*Online Ticketing is closed. Tickets will be available at the door for $13, cash only*
Friday, July 19
On the rooftops of Industry City
220 36th Street (Sunset Park, Brooklyn)
8:00PM: Doors open
8:30PM: Live music
9:00PM: Film
11:00PM-12:30AM: After-party
Real sex, offensive slam poets, and a naked film editor add to the director’s journey for egoless self-identity in this home movie-style portrait of lilting self-loathing.
(Joanna Arnow | 56 min.) A lot of documentary filmmakers think they are interesting subjects, turning the camera on themselves. Joanna Arnow does not think she is an interesting subject. So lacking in confidence that her personality borders on self-loathing, she perpetually puts herself in a position of pain and judgment. But Arnow finds solace behind the camera, and with this film sets out to discover why she is the way she is.
The 20-something filmmaker here documents herself through the reactions of those around her: her parents, who are blunt yet loving; her friends, disembodied voices on the phone, adamantly giving advice; the editor of her film, a pushy nude Freud with a ‘fro; and the film’s antagonist, Arnow’s sort-of-boyfriend, a “performance artist” out to offend, drinking heavily and hovering just above derelict. Through her associates’ viewpoints, she reveals a raw and honest portrait of twenty-something Brooklyn malaise and the pathos that fuels it.
Arnow’s debut feature (her short film “Month One” screened at Rooftop in 2012) voices a self-depiction that is shockingly candid, compared to the banal over-sharing of most social media personal documentation, or to the carefully-crafted faux openness of celebrities. Intentionally eschewing a smooth narrative or glossy production, with Arnow’s defiant spirit she artfully compiles her experiences into a journey down the winding paths she is forging within the rickety world around her.
Following in Rooftop’s tradition of screening films about real lives, this gritty home movie portraiture exposes even the most unbecoming moments, times most of us want to forget. Arnow’s depredations become so abject as to be comical, and as a viewer, you are made uncomfortable, but you’re rooting for her. You wish for her sake that she could take control of the relationships between subject and director, victim and perpetrator, but she’s unable. i hate myself :) is a grotesque exercise in existential crisis, but made with a smirk, asking us all to define just how much control we have in our own lives.
- Donna K.
