3rd NYDFF - Opening Night
Wednesday, May 26 - Anthology Film Archives - Courthouse Theater - 6.30 pm
BELOW SEA LEVEL, by Gianfranco Rosi (Italy/USA, 2008, 115')
The American Premiere of the Italian director's latest work: BELOW SEA LEVEL, the intimate portrait of a commune of outcasts living in the middle of the desert about 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles. The multi-awarded film received among the others the Venice Horizons Documentary Prize.
The film is presented in the director's presence.
A handful of misfits and outcasts create a makeshift community amidst the wreckage of the California desert. "Slab City" is on first sight little more than a collection of junked cars, corrugated steel sheds and handmade huts in an arid wasteland 190 miles from downtown Los Angeles, but the abandoned Marine Corps training camp is home to a small band of youthful bohemians, self-styled outsiders and seasonal drifters who have chosen to live outside of civilization with no laws, conventional authority, electricity or running water. Rosi and his camera crew spent two years documenting life in Slab City, and BELOW SEA LEVEL profiles the people who have chosen to settle down in this forbidding environment, and offers a glimpse of daily life in a village that's at once a throwback to America's pioneer spirit and a world away from a typical town in the twenty-first century.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue (at 2nd Street), New York, NY 10003
www.nydff.org