“It’s interesting, more filmmakers this year are asking for laurels,” says Sam Fleischner when we spoke just a few days before the opening of the seventh annual Rockaway Film Festival. Fleischner’s the festival’s co-founder and artistic director, Courtney Muller is co-founder and program director, and the two, along with their small team, have grown the festival to the point where the schedule boasts more premieres, U.S. and world, than ever and, with that growth, directors wanting to add the Rockaway selection to their posters and websites. 

“We never wanted to make a laurel,” admits Fleischner. “So it was like, alright, if we’re going to make a laurel, what is our laurel? We made one that’s a version of a native weed out here called Goldenrod with the roots in it that I really liked, but Courtney vetoed it.” The two “ended up doing some version of our logo, but making it our own thing that we feel good about,” says Fleischner.  “[The process has been a funny little microcosm of what growth means for a film festival.”

“Every year, it seems like we just get bigger and bigger and have greater and greater expectations of the films that we would like to see,” Muller says. “This year’s is an ambitious program — more premieres than we’ve ever done. We don’t necessarily place a huge emphasis on premiere status, but it is exciting to show films that no one has discovered yet and to see them in a sequence, among other films that are maybe a couple of years old, or maybe they’re quite old and could use a second look because they’re a gem that has been a bit lost.”

The 2024 edition of the Queens, New York festival taking place on the Rockaway peninsula begins tomorrow, August 17, with a “bio-art workshop” led by Karen Ingram (“living artworks” created by participants “from gene edited microbes in Petri dishes” will be photographed and included in an installation during the festival’s final days), a shorts program, a concert by the trio of Tim Keiper, Brian Marsell and Kaoru Watanabe, and then a 50th anniversary screening of Wim Wenders’s resplendent road movie Alice in the Cities, which begins with a sequence shot on the Rockaway boardwalk as a jet plane flies overhead. Over the following eight days there are many more screenings as well as gallery installations, an animation workshop and a program for “kid cinephiles” hosted by Light Industry.

Two films illustrative of the “the meta genre of films about filmmaking” screen also on the first weekend, notes Fleischner. On Sunday, April 18, legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman will be present for a screening of his 1985 documentary, Report from Hollywood, which is a behind the scenes account of the making of Wim Wenders’s The State of Things. Director and D.P. Sean Price Williams (The Sweet East) will moderate the post-screening Q&A with Lachman, after which Rockaway will screen Zia Anger’s forthcoming MUBI release, My First Film — “three layers of a movie within a movie within a movie” and “a particularly brave and original take” on this sub-genre, says Fleischner. With My First Film d.p. Ashley Connor attending, the day boasts talks with three generations of legendary New York cinematographers.

Among these titles are the world premiere of Baltimore-based filmmaker Corey Hughes’s new film, Your Final Meditation, which Muller describes as “very psychedelic — it looks at virtual space as a place of potential transcendence amidst the world of anxiety that we are all living in.” There’s also the U.S. premiere of Nele Wohlatz’s Brazil-set Sleep With Your Eyes Open, described as “a fresh and clever comedy of misunderstandings,” and As the Tide Comes In, another U.S. premiere, which is one of several Rockaway films that deal with flooding — “obviously a relevant theme around the world,” says Fleischner. Juan Palacios & Sofie Husum Johannesen’s 2023 film is, he says, “a really cool documentary shot on the northern part of Denmark, where there’s this piece of land that becomes an island at high tide that’s becoming more and more stranded, especially if there’s a longer high tide or a storm. And before that there’s the Congolese film, Rising Up at Night, which is about a village that’s downstream of a river that the town is totally flooded. They’re  living in their kitchens in waist-deep water and going about their lives and discussing what they’re going to have to do to get electricity and deal with the flooding.”

Fleischner’s own film, Jetty, “about the infrastructure work being done in Rockaway to hold back potential flooding in case of a storm event,” will also screen. “It’s very much just a process film — an industrial film of sorts,” he says. “I shot it on 16-millimeter and really followed, as best I could, the process over the course of a couple of years of building these things. This is really the place that I made the movie to show it, so it also feels like a site-specific film in a way.”

New this year are aspects of Rockaway’s physical set-up. For the last four years based out of the Arverne Cinema, Rockaway adds in 2024 a pop-up at the former brewery located next door. And the festival’s Annex Cinema will be used in a new way, as the site of a multi-screen installation from Jamil McGinnis and Pat Heywood consisting of footage shot for their forthcoming feature. Entitled Waking Up (For the First Time), the installation “explore[s]practices of spirituality and reflect[s] on meaning-making with reverence for the quotidian observations that make up our ordinary lives.” 

Says Muller, “[Jamil] was sending us footage of the things that he’d shot and wanting feedback. We were talking [and said], ‘Well, what would happen if we just looked at this footage as an installation? Would it change the way you’re going into the second half of the shoot? Would it change the way that you’re thinking about the film?’ And so giving them free rein to do whatever they wanted in the back of the Annex Cinema has been super cool and really energizing.”

Another special event is the closing night film, the rarely screened Gabriel, by the painter Agnes Martin. “She was an artist deeply concerned with the natural world and innocence,” says Muller, “and I think that screening it in this setting, in this outdoor setting, will be magical. And we’re so grateful to have received permission from her estate to show the film with a live score performed by Rockaway Chamber Music, which is an incredible initiative that was started by a cellist who lives out here, Emily Broussa.”

About the festival’s audience, Muller says it’s part attendees traveling from the inner boroughs and Rockaway natives. “Rockaway is a peninsula that has a lot of really different neighborhoods that are siloed.” Over the years, she says, “It’s been pretty amazing to see a ton of people come out with a lot of enthusiasm to see the whole gamut of films, from new premieres, from emerging filmmakers, to older stuff, and also more challenging art films. There’s a real appetite for that in Rockaway, which is a unique and special place. I don’t think there’s many places that you can see films with sand under your feet, but you’re in New York City, and perhaps a plane will fly overhead. And maybe it makes sense because you’re watching Alice in the Cities!”

The Rockaway Film Festival runs August 17 – 25. For a complete calendar and ticket information, visit the website.