Roger Deutsch
2021The View from Avenue A.
Roger Deutsch
Anton Van Dalen
Shot in NYC in 1984 and commissioned as a portrait of the Dutch expatriate artist Anton van Dalen, The View From Avenue A is also and more interestingly and profoundly, a portrait of another disappearing place, in this case, the dying (or revivifying, depending on your point of view) lower east side of Nest York. Deutsch brilliantly charts a history of a lost place, here not just a physical land- scape, but a landscape of the mind, that is, the artistic "bohemia" of the 60's and 70'e, changing soon to be completely gone, crushed, inexorably, by history." —Steven Simmons
The View from Avenue A.
Fathers and Sons
Roger Deutsch
Chronicling the history of his family from 1787 to now while looking for the answers to some buried secrets regarding certain relatives, Roger Deutsch (The Boy on the Train) soothingly voices over his latest effort - a poetic, travelogue-esque 30-minute documentary which takes the viewer on an engaging personal journey from Hungary to America and back via beautiful vintage photographs, grainy home videos (that often look better than professional and persistently stand the test of time), as well as his own impressionistic footage, with the unique experience enhanced by excellent musical choices. —Nikola Gocic
Fathers and Sons
Dead People
Roger Deutsch
Frank J. Butler
Filmed in 1974 and edited and released in 1983 (and then rereleased by its director in 2005), DEAD PEOPLE purports to document the final years of Frank Butler, a local fixture in the depressed burg of Ellicot City with a particular fondness for drink and tales of the dead. Over hazy 16mm footage two decades later, Deutsch adopted a painfully unsentimental view of his early approach, colored as it was by notions of ethnographic film and an undercurrent of fetishism for a man he considered somehow more "alive" than himself. While it chafes against notions of authenticity in documentary and incisively hints at the complicity of the subject in inventing his own history, DEAD PEOPLE simultaneously oozes nostalgia, transcending its own judgment as a gauzy memorial for the man Deutsch once called a friend.
Dead People
The Boy on the Train
Roger Deutsch
James Eckhouse, Kata Wéber
An American film director screening his new film in Budapest meets one of the subjects of that film. What begins as a simple chat over coffee turns into an alternately comic and suspenseful road trip.
The Boy on the Train
Jews
Roger Deutsch
JEWS excavates a lost world of manners and ritual in home movies shot by several Chicago families from the 1920s through the 1940s. Much as in similar found footage soliloquies by Péter Forgács, Jay Rosenblatt and Ken Jacobs, director Roger Deutsch wrings unexpected pathos from mundane traces of the past. Children mug for the camera with dances of the day, upright mothers march their strollers up the avenue, men smoke, the family gathers around the table to light the candles. The bare title cannot help but raise the specter of contemporaneous events in Europe, lending an extra degree of urgency to the film's meditation on disappearance. - Max Goldberg
Jews
In the Same Garden
Gurvinder Singh, Sergei Bodrov
We all live on the same planet, under one sun which nurtures and renews our unique and common hopes for the future. No matter how much we differ from each other in color, ethnicity and belief, we all share the same source of life, united in our destinies. An omnibus film on the topic of Turkish - Armenian relations.
In the Same Garden
