Rockaway 2025

“The first feature film in nearly twenty years from cult animators the Quay Brothers runs just seventy-six minutes,” noted Guy Lodge in Variety last fall, “though in the process of watching it, it feels both infinitely longer than that and over in the blink of an eye, like a dream of epic proportions that you forget seconds after waking. This dark, densely nested fairytale of life, deaths, and what comes in between is inspired by the writings of Polish literary titan Bruno Schulz, but with entirely its own collapsing, free-form model of storytelling—driven less by logic than intuitive feeling and ambience.”

For the evening, artist Lilli Carré has curated a program of short animated films created on paper, and she’ll discuss these works with the makers of three of them, Nora Rodriguez, Jodie Mack, and Kathryn Roake. Thursday begins with more short films followed by the North American premiere of Max Carlo Kohal’s Freight (2024), the story of the young crew on a cargo ship traveling the Rhine from Basel to Rotterdam. Shot over four years, Freight begins when Rudmer, who dreams of becoming a captain, is sixteen, and for Michael Sennhauser, there’s “lyrical sovereignty” in Kohal’s work.

Bruno Ganz plays a sailor who abandons his ocean tanker to explore Lisbon in In the White City. “What gives this 1983 Swiss film its authenticity and powerful moodiness,” wrote Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader at the time, “is perhaps the fact that the director, Alain Tanner, has followed the course of his own protagonist, cutting himself off from a planned scenario and allowing the shape of the city to dictate the incidents of his drama. Temperamentally it’s like no other Tanner film (at times, it suggests the work of Wim Wenders), but it has all his rigor and visual acuteness.” Rockaway will host the North American premiere of a new restoration.

Friday brings Xander Robin’s The Python Hunt, which captures the scene at the Florida Python Challenge, a contest that draws about a thousand people a year to compete for a $10,000 prize while tackling the state’s invasive species problem. When The Python Hunt premiered at SXSW, the Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg called it “a wild and generally empathetic journey into the swamp of the American soul.”

On Saturday, Yoel Morales’s Bionico’s Bachata, a playful story of love and addiction that won an Audience Award at SXSW, will be followed by Hailey Gates’s Atropia, the winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance. Alia Shawkat stars as an aspiring actor playing an Iraqi citizen in a fake town where the American military trains recruits. “Atropia makes for a twisted funhouse mirror that reflects the authentic American character,” writes Marshall Shaffer at the Playlist, “implicating all and sparing none for participating in a mass national delusion.”

Kids are encouraged to come to the Sunday morning screening of a program of shorts by William Wegman, some of them previously shown on Sesame Street, others rarely screened anywhere, and all of them starring his beloved Weimaraner dogs. Another of the day’s highlights will be a work in progress by James N. Kienitz Wilkins called Under Construction, which reunites him with the team behind The Plagiarists (2019). This year’s edition will then wrap with two works by filmmaker and artist Paul Clipson accompanied by live music from his close collaborator Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.