Shirley Clarke | 1967 | 35mm

Co-Presented with Fairytales Presentation Society 

On the night of December 2, 1966, Clarke and a tiny crew convened in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea to make a film. There, for twelve straight hours they filmed the one-and-only Jason Holliday as he spun tales, sang, donned costumes and reminisced about good times and bad behavior as a gay hustler, sometime houseboy and aspiring cabaret performer. The result is a mesmerizing portrait of a remarkable, charming and tortured man, who is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. Fairytales Presentation Society (best known for Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival) is our community partner - scroll down to learn more about them.  Visit MILESTONE FILM

Biography - Shirley Clarke

Born October 2, 1919 in New York, Shirley Brimberg Clarke danced into the world of art in her teens, studying with such innovative choreographers as Martha Graham, Hanya Holm and Doris Humphrey. 

After marrying and having a daughter, Clarke turned her talents to cinema, becoming an esteemed filmmaker at a time when few women worked in the field. Her early shorts reflected her lifelong love of dance along with a growing mastery of the new medium. In her award-winning A Dance in the Sun (1953), In Paris Parks (1954), Bullfight (1955) and A Moment in Love (1957), Clarke captured movement on film in a new way, eschewing close-ups in favor of long takes and innovative editing. An active member and advocate of New York’s independent film community, Clarke later turned her attention to social-issue filmmaking. 

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Fairytales Presentation Society is a not-for-profit, charitable organization located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, focusing on celebrating local and national queer artists of all artistic mediums including but not limited to film. Our artistic endeavors strive to provide a safe and respectful venue for members of all communities to celebrate queer culture. Activities include: the annual annual Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival, OUTReels Diversity Education Program and Youth Queer Media Program. 

Charles Burnett | 1983 | 80 MIN

My Brother's Wedding is a tragic comedy that takes place in South Central Los Angeles. The story focuses on a young man who hasn't made much of his life as of yet and has a distinct romantic notion about life in the ghetto. In spite of his naive sensitivity, he is given the task of being his brother's keeper, while he struggles with his emotions impairing his capacity for making sound decisions. This brings about circumstances that weave themselves into a set of complexities which Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), the main character, desperately tries to avoid. 

Biography - Charles Burnett

Born in Mississippi in 1944, Charles Burnett is an African-American film director and actor. Burnett studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, and began filming Killer of Sheep (1977) as a student. He was awarded a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation in 1988, which allowed him to make To Sleep with Anger (1990), starring Danny Glover. More recent works include 2007's Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation.

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Part of our Monday Night Movies partnership with Theatre Junction 

Kent MacKenzie | 1961 | 

Charles Burnett and Sherman Alexie present Kent Mackenzie's American Indie classic THE EXILES, a Milestone Films release. A story of American Indians eking out a living in the long-lost community of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles, the film premieres July 11, 2008 at New York's IFC Center. VISIT THE WEBSITE

Born to an American father and an English mother in Hampstead, London, England on April 6, 1930, Kent Mackenzie first attended an English public school, The Hall, where he had "the-old-school-tie" upbringing. His father, Dewitt Mackenzie, was the head of the London Bureau of the Associated Press during the 1930's. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Dewitt Mackenzie settled in New York as a Foreign News Analyst for AP. After being shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic five times before he was nine years old, Kent settled into grammar school in Bronxville, NY. He completed his high school education at Bronxville High, and matriculated to Dartmouth College in the fall of 1947.

At Dartmouth, Kent majored in English Literature and found his interest in motion pictures stimulated by a professor of English Drama, Benfield Pressey, who had recently spent a summer in Hollywood watching films in production. Pressey initiated a course in film writing at the college, which Kent attended.

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Conrad Rooks | 1966  | USA | 82 min

The hypnotic, psychedelic 1966 cult film written, directed by and starring Conrad Rooks was based on Rooks’ own experiences with drug addiction and his reaffirmation of life while visiting Switzerland. The film depicts its namesake, Chappaqua, New York as a sleepy hamlet in Westchester County, symbolic of drug-free suburban childhood innocence as well as one of the film’s references to Native American culture. (The name Chappaqua derives from the Wappinger Algonquian people and translates to ‘laurel swamp.’)

Lionel Rogosin | 1956 | USA | 65 Min

ON THE BOWERY chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row, the Bowery. When the film first opened it 1956, it exploded on the screen, burning away years of Hollywood artifice, jump-starting the post-war American independent scene and earning an Oscar nomination. Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna, ON THE BOWERY is simultaneously an incredible document of a bygone era and a vivid and devastating portrait of addiction that resonates today just as it did when it was made.

Exploring the underworld of the city’s skid row, Rogosin developed his signature style. After months drinking with men he met on the Bowery, Rogosin worked with them to write a screenplay that reflected their lives and then cast his drinking buddies as themselves