Get yourselves over to Barbes in Park Slope tonight at 7pm for the latest installment of Joe Pacheco’s Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series. Tonight brings two New York City premieres, including (descriptions have been taken from the Brooklyn Independent website):
Lost World (Gyula Nemes, 20 min., Hungary, 2008)
The life, demolition and reconstruction of the Kopaszi dam between 1998 and 2007. A mostly black & white 35mm documentary shot over ten years in a forgotten landscape in the center of Budapest. People living in houseboats and wooden houses, struggling against flood, snow and investors who want them to evict. The second part of The Dike of Transience.
Seaview (Paul Rowley and Nicky Gogan, 82 min., Ireland, 2007)
An hour north of Dublin beside the sea is a bizarre looking collection of grey cement buildings with brightly painted doors, and rusting fairground rides. This is Mosney - Ireland’s Coney Island. A former Butlin’s holiday camp, Mosney was once a world fully equipped for entertainment, with arcades, fairground rides, holiday chalets. It was a place where Irish families would escape the daily grind of work in order to relax, to dance, enjoy themselves.
A visit to Mosney today presents a radically different picture, but still a picture of escape. This former holiday camp is now a camp of another kind, a holding center for asylum seekers from all corners of the globe. Here new residents wait years for the results of their asylum claims.
Over three years, the filmmakers lived in Mosney, gaining the trust of the residents. Intensely close conversations reveal their individual stories, from the epic to the everyday. From Congo, Kurdistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Sri Lanka, we hear why people are forced to leave everything they have and move to a country where they are total strangers. And we learn of the trauma of waiting – living in fear in this bizarre no-mans-land.
