Free Screening of Twelve Ways to Sunday

When:Friday September 24, 2010
Time:9pm
Where:Solar One
23rd  Street and the East River
Manhattan, NY
Cost:Free

From Rooftop Films:

Come out and join Rooftop Films as they screen the documentary Twelve Ways To Sunday. “From the diner counters, church pews and backwoods of rural New York comes a collection of testimonies about the quiet struggle of a small community.”

9:15  Film Begins
10:20 Filmmaker Q and A
10:30 After Party with Free Radeberger Pilsner

TWELVE WAYS TO SUNDAY (Anna Farrell | Allegany County, NY | 65 min.)

World Premiere! Amid a rural landscape and disappearing communities, the residents of Allegany County, NY are living the working-class American story. This luscious and intimate cinematic portrait captures the testimonies of life in these small towns.

The personalities featured in Twelve Ways to Sunday, affecting a combination of simplicity and self-reliance, demonstrate that who we are is often unrelated to how we earn a paycheck. As the film travels from diner counters to church pews, from living rooms to the backwoods, a cast of colorful characters emerges. We meet Mary, a traveling teacher who cans her own food; Ken, a pastor who also makes and sells candy; John and Rita, a pair of motorcycle- and tattoo-enthusiasts; a grizzled truck driver, a hopeful elementary school principal, a homesteader, a waitress, a shepherd, a hunter, and the local quilting ladies.

While Americans elsewhere endure hardships brought on by the current economic downswing, and are forced to re-consider their value systems, this rural community has long understood what it means to find happiness, humbly and patiently, in the everyday. As we meander through the town, the film asks its audience to see, not the deprivation inherent here, but how these subjects each thrive in their own ways. The riches that we find here are simply of a different kind of wealth: a shared conversation, self-reliance, a pie on the windowsill, a snowstorm, the silence of the woods, an open road.

Featuring lush but stark photography and a delicately enticing score, Anna Farrell has crafted a film that reflects its subjects perfectly: plain-spoken but rich in ideas, straightforward but full of nuanced stories and characters. Farrell approaches the locals with a careful distance–rarely moving the camera, letting the small-town rhythm flow naturally–allowing the viewer to settle comfortably in like a new resident. As the film progresses the characters open up, with tales and anecdotes that are more comic and more intimate, more touching and more hopeful. Twelve Ways to Sunday reflects Rooftop Films’ populist spirit and do-it-yourself attitude, demonstrating the powerful beauty that comes from studying an oft-overlooked community.

Anna Farrell was a 2009 IFP Documentary Lab Fellow with Twelve Ways to Sunday, so a sneak peak of her film first screened for the public at the Rooftop Films / IFP Lab Selections screening last year.