Sidewalk Stories

Film Screening + Q&A
Friday, February 13
Screening + Q&A 7:30pm, Doors at 7pm
Free with Required RSVP Here. Suggested Donation $10
Food Truck & Drinks

Pioneer Works: Center for Art and Innovation is proud to bring Sidewalk Stories back to New York – the very grounds where the film was shot 26 years ago – after a release of its restored version at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013.

Twenty years before The Artist, Sidewalk Stories portrays the friendship of a tramp and a child, in a moving and funny homage to Chaplin’s The Kid. Both witty and tender, Charles Lane’s gorgeous black and white comedy pays tribute to the silent film era, with a score composed by Marc Marder.

This gripping tale of the underprivileged and its beautiful portrayal of the city, Sidewalk Stories uniquely draws on social satire to deliver a timeless message of generosity and love.The film is an important work of the New African-American cinema of the 1980s, along with Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood, that conveyed a strong political message.

Q&A with Writer/Director Charles Lane and Composer Marc Marder:

Charles Lane is an African-American actor and filmmaker. He is a native New Yorker, born and raised. While attending SUNY Purchase as a film student, he made a short titled A Place in Time based on the famous Kitty Genovese incident. This short gained him a certain amount of attention, including a Student Academy Award win.

Marc Marder composes for film, theater and concert. For the cinema, his score for Sidewalk Stories, a silent feature film by Charles Lane (1989) won the Deutches Schalleplatten Preis in 1990 for one of the best film scores of the year and led him on to accompany Charles for his Hollywood comedy, True Identity in 1991. He has composed the scores for all of Cambodian Rithy Panh’s films- both documentaries and fictions – and has been with him at the Cannes Festival in the Official Selection for six of those eighteen films. In 2013 The Missing Picture won the prize of the Un Certain Regard selection and was nominated for an Oscar in the Foreign film selection. For this same score he won the prize for Best Music in Film awarded by the Sacem and the French National Radio in 2014 along with a commission for a large orchestral work to be performed in October of this year.

Don’t miss Charles Lane’s A Place in Time on February 19, part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968 – 1986.