Film Screenings / Programs / Series
SOMETIMES CITIES: URBAN AMERICA BEYOND NYC
June 14 – June 17
New Yorkers’ justifiable pride in the vibrancy, diversity, and cultural dominance of their city has been known to mutate into a not-so-attractive sense of superiority, a conviction that – with the possible exception of Los Angeles, Chicago, and perhaps a handful of other metropolises – other U.S. cities are hardly worth paying attention to. This paradoxical provincialism has never been particularly sympathetic, and it’s even less so today, when the nation’s economic woes have left the largely recession-proof New York increasingly clueless when it comes to the plight of so many mid-sized American cities.
To pay tribute to some of the beleaguered, struggling, yet still resilient urban centers that so often find themselves eclipsed in the national imagination by larger, wealthier cities – and which, thanks to their financial woes, demonstrate some of the gritty energy and resourcefulness that New York has largely lost over the past decade or two – Anthology presents a selection of documentaries which illustrate the plight, and the promise, of the mid-sized American city.
Special thanks to Chad Freidrichs, Tom Jarmusch, Clare Lucas (Films of Record), Paul Marchant (First Run Features), and Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom (Icarus Films).
Please note: as a complement to this series, we will be presenting a retrospective devoted to the films of Tony Buba, who has been making films in and about Pittsburgh and Braddock, PA, for the past four decades.
