Debuting at this years’ River to River Festival is the Now That’s HIP! Movie Nights series – an array of classic feature films, all set in New York City, plus short films by some of New York’s top filmmakers. Sponsored by HIP Health Plan of New York. Adding to the FREE fun this summer are four feature movies preceded by short films by highly acclaimed New York filmmakers Jennifer Reeves, Jeff Scher, Jem Cohen, and Mark Street. Movie screenings are Tuesdays August 8, 15, 22 and 29.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 8 | 6:30PM

FEATURE PRESENTATION:
Barefoot in the Park (106 minutes, 1967)
Robert Redford (Paul) and Jane Fonda (Corie) star in Neil Simon�s Barefoot in the Park as newlyweds adjusting to life in their new, very small New York City apartment. Paul's working hard at starting his career as a lawyer while Corie's eager to be romantic and spontaneous; giving the two plenty to squabble about. The movie also features Mildred Natwick as Corie's mother and Charles Boyer as the elderly bohemian neighbor.

PRECEDING THE FEATURE:
Filmmaker, Jennifer Reeves presents
The Time We Killed (excerpt, 12 min.)
This lush black & white experimental feature portrays the life and imaginings of a writer unable to leave her New York City apartment. Robyn Taylor tries to comprehend and fight her growing agoraphobia by looking into her own past and confronting the world events of the present (from a murder-suicide next door to the war in Iraq). Robyn�s obsessive ruminations threaten to drive her deeper into the solitude of an illusory world, until a personal encounter with death prompts her to leave the safety of home once again.

Jennifer Reeves is a New York-based filmmaker whose films have shown all over the world from the Berlin, Sundance, Vancouver, London, Toronto, New York, Seoul, and Rotterdam International Film Festivals to the Robert Flaherty Seminar, Princeton University, the Sundance Channel, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 15 | 6:30PM

FEATURE PRESENTATION:
Pick Up on South Street (80 minutes, 1953)
Directed by Samuel Fuller, who also wrote the screenplay, Pickup on South Street is a tough, brutal, well-made film about a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) who inadvertently acquires top-secret microfilm and becomes a target for espionage agents. With additional performances by Thelma Ritter and Jean Peters and a setting almost entirely in the alleys, subways, waterfront dives, and streets of the Seaport area of New York, this is certainly film-noir at it�s best.

PRECEDING THE FEATURE:
Filmmaker, Jeff Scher presents
Trigger Happy (7 minutes)
Dancing in the street with thousands of objects picked up from the street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Filmed in delirious Black and White Hi-Con.
SID (5 minutes)
In this remarkable short film about small dogs, there's no such thing as too much for the flying dog.

Jeff Scher is a New York-based filmmaker, who defines himself not as an animator, but as a painter working in motion. He is fascinated by the human mind�s ability to create the illusion of movement from disparate images. His montages are dizzying arrays of color, light, figures and forms that flit about like unruly thoughts, tricking the eye and revealing unexpected visual harmonies. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Academy Film Archives, Hirshhorn Museum, Pompidou Centre, Musee d�Art Moderne, Vienna Kunsthalle and the Austrian National Film Archive.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 22 | 6:30PM

FEATURE PRESENTATION:
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (92 minutes, 1975)
Gary Cooper stars in this Frank Capra classic comedy from 1936. It tells the story of a simple small-town man, Longfellow Deeds, who inherits a fortune and encounters people who want to use his money for their own aims. He is able to fight all of them off until a scheming journalist (Jean Arthur) comes on the scene.

PRECEDING THE FEATURE:
Filmmaker, Jem Cohen presents
Little Flags (6 Minutes)
Filmed on the streets of Lower Manhattan during a patriotic victory parade.
NYC Weights and Measures (6 Minutes)
This film opens with footage from the 1998 ticker-tape parade held along lower Broadway's "Canyon of Heroes" for astronaut John Glenn upon his return to Earth from his mission on the space shuttle DISCOVERY. Like a floating, drifting piece of ticker tape, the film then makes its way across boroughs and time to explore New York City's many moods, from loud and relentless to grave and dreamy.

Jem Cohen is a New York-based film- and videomaker. Often shooting in hundreds of locations with little or no additional crew, Cohen collects street footage, portraits, and sounds. The projects built from these archives defy easy categorization, thriving on the collision between documentary, narrative, and experimental approaches. Cohen's work has been broadcast by PBS, the BBC, Planete, and the Sundance Channel. Awards include first prizes at Locarno International Film Festival, Bonn Videonale, Festival Dei Popoli, Doubletake Documentary Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Film + Arc, Graz, and the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award 2000. Cohen is a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellow.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 29 | 6:30PM

FEATURE PRESENTATION:
Rear Window (112 minutes, 1954) In Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic, Photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart) is a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment. His immersion in the human drama (and comedy) visible from his window is a by-product of boredom, underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and a wisecracking visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter). Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) disappears, Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether she's really left town, as Thorwald insists, or been murdered.

PRECEDING THE FEATURE:
Filmmaker, Mark Street presents
alone, apart: the dream reveals the waking day (7 minutes)
Mark Street�s film is an homage to two ramshackle cities, made up of footage shot while wandering. He meanders city streets with a camera, looking to be haunted by unfamiliar vistas, he finds solace in the forgotten landscapes, odd voices on a ham radio and shimmering water in a desolate harbor.

Brooklyn based filmmaker Mark Street has had his work presented at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Toronto Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, London Film Festival, Festival du Cinema Nouveau, Montreal, Oberhausen Film Festival, Viennale International Film Festival, Vienna,VIPER Film Festival, Zurich, European Media Arts Festival, Pacific Film Archive, SF Cinematheque, San Francisco International Film Festival, NY Underground Film Festival, Reel NY, CH 13 WNET NY, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival.