Speakeasy Cinema returns to Page 22! As always, the film, chosen by the guest host, is a secret until it rolls!
This month’s Speakeasy Cinema guest is Miao Wang – a filmmaker whose visual storytelling is damned lyrical. And it’s the 4th of four, so try to make it!
Matt
Miao Wang is a filmmaker, editor, and web/print designer based in New York. Wang immigrated to the U.S. from her hometown of Beijing in 1990. She started as an apprentice at Maysles Films. Beijing Taxi, Wang’s critically acclaimed first feature, premiered and was nominated for Best Feature Documentary at SXSW 2010. It screened at over 30 international film festivals, had a theatrical release in 2010, and broadcast nation-wide on PBS in 2011. Her first documentary, Yellow Ox Mountain, screened at over 20 festivals and institutions and was broadcast on WNET Thirteen. Wang is currently in production with MAINE-LAND – a new film looking at education, youth, and cultural dissonance through the lives of a new wave of Chinese high-school students studying abroad in the US. Wang has a BA in economics from the University of Chicago, and a MFA in design and film from Parsons School of Design. The mission of her production company Three Waters Productions is to make creative and cinematic films that inspire cultural understanding, build connections, and a more humanist perspective of the world.
Miao has received grants from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, the Jerome Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from IFP, Tribeca Film Institute, and Women Make Movies. She is a fellow of IFP Filmmaker’s Lab, Tribeca All Access, Sundance, and the Flaherty Seminar.
Our location: Page 22 Studio, a workplace for emerging and established Writers, Directors, and Actors, dedicated to the spirit of Geraldine Page.
The address is 435 W. 22nd St, 2nd Floor, NY NY 10011.
The cost will be a donation ($5 suggested).
Please bring drinks you consume responsibly.
The screening begins at 7 PM.
SPEAKEASY CINEMA is created, produced and hosted by Matt Kohn, Director of CALL IT DEMOCRACY and THE MANUTE BOL SUDAN FILM PROJECT
http://thegracecourtpicturecompany.com/
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WHAT IS SPEAKEASY CINEMA? WHY IS IT DIFFERENT FROM OTHER SCREENING SERIES?
If you’re new to this list, I created and hosted the independent and underground movie screening series Speakeasy Cinema. Between 2006 and 2009 it was housed at the Collective Unconscious and then Soho House. Every month Speakeasy Cinema featured at least one guest who choose an exciting, controversial movie they would like an audience to discuss. However, before the screening no one in the audience knew what they were coming to see. After the film was screened, the audience participated in conversation, with only one purpose: what did you see? What did it mean to you? How did it make you feel?
Guests included Tom Gilroy, Peter Mattai, Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, Jem Cohen, Norman Spinrad, Debra Eisenstadt, Josh Gilbert, Nelson Cabrera, Pedro Carvajal, Signe Baumane, Jonthan Stern, Robert Milazzo, Michael Badalucco, Joe Maggio, The Zuvuya Collective, Avram Ludwig, Ian Olds, Ira Sachs, Scott Saunders, and Tony Torn, Kim Jackson, and Alix Lambert. Every single conversation they inspired was a success because the films they brought are off the beaten path and worthy of our time. We screened AMERICAN JOB, SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR, BONE, BLOOD OF THE BEASTS and PSYCH-OUT, DAY OF THE LOCUSTS, “Films Rescued from Fire (of Chilian censors)”, TOGETHER (TILLSAMMANS), SECUESTRO EXPRESS, SEVENTEEN, TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942 version), MICKY AND MAUDE, 13 TSAMETI, and “A Short Film About Killing” from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s DEKALOG,VIVA ZAPATA!, COME AND SEE, PSYCHOSYMBIOTAXIPLASM, and SOMETHING LIKE HAPPINESS (Stesti), F IS FOR FAKE, and DEATH BY HANGING.
Many of our conversations took us out of the theater and into nearby bars and restaurants — As attendees of any experience, our schedules have become more programed, our plans more specific to what we think we want or don’t want. Speakeasy Cinema returns becuase movies were also meant to be enjoyed as an intellectual and emotional surprise and with friends, lovers, family members, dates, strangers or even someone else’s teenager.
Speakeasy Cinema has a few rules:
1) our guests bring a film and no one one knows what it is until the lights dim
2) the film can’t be a film the guests have worked on, only a film they love or hate, think is important, inspiring and want to talk about
3) after the film, the audiences and the filmmakers share their experiences watching the film. We talk about ART.
4) industry talk is verboten!
5) we can drink in this theater, so bring a bottle – we provide the corkscrew
6) we do it the third Sunday evening of each month
7) we don’t don’t show documentaries, whatever documentaries are
8) no audio or video records of what went down. What’s spoken about at Speakeasy Cinema LE stays at Speakeasy Cinema. END OF STORY.
As with any list, if you prefer to be removed, please let me know at firewalkfilm@earthlink.net
Thanks…
Matt
TORN PAGE 