Cornell Cinema welcomes filmmaker Marc Singer at a screening of his documentary "Dark Days," winner of the Grand Jury's cinematography award and the Audience Award at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Singer will introduce the film and discuss his experiences filming the lives of the homeless who inhabit the train tunnels underneath New York City on Saturday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. Admission is $4.50 general/$4 students and seniors.
When 21-year-old Singer came to New York in 1994 from London to start a modeling career, he never expected to spend the next six years of his life beneath the city with the crack addicts, the mentally ill and the simply unlucky people whose only homes were makeshift shacks in Amtrak tunnels. Singer was so moved by his encounters with the underground homeless that he moved below himself. A suggestion from one of the tunnel dwellers spurred Singer to start making "Dark Days," although he had no film experience. He trained a crew of the homeless to work with him and went deeply into debt to make a documentary that Rolling Stone called "a film of staggering force."
The screening of "Dark Days" is held in conjunction with the annual Sleepout Against Homelessness, organized by the Cornell Coalition for the Homeless (see Briefs).
Experimental filmmaker Robert Beavers will visit campus Tuesday, April 24, at 7:30 p.m. in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts Film Forum. Admission is $3.
Beavers will screen a few films during his Cornell visit, including "From the Notebook of," considered his most masterful work of structural harmony, binary oppositions and self-reflexive form. The title refers to Leonardo da Vinci's notebook and to the filmmaker's own written observations on filmmaking techniques that appear on screen as journal entries.
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