Gotham Alumni on Screen: June 2025
by The Gotham Staff on June 17, 2025 in Alumni on Screen
Welcome to Alumni on Screen! To champion and signal-boost our Gotham-supported projects, at the top of each month we’ll have a rundown of alumni making their way into the world on screens both big and small.
IFC Theater | Monday, June 30 at 7 PM
Filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed in person with special guests
Filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed was only 18 months old when her mother, renowned journalist Sheila Turner Seed, unexpectedly passed away. Driven by a desire to uncover what she left behind, Seed embarks on a journey to meet with people whose lives were touched by her mother. Using audio and photographic archives from her mother’s career, A Photographic Memory is an investigation into the archive in search of remnants of a loved one, reconstructing their image in an attempt to get to know them. Sheila’s intimate interviews with famous photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Lisette Model and Bruce Davidson, among others, are brought to life via Rachel’s reimaginings, further immersing us into Sheila’s world as mother and daughter’s worlds merge in unexpected ways.
Directed by Rachel Elizabeth Seed
Gotham Alum: A Photographic Memory is an alum of the 2017 Project Market – Spotlight on Docs. It went on to screen at such festivals as True/False, Full Frame, Hot Docs, DOC NYC, Cleveland International, Chicago International, among many others.
Roxy Cinema | Saturday, June 21 at 9:30 PM
Rachel doesn’t realize she has grown up in captivity working for an advertising agency where her job is to assess Mommy 6.0, her favorite pop star in the whole entire world.
Directed by Peter Vack
Gotham Alum: www.rachelormont.com is an alum of the 2014 Project Market – Emerging Narrative. It had its world premiere at the 2024 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Roxy Cinema | Wednesday, June 25 at 7 PM
Filmmaker Q&A following screening.
In this surreal trip through history the world of queer body modification and its intersection with BDSM is brought to life with rich portraiture of an artist and his philosophy of a spirit-body connection. Merging oral history with 16mm abstraction and photographic meditation, A Body to Live In uses the life story and artworks of Fakir Musafar to guide us through pressing questions of belonging and the search for an authentic way of being.
Directed by Angelo Madsen
Gotham Alum: A Body to Live In is an alum of the 2022 Project Market – Spotlight on Docs. It had its world premiere at the 2024 True/False Film Festival and went on to play at BFI Flare, Ann Arbor, and Frameline.
Nitehawk Cinema | June 28 & 29 at 11 AM
Based on Jane Rule’s novel Desert of the Heart (1964) and screenwritten by Natalie Cooper, Donna Deitch’s luminous narrative feature debut centers on a burgeoning lesbian romance between maverick casino worker/artist Cay Rivvers (Patricia Charbonneau) and repressed NYC university professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) who arrives in 1957 Reno, Nevada to get a divorce. The open western desert and bustling casinos are coupled with the memorable music of Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, Kitty Wells, Elvis Presley and more, contrasting the setting and mood to the climate wherein being queer was…complicated. Landmark in its positive portrayal of sapphic romance and celebrated for its passionate, sensual love scenes that nearly fog the camera’s lens, Deitch’s vision for Cay and Vivian’s nuanced onscreen relationship explores the tension and wonder when each discovers a side of themselves they never knew existed.
Directed by Donna Deitch
Gotham Alum: Desert Hearts is an alum of the 1985 Project Market. It had its world premiere at 1985 Locarno Film Festival and went on to play at Toronto International, Chicago International, and Sundance. It was released theatrically on March 7, 1986.
UNITED IN ANGER: A HISTORY OF ACT UP
MoMA | June 11 at 7 PM and June 18 at 4:30 PM
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP is an inspiring documentary about the birth and life of the AIDS activist movement from the perspective of the people in the trenches fighting the epidemic. Utilizing oral histories of members of ACT UP, as well as rare archival footage, the film depicts the efforts of ACT UP as it battles corporate greed, social indifference, and government negligence.
Directed by Jim Hubbard
Gotham Alum: United in Anger: A History of ACT UP is an alum of the 2005 Project Market – Doc WIP. It had its World Premiere at the MoMA as the Opening Night Film of Documentary Fortnight. It has played at over 60 film festivals including Hot Docs, Rio de Janeiro International, Houston Cinema Arts, Cleveland International, San Francisco LGBT Film Festival, Outfest, MIX Brasil, Kashish: Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, MediaImpact: 2nd International Festival of Activist Art (Moscow), and BFI Flare. It has screened at over 30 museums worldwide including the Warhol Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, MUDAM (Luxembourg), the Hammer Museum, mumok (Vienna), and the Art Institute of Chicago. The film won Best Documentary at MIX Milano, Italy, and ReelQ in Pittsburgh, PA.
MoMA | June 28 at 7 PM & July 7 at 5 PM
In 1974 film exhibitor Sid Geffen and his wife, the French-born filmmaker and editor Jackie Raynal, took over the Bleecker Street Cinema (which was opened by Lionel Rogosin in 1960) a year after they reopened and began programming the Carnegie Hall Cinema. Geffen told the Village Voice that the Bleecker Street programming would be “adapted to a neighborhood heavily influenced by New York University”, and indeed the theater made a policy of showing films by young independent filmmakers. In 1981 they opened Jim Jarmusch’s first feature, Permanent Vacation, in their small second theater, the James Agee Room, which was only equipped to show 16mm. This laconic feature, an embryonic form of Jarmusch’s later films, stands out today as a vivid time capsule of hollowed-out, pre-gentrification Soho. It follows the drifting days and nights of its teenage star, Chris Parker, whose real life is barely fictionalized in the film. As the theater’s newsletter described it, “Permanent Vacation presents a chronicle of the new, lost, post-punk generation.”
Written and Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Gotham Alum: Permanent Vacation is an alum of the 1980 Project Market.
If your project is an alumnus of The Gotham programs and is being released this month, and you do not see it listed here, please contact us at [email protected]