Thirteen/WNET’s REEL NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL kicks off the summer with independent films and videos by New Yorkers and about New York. The festival begins today, June 27th and lasts through August 1st. Thirteen will air a new film each Friday night at 12:30am.
For Reel New York, hundreds of films were submitted for consideration. This year’s selection features the very best in documentary, narrative, animation, and experimental works.
The films featured in REEL NEW YORK are as provocative as the city itself, stretching from unique perspectives on family dynamics, the tragedy and devastation of gun violence, and tentative romantic entanglements; to subtle explorations of human nature, considerations of New York of yesteryear, varied expressions of the dance world, and the dream of flight realized through the magic of cinema.
Don’t miss the first film, Been Rich All My Life, airing tonight at 12:30am on Thirteen.
About the film
From Harlem’s Golden Age: The Divas Who Won’t Stop Dancing! They filled the dance halls of Harlem in its golden age, performing at the famed Apollo Theater and Cotton Club with legendary bandleaders like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. They led the first strike by African American performers when they walked out of the Apollo in a successful bid for higher wages, establishing AGVA, an integrated performer’s union. They danced on the first black USO tour, stealing the “for colored only” signs off the trains they rode through the American South. That was over 65 years ago, and today they’re still hoofin’ and living it up. They are the “Silver Belles”, the sassy, classy chorus line dancers still filling the concert halls well into their eighties and nineties. Women Film Critics Circle Award 2006. Watch a preview.
For more information, including a full festival schedule, visit the REEL NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL online.
Hollywood. We often complain about the almost complete lack of creative thinking and ideas that go into Hollywood movies today. I wonder what the movie studios would think if they knew that new talent and new voices on film could really get people coming back to the theaters in the high numbers they once did. There was a time when a movie was number one at the boxx office five weeks in a row. Now it only stays around at the top for one week. Then it;s on DVD. Hardly what you would call a success.