08/17/2026
Join us for two nights of film about immigrant stories, gardens & urban space at 6th Street and Avenue B Community Garden! Night one on SUNDAY, AUGUST 23RD @ 8PM features the NYC premiere of Zoe Beloff’s short JOSEPHINE THE SINGER OR THE MOUSE PEOPLE, a retelling of Franz Kafka’s last short story staged in the gardens of the Lower East Side, alongside a selection of 16mm shorts sourced from The Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Canyon Cinema including Bruce Baille’s MR. HAYASHI, Stan Brakhage’s THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, Melissa Friedling’s GARDEN ROLL BOUNCE PARKING LOT, Jack Smith’s SCOTCH TAPE, and Luján Montes’s INTEMPERIE/OUT IN THE OPEN.
Night two on THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10TH @ 8PM features Chantal Akerman’s rarely screened HISTOIRES D'AMÉRIQUE: FOOD, FAMILY AND PHILOSOPHY, a narration of Ellis Island-era immigrant stories by Jewish legends of the downtown avant-garde, shot in overgrown vacant lots along the East River shortly before their gentrification. The full-length program will be preceded by Marie Menken’s 16mm short GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN.
The series is named for the Yiddish slang term KESSELGARTEN—meaning any noisy, chaotic situation or “ruckus”— that comes from the Eastern-European-accented pronunciation of “Castle Garden,” America’s first immigration processing center decades before Ellis Island, opened on the site of a former pleasure garden at the southern tip of Manhattan. These films probe the relationships between immigrant communities and green, unruly urban spaces, particularly here in NYC, and more broadly interrogate the definition of a garden: both as a serene and beautiful place for communion with nature, and as a public space of encounter, contest, labor & urban reclamation, spaces that are continuously remade by their communities. Co-curated by Matt McKinzie, Philomena Mattes, and Zoe Beloff. This event is free to attend and open to the public!
