About this Event
https://vimeo.com/1081174506
LIFE FORGOTTEN - Evocative yet playful, Life Forgotten asks, how does everyday entertainment bring people together and act as a catalyst for social change? Situating archival film in parallel with reenactment, the film conjures up New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century. It centers on a real storefront cinema, Frank Seiden’s Variety Theater. Here, silent movies were anything but. Frank and his sons improvised dialog for the films and sang Yiddish ballads to an audience that didn’t hesitate to join in or argue back. It was a welcoming space for women and the film follows a group of radical young garment workers who gather here to figure out how to fight for women’s rights and change their world. Young activist Clara Lemlich and her friends confront social issues which are still very much alive, including the problem of wage theft, the fight for unionization, and workplace harassment.
Life Forgotten defies conventional categorization. Rather than allowing the audience to drift into the nostalgic revery of a costume drama or observe from a documentary distance, the film's aim is to create an evocation of a lost world, multi-dimensional and active, a reenactment of the past in the present that involves archival film, puppet theater and even a dance number inspired by Marx’s Capital. (51m, 2025, Director: Zoe Beloff) + Director Q&A
Shorts to precede:
THE PICKET LINE celebrates the pulse of people working in solidarity for justice. Recorded by Don Santina (AFM Local 6) and his band Red Dust. (3m, 2024, Director: Don Santina)
HOW THEY BUILT A MOVEMENT - A young activist sits down with renowned civil rights attorney Jim Harrington, founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project and Texas attorney to César Chávez, to learn the enduring lessons of grassroots organizing. Through personal reflection and archival context, the film seeks to bridge generations, linking Harrington’s early fights for farmworkers’ rights to today’s ongoing struggles for justice, equity, and human dignity. Both urgent and timeless, Harrington distills decades of movement wisdom into a clear-eyed meditation on how ordinary people can drive extraordinary change. (9m, 2025, Director: Oddett Garza)
THE MILK OF LIFE is a historical allegory based on the true story of New York City's 19th-century swill milk tragedy, when thousands of infants from poor and working-class families died while powerful industrial and political interests profited from a system that valued money over human life. But the film is not only about the 1850s.
Rather than confront the present directly, The Milk of Life looks backward in order to examine what is happening in America today. The historical story becomes a mirror: a society divided by wealth and power, ordinary people struggling to survive, institutions failing those they are meant to protect, powerful figures growing larger as others suffer, and an artist attempting to bear witness.
Drawn entirely by hand, the film compresses what could be a two-hour historical narrative into fourteen minutes of symbolic visual storytelling. Characters, events, and conflicts from the true story remain, but nearly every frame carries a second meaning. Bodies transform, buildings grow and collapse, money changes hands, and the color red gradually spreads through an otherwise black-and-white world. The boundary between past and present begins to disappear - not because history simply repeats itself, but because the forces that shaped it never entirely went away. (14m, 2026, Director: Joseph So)
Event venue & nearby stays
Cinema Village, 22 East 12th St, New York, United States
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