New York City’s Hi-ARTS launches the inaugural Outdoor Film Festival, which kicks off on July 6 as part of the Festival of New York, and runs through July 8.
The Outdoor Film Festival consists of a series of interactive workshops and film screenings set in open spaces and nature in East Harlem. With each day given a thematic focal point, the festival is centered around intergenerational healing as it relates to Black and BIPOC communities living in Harlem and across New York City. The festival will take place in both the outdoor gardens of George Washington Houses, a New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) public housing development, and El Barrio’s Artspace, home of Hi-ARTS.
“The Outdoor Film Festival is not only an opportunity to showcase Hi-ARTS’ incredible artists, but also welcomes our audiences, artists and immediate neighbors into a shared space while centering topics of healing and community-building. We’re committed to offering experiences that reflect and engage our communities, especially in times of unrest, trauma and uncertainty,” said Aaron L. McKinney, Executive Director of Hi-ARTS.
The Outdoor Film Festival kicks off on Wednesday, July 6, in the Peaceful Antilles Garden at George Washington Houses (East 99th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues) with Taking Root ‘n’ Talking Roots, and will include a series of two interactive workshops led by Hakim Pitts, artist and Associate Producer of the BlackStar Film Festival award-winning documentary In Our Mothers’ Gardens featuring Tarana Burke.
The festival continues on Thursday, July 7, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. ET with The Gardens We Tend. The event will include the sharing of two work-in-progress films: GODSPEED: A Story from the Black Future by Celia C. Peters and I DIGRESS: The Intimate Insights of a Childhood Weirdo by Sauda Aziza Jackson and April Sweeney. The evening includes two short films by Hi-ARTS residency alumni: (construct)Clearing by Tanika I. Williams and What does PURPLE sound like? by Sydnie L. Mosley Dances (SLMDances). The Gardens We Tend will take place at George Washington Houses’ Community Circle Stage platform.
An Afrofuturist sci-fi feature film set in the near future, GODSPEED features a brilliant tech editor plagued by terrifying psychological symptoms, who refuses to believe the revelation that she’s not human — and that the only cure that will save her is on another world.
I DIGRESS: The Intimate Insights of a Childhood Weirdo is a four-episode, transmedia performance memoir exploring the weight of inheritance and the recollection of memories and material things once lost to time. The film weaves together 15 personal tales from Jackson’s childhood with the media and memorabilia that defined her past.
(construct)Clearing is a meditation on quiet care, intention, intergenerational movement and labor. The film seeks to understand how we wear and repeat family patterns of silence and separation. The work speaks to the experience of migration — moving from country to town, across countries, across towns — and seeks to present the pain around the unspoken suffering experienced during the separation of a caregiver and their charge.
What does PURPLE sound like? captures the radical joy in a place — public housing communities in New York City — via the stories of decades-long residents to uncover strategies of resilience, amplify cultural traditions and shift public discourse and policy.
Williams and SLMDances are Hi-ARTS CRITICAL BREAKS and SKY LAB alumni. The CRITICAL BREAKS residency provides an intensive development process, rehearsal space and a public offering (performance, experience or showing) of their choice to artists in a pivotal phase of creating new work. The SKY LAB is a program that supports socially engaged artists who center community in the development and research of their work, including practitioners who create outside of the traditional studio or theater.
The festival concludes on Friday, July 8, with a screening of In Our Mothers’ Gardens on the front lawn of El Barrio’s Artspace PS109. The evening of film under the stars at Hi-ARTS will begin at 7 p.m. with a community circle and pre-screening discussion centered around themes in the film In Our Mothers’ Gardens. The critically acclaimed new documentary forefronts Black women from across the globe as they unlock stories of their mothers to redefine holistic lives rooted in radical self-care and healing.
The festival is being presented in partnership with George Washington Houses’ 1809 Resident Watch with the support of the Maysles Documentary Center.