Offsite
Maria Hernandez Park
Handball Court
Brooklyn, NY 11237
- This event has passed.
May 15, 2025 at 7:30 pm
POSTPONED – Rewind & Play
Free Outdoor Screening at Maria Hernandez Park
Due to some uncertain weather forecasts – we postponed this program. NEW DATE coming soon.
UnionDocs is headed outside for May and June to take advantage of one of our favorite city offerings: the ready-made cinemas of the handball courts in our public parks. It’s a long-standing UNDO tradition to project bold visions, reflections, and possibilities onto the walls of the city’s handball courts, transforming them into open-air theaters. This summer, we’re thrilled to continue that tradition with a slate of programs that are free and open to all.
For our first program of the season, we’re thinking about the ways music carries both personal and collective histories—how it holds space for grief, for joy, for transcendence. This program presents a spiritually resonant film that honors an artist who reimagined the possibilities of sound, and who challenged the structures—musical, social, and otherwise—that sought to contain him.
Rewind & Play by Alain Gomis excavates archival footage of Thelonious Monk in a 1969 French TV interview, laying bare the tensions between artistic brilliance and the violence of cultural misrecognition. Exposing the disconnect between Monk and his interviewer—whose patronizing tone and blinkered questions reveal the limiting frameworks through which Black musicians have so often been filtered. The film resists the polished veneer of legacy and offers instead a sharp, intimate portrait of a genius navigating an industry that too rarely met him on his own terms.
These film doesn’t just revisit the past—it activate its, asking us to tune in more deeply to what’s been recorded, and what’s been left out. It reminds us that sound is a record of presence: of who was there, of what was felt, of what still echoes.
As a super special opening act, we’re delighted to partner with the incredible folks at Cafe Erzulie to set the tone with some live music to kick things off!
This event is free and open to all, inviting the UNDO community, our neighbors, passersby, film lovers, and anyone curious to join for a festive evening under the stars, come through!
Special thanks to Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez and her office for their generous support in making these outdoor screenings possible!
Program
Rewind & Play by Alain Gomis
65 min, 2022
In December 1969, legendary jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk ended his European concert tour with a performance at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Before the show, he was invited to appear on a French television program to perform and answer questions in an intimate setting. Using newly discovered footage from this recording, director Alain Gomis (FÉLICITÉ) reveals the disconnect between Monk and his interviewer, Henri Renaud, whose unwittingly trivializing approach conveys the casual racism and exploitation prevalent in the music industry at large. A fascinating behind-the-scenes documentary with extraordinary rarely-seen performances, REWIND & PLAY offers a unique opportunity to see Monk in a way that very few people did.
Bios
Alain Gomis is an award-winning French-Senegalese filmmaker whose work has been shown at major international festivals. In 2002, his first film, “As a Man,” on the struggles of migrants in France, won the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. His next films (“Andalucia” in 2007 and “Today” in 2011) were shown at the Venice Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival. His latest film, “Félicité”, was awarded the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and won Gomis his second FESPACO Golden Stallion. He is currently working on a fiction film loosely based on American jazz legend Thelonious Monk.
Presented With
