People watching 'The Parking Lot Movie'
This weekend marks the launch of Open Roof Films' inaugural summer film festival. It combines the warm-weather joys of live music, film, and beer with the Batman-badassery of being on a roof. If the previous incarnation of this event in New York is any indication, people will love it.
As the former chairman and chief executive officer of Alliance Atlantis, Michael MacMillan is familiar with film screenings. Usually, they're indoors. While ORF won't make anyone rich - it is a non-profit - by changing the setting of where a film is experienced, he, and his co-founders, make watching movies seem more important somehow.
The industry needs that.
Mr. MacMillan was inspired to start ORF after he attended a rooftop screening during Hot Docs. The New York City based Rooftop Films, who have been screening art-house films in counterintuitive places for 14 years with growing popularity, ran that event.
Two days after the screening MacMillan met Burzin Contractor, who was working at a media and technology accounting firm, and Sandra Singer, a CA with extensive experience in both the non-profit and media sectors, a digital media conference. The three were at the same table for lunch.
"We were ostensibly talking about digital media, but we quickly segued into a much more interesting discussion about rooftops, urban community, doing neat things in crazy places, and this bubbled up as a result," Mr. MacMillan says about meeting Open Roof Films' co-founders.
Fourteen weeks later, with help from Hot Docs, and a blessing from their New York counterparts, they are showing The Parking Lot Movie on top of the Amsterdam brewery.
While the cynic might say that this is another example of Toronto following its Big City Hero's lead, it's actually a part of something broader. The reason Rooftop Films has become so popular in NYC is because these days people are so hungry to create, experience, and relive collective memories. There's something immediately nostalgic about the particular combination of activities of Open Roof Films.
Mr. MacMillan often has discussions about the future of cinema in this age of limitless piracy. He isn't worried. "People love doing stuff together," he says. "I laugh more loudly in a group, I cry bigger tears in a group. There is no doubt that watching a movie together is far more pleasurable. Humans love doing stuff together as a community. If people are given the chance to participate in this kind of activity, they want to."
By making a film into a completely unique event, a memory, it changes it from the kind of accidental community formed by the Cineplex, and takes on the kind of living togetherness of a concert, a party, or sneaking on a roof to drink beers with friends.
The films that Open Roof Films have selected seem to dovetail with that. Next week, they're showing This Film Is Broken, a wistful romance set amidst last year's free Broken Social Scene concert. Or Winnebago Man, a documentary that finds a curmudgeonly YouTube sensation and humanizes him.
Think of Open Roof Films as a modern, urban drive-in, minus the make-outs. Or, as Mr. MacMillan says, "It's the same reason we have picnics." It makes the solitary and ordinary worth remembering. We live for that.
Plus, it's a roof.
Special to The Globe and Mail