Damon Smith

In response to the cancellation of film festivals around the world and disruption in the lives and work of filmmakers, Eric Hynes, Damon Smith, and Jeff Reichert filmed and edited the documentary ROOM H.264: Quarantine, April 2020 over the course of the last two weeks. Shot via Skype, it 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?”

An homage to Wim Wenders’ documentary Room 666. Over True/False weekend, a variety of True/False filmmakers will find themselves alone in a hotel room, facing a camera and a provocative prompt: “Is cinema a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?”

This film, to be shot, edited, finished, and screened all within the dates of the First Look festival, is an open-ended homage to Wim Wenders's documentary Room 666. As in Wenders's original, visiting filmmakers, alone with a camera in a hotel room, will answer the question "Is cinema a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?" Participants will include an international selection of filmmakers visiting for First Look 2018.

Made from footage captured at Brooklyn’s BAMcinemafest in June 2016 in which filmmakers were left alone in a hotel with a camera and a question: "Is cinema a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?" An homage to Wim Wenders’s documentary Room 666, in which the same question was posed to directors such as Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ROOM H.264: Brooklyn, NY, June 2016 serves as a revealing document about the current state of American independent film, as well as a provocative rumination about how we see and experience the world.

Chinese teenagers from the wealthy elite, with big American dreams, settle into a boarding school in small-town Maine. As their fuzzy visions of the American dream slowly gain more clarity, their relationship to home takes on a poignant new aspect.