To celebrate the premiere of Slow Machine at New York Film Festival, UnionDocs is excited to host co-directors Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo to the LEAN-TO to share some inspiration and a conversation with critic / writer / programmer Steve Macfarlane.

Join us Friday, for an extra special screening of Luis Lopez Carrasco’s El Futuro (2013). We’ll be looking closely at what Carrasco describes as a documentary view “which feeds on the present but connects with a very recent yesterday which has been quickly buried. A popular, choral fresco which occurs in another time but resembles the present time too much, as if we lived in an anachronistic limbo, a closed area which does not cease to happen. The past and the present are recorded in a circular time dimension  which feeds on itself.”

Selected by Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo in celebration of their latest described by NYFF as “deftly lensed in 16mm and unfurling as a digressive, tantalizingly off-kilter mystery, Slow Machine is a fascinating work pitched at the intersection of American independent cinema and the avant-garde theater of Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group.“

Seats are limited and socially-distanced in the LEAN-TO and sold by pods for 2 or 3 people. If you want to attend in a group of three please purchase 1 seat for 2, and write us to add a third person to your group.

This feature debut by López Carrasco is set at a party in 1982 on the eve of the election that was to give Socialist leader Felipe González an absolute majority. We hear a radio report in which he announces his plans for the future: defence of the (still young) democracy, conquering the economic crisis and strengthening the unity of Spain.

At the party that, as El Pais put it, ‘lasted so long that 30 years passed before daylight came back,’ twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings talk animatedly about relationships, drugs, horoscopes, the ETA, etc. Meanwhile, very cool Spanish new-wave music is playing.

Paul Felten is a filmmaker and screenwriter. He was born and raised in Reno, Nevada. He is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied Film and has been mostly active as a screenwriter, having written or co-written titles such as Bomb and Francophrenia (Or, Don’t Kill Me I Know Where the Baby Is). Felten is also the former director of Olympia Film Festival and was a participant in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Slow Machine is his first feature film as co-director.

Joe DeNardo (1979, USA) is a filmmaker, cinematographer, musician and photographer. He has been a member of the punk group Growing for 13 years and also works as a solo artist. He has directed and photographed several shorts and music films, and a retrospective dedicated to his work was presented at UnionDocs in New York in 2014. Slow Machine is his first feature film.