The Last Laugh

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The Last Laugh

Q&A filmmaker Ferne Perlstein

2016. 88 m. Ferne Perlstein. The Film Collaborative. US. English. Rated NR.

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A hit from last year’s festival returns for one night only—with filmmaker!

They say that comedy is tragedy plus time. The question is how much time has to pass before it’s all right to take a tragic, traumatizing event and use it as a framing device for a joke. Can the Holocaust ever be funny? Director Ferne Pearlstein (Sumo East and West, Imelda) gathers top comedians and prominent Jewish figures (Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, Abraham Foxman, Shalom Auslander), and candidly asks this and other piercing questions. All these voices are interwoven with classic movie clips, rare archival footage of the cabarets that actually existed in concentration camps, and an intimate portrait of Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone, inviting us to laugh, think, remember, and contemplate a possibility that at first seems incomprehensible.

Read an interview with filmmaker Ferne Perlstein here!

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Q&A filmmaker Ferne Perlstein

Friday, Mar. 16 2018, 5:00

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Q&A filmmaker Ferne Pearlstein, Robert Edwards, and producer Amy Hobby

Wednesday, Mar. 22 2017, 7:30

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Ferne Pearlstein is an award-winning director, cinematographer, and editor whose work has been screened and broadcast around the world. An acclaimed DP, Pearlstein is one of only a handful of female cinematographers featured in Kodak's long-running On Film ad campaign in American Cinematographer. In 2004 she won the Sundance Cinematography Prize for Imelda and has shot in places as diverse as Haiti, Uganda, Guyana, and Thai refugee camps, where she snuck her 16mm camera across the Burmese border to film in rebel bases of the Karen Liberation Army. Pearlstein‘s 2003 documentary Sumo East and West premiered at the Tribeca, LA, and Melbourne Film Festivals and aired on PBS’s Independent Lens. Among her other credits are DP on Alex Gibney’s segment of Freakonomics and Ruthie and Connie (HBO), and co-director/editor on Dita and the Family Business. Pearlstein’s first scriptwriting effort Evie’s Garden was a semi-finalist in AMPAS’s prestigious Nicholl Fellowship.

Robert Edwards is a writer/director based in New York. His most recent film is When I Live My Life Over Again, starring Christopher Walken, which premiered at Tribeca in 2015. A graduate of Stanford’s Masters Program in Documentary Film, Edwards won a 2001 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his first script, Land of the Blind, which in 2006 became his directorial debut, starring Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland. As a screenwriter, he has written for directors such as Bennett Miller and Mark Romanek and is currently at work on a miniseries about the Flying Tigers for executive producer John Woo. For his next film, Edwards is developing The Bomb in My Garden—based on his adaptation of the memoir of the chief scientist in Saddam Hussein’s uranium enrichment program—with Johnny Depp’s production company Infinitum Nihil.

Amy Hobby is the Executive Director at the Tribeca Film Institute as well as an Emmy award winning, Academy-Award and Grammy nominated producer whose films include And Everything Is Going Fine directed by Steven Soderbergh, Shepard & Dark, Secretary (starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Love, Marilyn directed by Liz Garbus with whom she collaborated again on her most recent film What Happened, Miss Simone? In 2013, Ms. Hobby co-founded Tangerine Entertainment- a company dedicated to produce and build community for films directed by women. Tangerine’s films Paint it Black directed by Amber Tamblyn and The Last Laugh directed by Ferne Pearlstein are both currently active on the festival circuit and will be released in 2017. In her various capacities, Ms. Hobby has been on numerous Film Festival Juries and Panels over the past 10 years.