewn with photographic proofs, guests at a film screening in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, stepped into the past on Wednesday night: a Swinging ’60s photo studio where a Britpop band rocked out while a gaggle of actors with Twiggyesque doe eyes struck poses in the center of the room, vying for their moment in front of a photographer’s lens.
It was the New York opening of Future Cinema, an English company that screens films, and it was held at at the Shangri-La Studio on Sutton Street. The film was “Blow-Up,” the 1966 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, set in London and starring an Austin Powers prototype — an ennui-ridden fashion photographer named Thomas (David Hemmings).
The intent was for guests to feel as if they were models at a casting. As the line to enter stretched down the sidewalk before doors opened at 8 p.m., guests said, a vintage British car pulled up, spilling forth a live-action “Thomas” followed by a cluster of screaming girls, who would later become the mod models in the photo-shoot-turned-party. [Read more...]
