GREENWICH VILLAGE FOLK SCARE
GREENWICH VILLAGE FOLK SCARE
For years, weekend folksinging has been a tradition in Washington Square Park, in New York City’s Greenwich village. But in the spring of 1961 the City rescinded its customary permit for singing in the park. This triggered a protest demonstration on Sunday, April 9th of that year, which was put down with excessive force by the NYPD but eventually resulted in the City backing down and reinstating the permit.
SUNDAY is a 17-minute, impressionistic documentary about the events of that day. It garnered nine international awards shortly after its initial release, and has been widely honored as the first social-protest film of the 1960s,
SUNDAY is now part of the permanent film collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and has been shown at numerous film symposia since its restoration, in 2008, by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, funded by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation.
In late 2014, Scorsese’s Foundation was itself honored by the Vienna Film Museum, which mounted a week-long festival featuring dozens of cinema classics that the Foundation has helped restore and preserve. I’m pleased that SUNDAY was chosen to be represented among them. – Dan Drasin