Roemer Film Festival Proposal

My friend Andrea asked if I would be up for proposing a mini film festival for a local film culture society here in Trento. Ever since I’ve been chatting film on the regular with MBS as part of the Family Pictures Podcast (FPP) I feel ever more confident—not sure that’s entirely a good thing. So when he suggested the idea I immediately thought of a NYC in the 80s festival, showcasing movies like The Warriors (1979), Times Square (1980), Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), The New York Ripper (1982), and C.H.U.D. (1984). My undergirding argument would be highlighting how these movies showcase both the decaying NYC infrastructure, as well as the rhetoric of gentrification in the not-so–rotten apple. In fact, I think I already wrote about that on this blog:

Of Punks, Pimps and C.H.U.D.s: Gentrification in NYC as told by 1980s film

But after podcasting with MBS this last year or so, I’ve been falling down all kinds of film-dug rabbit holes. In fact, one film we did on a lark, Michael Roemer‘s Vengeance Is Mine (1984), has turned me into a huge fan of his work. There’s a commitment to independent cinema in his films that can be read into the strange fact that his work often peaks in popularity decades after it was made. From feature films to TV documentaries to PBS American Showcase specials—there’s a consistent vision of a quiet, looming realism that haunts quotidian life on the margins.*

So, the idea is to put together a four-film retrospective featuring his films. They’ll be projected in 4K, and I think I have a special lady friend who can help ensure the translation into Italian is solid. The idea of introducing folks to an under-appreciated figure of American independent cinema is very cool. What’s more, the fact that it is a local film community kind of marries nicely with my last post about blogging as a place on earth. It would seem I’m starting to come out of my shell a bit in dear old Italy. Although be sure to manage your expectations, any intro to the films will have to be in English, but I’ll try and have some real-time translation technologies—if they even agree to this thing. I told my friend Andrea, “I can try and do it in Italian.” And he looked at me sympathetically and said, “You should do it in English.” [Lol and sigh.]

All this said, I could be pissing in the wind. At this point, it’s just an idea, and the film society has no shortage of compelling films—so we’ll see. But like with FPP, it just feels life-affirming even to think about the possibility of talking about movies with other people. I love them so!

Outsiders and Moral Reckonings: The Cinema of Michael Roemer

This four-film retrospective brings together Nothing but a Man (1964), The Plot Against Harry (1969/1989), Dying (1976), and Vengeance Is Mine, also released as Haunted), offering Italian audiences a rare opportunity to encounter one of the most singular and under-recognized voices in American independent cinema. All screenings will be presented in English with Italian subtitles.

Michael Roemer’s fiction features are marked by psychological precision and an unwavering attention to social reality. Nothing but a Man offers an intimate portrait of a Black railroad worker navigating racism and dignity in the American South, rendered with emotional restraint and moral clarity. The Plot Against Harry, long unavailable after its initial release, shifts into dry, observational comedy: a small-time Jewish bookmaker drifts through family and community life in New York, his bluster masking vulnerability and displacement.

With Dying, Roemer turns to documentary form. This four-part television work confronts terminal illness directly, following patients, families, and medical professionals with unsentimental attentiveness. Refusing melodrama, Dying becomes a profound inquiry into mortality, autonomy, and the ethical dimensions of end-of-life care.

Vengeance Is Mine returns to fiction in a quieter, more interior register. Centered on a divorced woman who returns to her childhood home and enters a fraught new relationship, the film examines emotional dependency, memory, and the lingering force of family history. Where Dying faces death in its immediate physical reality, Vengeance Is Mine explores the ways the past inhabits the present—how unresolved attachments and private wounds continue to shape adult life.

Taken together, these four films reveal a filmmaker of remarkable range—moving between documentary and fiction, social realism and intimate drama—yet consistently committed to questions of dignity, responsibility, and the fragile structures that bind individuals to family and community.

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*Something we discussed recently on FPP while extolling Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages (2007): why did she have to wait ten years between films, from 1997’s The Slums of Beverly Hills to The Savages? That almost Roemerian 🙂