The Rockaway Film Festival returns for its eighth year to coastal New York City — that’s Rockaway Beach if you’re unfamiliar — with a lineup of al fresco screenings and musical performances. IndieWire shares details exclusively below ahead of the event taking place August 20-24.
Highlights include the East Coast premiere of Hailey Gates’ war satire “Atropia,” starring Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner, and winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in this year’s Dramatic competition. (Luca Guadagnino also counts among the film’s producers). Xander Robin’s SXSW Special Jury Award-winning documentary “The Python Hunt,” produced by Lance Oppenheimer, also comes to Rockaway. The eccentric nonfiction film follows a crew of amateur snake hunters over 10 days in the Florida Everglades.
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The Rockaway Film Festival will also screen stop-motion animation icons the Quay Brothers’ latest film, “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” their first feature in 20 years. Other films include the North American premiere of Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner’s new restoration of “In the White City,” a 1983 film aptly, for this festival, that follows a mariner. A collection of William Wegman shorts for all ages, meanwhile, showcases the artist’s canine collaborators, many of whom eventually appeared on series like “Sesame Street.”
This year’s edition concludes with two of Paul Clipson’s rarely screened works in 16mm with live music by his close collaborator Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. The San Francisco experimental filmmaker, who died in 2018, was best known for creating sensory cascades of double exposures that meld light and color.
Rockaway Film Festival is organized by co-directors Sam Fleischner, Courtney Muller, and Kathy Del Beccaro, and is proud to be sponsored by Istic Illic Pictures, NYC Ferry, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr.
Courtney Muller, program director said, “We view our festival as a complete, continuous sequence where one program flows into the next and this year we took inspiration from stories of renewal where endings become beginnings.”
Sam Fleischner, artistic director added, “I’m excited by the films in our program that explore new techniques and forecast future directions of the movie medium by shattering perceptions of artifice.”
Kathy Del Beccaro, managing director added, “The films in this year’s program feel like true discoveries from around the world, and I can’t wait for our audience to find something new in their dialogue.”
Rockaway Film Festival is a 501c3 non-profit that presents film and other programming year-round at the Arverne Cinema, an outdoor space that expanded in 2024 to include a scond, indoor theater.
For more information and the full schedule, visit the Rockaway Film Festival website.
