The Hamptons International Film Festival has its annual Views from Long Island program, which features films made here or bearing a strong local connection. But given how many people in entertainment and film are full or part-time residents of the South Fork, there are always a few more movies that have roots in the area.
The documentary "Ron Delsener Presents" takes as its subject a longtime East Hampton homeowner. He is also a concert promoter who helped come up with the modern model of large-venue music events.
Regular readers of this section may recall that it was said during the time of the documentary's premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival that he "brought the Beatles to Queens, Queen to Madison Square Garden, Simon and Garfunkel to Central Park, and pretty much every band from the '70s onward to some venue in New York City."
The film is composed of interviews with Mr. Delsener, who recently retired at the age of 86, and with his wife and colleagues, and footage of him going about his daily business and his nightly haunts. He is also captured at his East Hampton house, examining the archives of a career spanning more than half a century. The film will be shown at East Hampton Cinema on Tuesday at 5:15 p.m.
Although a documentary on Ukraine is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks "local," the feature "Rule of Two Walls," was executive produced by Liev Schreiber, a part-time South Fork resident. The film is about artists carrying on their lives in the midst of a modern-day war. It also premiered at Tribeca in June. The artists in the film make music, studio paintings, street art, and film in defiance of the Russian invasion.
They are also shown meeting up at coffee bars, restaurants, and clubs -- keeping up their social lives and running errands as missiles blast into buildings and explode around them.
Mr. Schreiber co-founded BlueCheck Ukraine after the war started and works with UNITED24, President Volodymyr Zelensky's fund-raising platform for Ukraine, to get money directly to the war's front lines. At the time of the film's premiere, he said he had been to the country three times since the beginning of the invasion.
"As an artist in my own right trying to do all that I can to help Ukraine," he said in the film's production notes, "I responded to the film's focus on Ukrainian artists processing the brutality of the war, while using their art to fight back."
The film will be shown on Monday at 5 p.m. at East Hampton Cinema.
