What Rockaway Film Festival Can Teach Us About Going to the Movies

Despite its endless appetite for novelty, New York City really is a creature of recursion. Memories never remain too far behind, or rather, too far ahead, before they’re back again wearing a familiar form. One of the city’s finest resurrections in recent memory is moviegoing in the Rockaways. Like the millionaire colonies born of Gilded Age excesses or the Coney Island-rival Rockaways’ Playland that formerly occupied this area of coastal Queens, it’s a stretch of the imagination to conjure up the heyday of movie theaters by the beach.

Their near-absence on the peninsula today obscures the foreign era they once thrived in, a few golden decades that spanned from the 1920s to ‘50s earmarked by 25-cent tickets to double features, smoking-friendly cinemas, and faux tuxedoed attendants. A combination of factors ranging from demographic shifts following the Second World War to devastating building fires to general neighborhood decline led to the gradual shuttering of Rockaways’ theaters.

The last gasp came when Jerry Lewis Cinema closed its doors in 1996, and the Rockaways went without a commercial indoor theater for the next 25 years. The dry spell was finally broken in 2021 by the nonprofit Rockaway Film Festival organization, when it led the effort of building Arverne Cinema, now the only one of its kind. Ever since the festival itself started nine years ago—popping up screens in venues from Fort Tilden to Jacob Riis Park—hope for the return of moviegoing as a neighborhood pastime has abounded, as one might expect following any reported sighting post-extinction.

I arrive at this year’s Rockaway Film Festival

I arrive at this year’s Rockaway Film Festival (RFF9) in local uniform, with swim trunks donned beneath my work slacks and flip-flops afoot in case of any impromptu beach-going. With the day’s storms recently broken, the muggy summer air made way for a preview of the better days of fall to set the stage for an evening at the open-air movies. The outdoor cinema is wrapped by a rough-hewn Brutalist perimeter—half-lined with concrete cubes, the other half enclosed with planks salvaged from the boardwalk destroyed during Hurricane Sandy.

Filled with gravel and sand, it’s like we’re on the bottom of a riverbed with the constant stream of smooth-bellied airplanes taking off above us from the nearby JFK airport. The space certainly feels scrappier than the black-and-white photos of its predecessors. For one, the former Arverne Theater—once a venue for Yiddish acts from the Rockaways’ vibrant Jewish community—broadcasted itself with an outsized vertical marquee until its dismantling in 1952.

And the Arverne Pier Theater wore its neoclassical inspirations on its sleeve, complete with Corinthian columns and a half-round pediment. The main centerpiece of the cinema that stands today is its screen, and behind it, there’s not much in the way of scenery. Peeping over the horizon, tower cranes hover forever paused in their progress at the defunct concrete facility, leaning over with their trussed necks, a family of mechanical sauropods.

The warmth of the space only truly activates

The warmth of the space only truly activates once it’s brimming with people: within my earshot, some trade stories on their convoluted commutes to get here; others debate the ethics of documentary-making; but most exchange reports on what they’ve seen recently and the homework they’ve done on what’s about to screen. Though, those conversations might only apply to the crowd for the world premiere of Eternity One, a documentary from Baltimore-based filmmaker Marnie Ellen Hertzler regarding the precarity of Tangier Island, a remote island community in the Chesapeake Bay eroding from the climate crisis.

While the film is the first screening of the festival, it’s not necessarily indicative of the programming (or the crowds) to come. The exciting truth is that none of the films quite are, with the RFF9 lineup reading as an eclectic yet affordable menu. Tickets are capped at $10, and a handful of movies are even being shown for free to ensure that everyone who wants a seat can get one.

To name but a few of the movies showing, there’s the 1979 Muppets Movie (the one with “Rainbow Connection”), a generational crowd-pleaser sure to work its magic once again with young families in attendance; a collection of animated shorts themed around “Romantasy” for the old school Adult Swim crowd; and a Dabke dance workshop led by El Funoun, a traditional Palestinian dance company braiding celebration with resistance.

As the latter item suggests, there’s much more

As the latter item suggests, there’s much more to the festival than just what’s on screen. Most movies are paired with local live acts to fill the air as the crowd mills in or to keep the party going long after the projector shuts off. You might walk into one screening to the processional music of Brooklyn slacker prog and exit the next to a Roots reggae DJ set. Kyp Malone, in all his braid-bearded glory, plays before Eternity One, at times playfully directing us, “now pretend I’m a movie, and pay the fuck attention,” and later offering light conversation starters between straight-from-the-bottle sips of Casamigos like, “did you think fascism was going to feel different?”
One particularly inspired pairing comes from the combination of Ridgewood-based documentarian John Wilson’s first feature, The History of Concrete, with a set from Bellerose rapper Heems (of Das Racist fame for any lovers of combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bells).

Wilson’s whispering, Kermit-ish cadence juxtaposed with Heems’s audacious bars shorthands the borough’s rejection of one-size-fits-all characterization as one of the most diverse urban centers in the world. Tying a bow on the Queens-ness of it all is the al-fresco setting itself. This might be the one pocket of the city that does sleep. Call it the influence of the local surf culture, or the protected peace of the nearby nature reserves, but the Rockaways are just the kind of place made for prying sticks out of asses.

Take it from friendly neighborhood rockstar Patti Smith, who put it simply on her Substack: “Being at Rockaway Beach makes me happy.” It’s long ceased to be a neighborhood that puts on airs, an attitude that liberates us all tonight. Under the darkening sky, I’m oddly comforted by the couple next to me taking advantage of the shifting tenebrism for some drive-in-style PDA.

Tucked inside the cul-de-sac of a residential street

Tucked inside the cul-de-sac of a residential street off of Beach 67, Arverne Cinema is right at home amongst the two-story houses hosting their own celebrations, with one particularly passionate birthday party across the street beating out the volume of Hertzler’s Q&A. While the festival bounced around for its first few years, finding a permanent home in the community had always been the goal.

“There’s not much that’s like the joy of sharing a movie that you love very much in a space that was built by friends and neighbors with a full audience,” said RFF co-founder and organizer Courtney Muller, reflecting on the festival’s sixth year at Arverne Cinema. At the risk of sounding like another trite moral about the importance of social gathering post-pandemic, the Rockaway Film Festival is as much about movie-going as it is about movie-watching.

Thankfully, the act is not nearly as endangered as it was once reported to be, with chains like AMC boasting booming attendance numbers. But factors such as surging ticket prices and shorter gaps between theatrical runs and streaming releases contribute to the perception that going out to the movies is a luxury, and shrink crowds accordingly. That image is only bolstered by the glamorous superlatives we’ve come to expect from premiere film festivals around the world—the record-smashing standing ovations at Cannes, a bigger and better revamp of Sundance, the making or breaking of Oscar contenders at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Between the flimsy baskets of superb beach shack

Between the flimsy baskets of superb beach shack grub and seating reminiscent of a school play, the Rockaway Film Festival is doing the remedial work of bringing movies back to the people by reminding its attendees that a movie theater is not supposed to be a sarcophagus. My favorites in New York, and the ones I’d champion are worth traveling for, are all framed by their own signs of life, from the faint roar of the subways that rumbles through the Angelika to the shoulder-to-shoulder sardine can theaters of Film Forum (though one should never go so far as to condone cellphone use for QR code ordering at an Alamo Drafthouse).

That a film festival grows in the Rockaways after more than two decades without a single theater is a feat in its own right, and its longevity for the past nine years speaks to the simple human desire shared by cinephiles and curious locals alike that watching a good movie in a crowd of peers, perhaps even with your toes in the sand, should come at no exorbitant cost. “When this festival began as a four-day experiment in 2018, it was not just about showing movies—it was about saying clearly to this community that it deserves cinema,” shared Rafael Espinal, Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, to kick off the start of this year’s events, “Rockaway reminds us that cinema belongs everywhere in New York City, not just in the places where people expect them, but right here, by the beach with this community.”
In an interview with Hell Gate, Muller described the undercurrent of this year’s programming as the “stories of things coming apart” and what grows in the spaces left after collapse.

It might as well be the unofficial motto for the Rockaways, where surfers dropped everything to shovel out sunken homes after Hurricane Sandy, grassroots mutual aid networks opened their doors to displaced New Yorkers after 9/11, and neighbors came together to convert a vacant lot into a movie theater. RFF9 is an exemplary case study that the local flavor of the Rockaways is best appreciated up close.

I can’t write about what it was like

I can’t write about what it was like to taste the salt air seasoned with New York atmosphere and make the flavor materialize on your tongue. A high-budget documentary exclusive to the streaming platform that produced it can’t either. You might have to wait another year for the next festival, take the A train as far down as you’ve ever taken it, come early, and claim one of the beach chairs while you can to feel it for yourself, but the point is that you must.

How to Visit Rockaway Film Festival
This year’s festival runs from September 2-6, and while tickets to the remaining screenings have all sold out online, some have limited capacity for tickets sold at the door, and for others, you can sign up to be on a waitlist at the ticket stand before showtime. For the most up-to-date information on this year’s screenings, visit the programming page of the festival here.

As far as getting yourself to Arverne Cinema, you have a few options. You could take the Far Rockaway-bound A train to Beach 67 and walk eight minutes to the theater, ride the Q22 bus to the Rockaway Beach Blvd / Beach 73 St stop or the Beach Channel Dr / Beach 71 St stop (and connect to the bus from the LIRR Far Rockaway station), or ride the NYC Ferry, which by and large offers the most scenic views.

The festival’s website also hosts an extensive Rockaway guide with recommendations ranging from where to get your morning coffee to the best cannabis dispensary in town. Take full advantage of these expert recs by basing yourself directly in the Rockaways. For a weekend stay, the beachy sanctuary of the Rockaway Hotel is the way to go.

Source: www.cntraveler.com