NEW YORK, NY.- In response to the cancellation of film festivals around the world and disruption in the lives and work of filmmakers, the documentary ROOM H.264: Quarantine, April 2020—filmed and edited over the course of the last two weeks—makes its debut online on Sunday, April 19, 12:00 P.M. EDT on Vimeo and will remain online until May 3. A live discussion with filmmakers Eric Hynes, Jeff Reichert, and Damon Smith will take place on Sunday evening at 8:00 P.M. Shot via Skype, ROOM H.264: Quarantine, April 2020 features those whose work was slated to screen at festivals like SXSW, CPH:DOX, Tribeca, First Look and more. The documentary depicts a broad range of filmmakers, each sequestered in their own spaces in locations throughout North America, Europe, Africa and beyond, responding to a question first posed by Wim Wenders in his classic 1982 documentary experiment Room 666, and perhaps newly resonant today: “Is cinema becoming a dead language—an art form which is already in decline?”

The following international filmmakers, including several who were slated to premiere their films at MoMI’s 2020 First Look Festival, before the Museum closed, participated in the project: Yung Chang, Zeshawn Ali, Maya Daisy Hawke, Bill Ross, Turner Ross, Lisa Rovner, Pia Hellenthal and Rahul Jain, Todd Chandler, Anna Eborn, Michael Andrianaly, Lauren Domino, Jiayan “Jenny” Shi, Steve James, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri, Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, Cecilia Aldarondo, John Skoog, Courtney Stephens, Elizabeth Lo, Bo McGuire, and Hubert Sauper. The resulting film is a poetic, melancholy ode to cinema and creation in a moment when both have been drastically affected by the ongoing pandemic.

ROOM H.264: Quarantine, April 2020 is the fourth chapter in an ongoing 21st-century update on Wim Wenders's feature-length documentary Room 666. In Room 666, Wenders invited filmmakers attending the Cannes Film Festival in 1982 into a hotel room for ten minutes to answer a single question related to the future of cinema. Hynes, Reichert, and Smith have been revisiting the concept and spirit of Wenders’s project since 2016, with the participation of filmmakers such as Kirsten Johnson, Robert Greene, Bing Liu, Julia Reichert, Brett Story, Feras Fayyad, Ashley Connor, Nanfu Wang, and many others. To date, well over 70 contemporary filmmakers have participated in the ROOM H.264 project.

The first and second phases—the curious, exploratory initial experiment, ROOM H.264: Brooklyn, NY, 2016, and the more abstract, cerebral, ROOM H.264: Astoria, NY, January 2018—premiered at First Look 2018. The freewheeling third iteration, ROOM H.264: Columbia, MO, March 2019, premiered at last year's True/False Film Fest. ROOM H.264 was also a gallery installation at MoMI in 2019. In advance of the debut of Quarantine, April 2020, the earlier films will be made available to view online. Dates, times, and locations for streaming will be announced via MoMI’s website.

“We’ve found that the time and place of each iteration strongly influenced responses, and considering the uncertain place we all find ourselves in—in terms of both our lives and livelihoods—we felt that now was an interesting time to try another approach, adjusted to accommodate the new variable of our being sequestered in separate locations,” said the filmmakers.

First Look is the Museum’s annual festival of new, innovative international cinema. The 9th edition, scheduled for March 11 through 15, was cut short after the first two days as the Museum building was closed in efforts to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. The festival opened with the New York premiere of Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro. The last film shown was John Skoog’s Ridge. The full slate of films can be found here. Currently, the Museum is continuing to present some First Look films and related new work online under the umbrella “First Look 2020 Online.”

SCHEDULE:
• Friday, April 17, 12:00 p.m. EDT: ROOM H.264 films to be made available through the weekend

• Sunday, April 19, 12:00 p.m. EDT: ROOM H.264: Quarantine, April 2020 available for online viewing (through May 3)

• Sunday, April 19, 8:00 p.m. EDT: Live online discussion with Jeff Reichart, Damon Smith, Eric Hynes. Free with suggested donation.