Cinema Arts Centre is partnering with Long Island Traditions, and the Plaza Cinema and Media Arts Center in Patchogue to host a two-month-long Maritime Film Festival.
The series, which starts March 15, examines Long Island’s coastal culture. The screening of the documentary film “A World Within a World: Long Island Bay Houses” will lead off the festival.
The movie depicts the lives, history, and experiences of bay house owners in Hempstead from both a historical and contemporary perspective. Based on fieldwork by folklorist and maritime ethnographer Nancy Solomon of Long Island Traditions, filmmakers Barbara Weber and Greg Blank detail how bay house owners have endured through severe storms and hurricanes as well as eroding marshlands.
The film will have an encore screening at The Plaza Cinema in Patchogue on Tuesday March 31 and on Saturday, April 4th. A Q&A and discussion with the filmmakers and Solomon will follow both screenings.
Other highlights of the festival include:
- A screening of the 2006 narrative film, Diggers, starring Paul Rudd as a Long Island clam digger in the 1970’s at The Plaza Cinema on Saturday, April 18.
- The documentary film, Maiden, tells the story of Tracy Edwards, a 24-year-old woman who creates an all-female crew (including Long Islander, Dawn Riley) to compete in the Whitbread Round the World Race, a yacht race that covered 33,000 miles and lasted for nine months in 1989. A Q&A with Ms. Riley, now the director of the Oakcliff Sailing School in Oyster Bay, will follow the screening on Sunday, April 26 at Cinema Arts Centre.
- Charlotte, a documentary film about a boatyard, the Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway, located on Martha’s Vineyard. A Q&A with special guest Kevin Weeks of “Weeks Boat Yard” in Patchogue will follow the screening on Tuesday, April 28th at The Plaza.
- The festival will close on Sunday May 3 at Cinema Arts Centre with a screening of “The Bungalows of Far Rockaway” produced by Jennifer Callahan in 2010. Narrated by Academy-Award winner Estelle Parsons, the film examines the historic bungalows of the Far Rockaways that were built by local architects including Henry Hohauser.
Tickets for the individual films may be purchased through the venue’s website and box office Cinema Arts Centre: www.cinemaartscentre.org | Plaza Cinema: www.plazamac.org
The festival is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Lion Gardiner Foundation.