Spike Lee Will Co-host the Ultimate Brooklyn Watch Party

A New York cinephile has no great shortage of fabulous film programming to choose from, but there’s a difference, maybe, in programming and a watch party. The former invokes capital-T Themes; the latter invokes your friend trying to figure out how their Blu-ray player works, a playful casualness ahead of sitting down for something that just might blow your mind. So many of the city’s festivals are set in Manhattan, which is why it feels like such a monumental get that Playback: The Brooklyn Watch Party will kick off this fall at BAM, created, hosted, and programmed by real-deal New Yorkers. “We wanted it to feel like an invitation to your friend’s house to watch their favorite movies,” co-host Spike Lee told us over email. He will show his seminal film Crooklyn, one of his “most personal films” and “an homage to Brooklyn of the early ’70s,” at the festival.

Created by filmmaker and producer Nicholas Ma and hosted by Lee and Clara Wu Tsai, Playback will feature films curated by Questlove, John Turturro, and Bryan Stevenson, all of whom will participate in moderated discussions after showing their selections, which span genre, country of origin, and time period. “Over the course of two days, we’ll travel from Brooklyn to Mumbai to Ghana to Algeria and back to New York City again,” Ma added of his curators’ selections. The official lineup has each curator selecting two movies. Questlove will show Denis Sanders’s Soul to Soul and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Stevenson will show Mira Nair’s directorial debut, Salaam Bombay! (as well as chat with her after the screening), and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God. And longtime Spike Lee friend and fellow Knicks fan Turturro will show Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style. Spike Lee will screen his seminal work Crooklyn to kick off the festival on Friday evening, and there may be even more surprises in store throughout the two-day event.

“Most film festivals are built around the film industry — new releases, premieres, awards, what’s coming next. Playback is really built around the audience: great movies, the people who love them, and what can happen when we experience them together,” Ma added. Playback will be set across November 6 and 7, culminating in an afternoon block party outside BAM that Saturday. So it’s not all that different from watching a movie with your friend at their place — you just have to imagine your friend has access to one of the biggest screens ever and 400-something other friends to watch with.