Jonas Mekas Film Festival

The Jonas Mekas Film Festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey will be held at the Showroom Cinema at 707 Cookman Avenue, just one block from the train station. The Film Festival will run from July 17 to July 27, 2025. The Film Festival is in conjunction with OUTPOST NYC DCG.  Additionally, Parlor Gallery at 717 Cookman Avenue will be exhibiting Jonas Mekas still-framed photographs and will host a reception on the opening evening of the Film Festival. 

Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) was born in a farming village in Lithuania and moved to New York City in 1949 as a war refugee. A pioneering figure in American avant-garde cinema, he co-founded Film Culture magazine with his brother in 1954 and became a film columnist for The Village Voice in 1958. In the early 1960s, he founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which evolved into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest repositories of avant-garde film. He published over thirty books of prose and poetry and taught at institutions such as the New School, Cooper Union, NYU, and MIT. His work influenced generations of filmmakers and artists, such as Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, and Chantal Akerman. His films and installations have been exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Serpentine Gallery, Whitney Museum, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou.

A selection of films tracing Jonas Mekas’s lifelong engagement with cinema as a form of personal and poetic expression. This retrospective follows his evolution from Guns of the Trees (1961), a politically charged early work, to Walden (1969), which pioneered his diary filmmaking. Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) and Lost Lost Lost (1976) reflect on exile and belonging, while his portraits of Andy Warhol and Martin Scorsese offer rare insights into their creative processes. The series concludes with As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), a nearly five-hour compilation of Mekas’s home movies spanning three decades, described by The New York Times as “a first—the home movie as epic,” and Sleepless Nights Stories (2011), a film of late-night musings and unguarded moments with Yoko Ono, Björk, Marina Abramović, and other longtime friends. Sebastian Mekas, the son of Jonas Mekas, will be in attendance and will give introductory remarks several evenings. 

The programing schedule for the Film Festival is as follows:

Thursday, July 17
Guns of the Trees (1961) – 86 min.

Friday, July 18
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1990) – 35 min.
Happy Birthday to John (1996) – 24 min.
Zefiro Torna (1992) – 34 min.

Saturday, July 19
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) – 82 min.

Sunday, July 20
Lost Lost Lost (1976) – 178 min.

Thursday, July 24

Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches) (1968-69) – 180 min.

Friday, July 25
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) – 228 min.

Saturday, July 26
Notes on an American Film Director at Work – Martin Scorsese (2005) – 103 min.

Sunday, July 27
Sleepless Nights Stories (2011) – 114 min.

Showroom Cinema is a small independent theatre that features high-quality first run films, documentaries, Oscar Shorts, classics, and hosts live comedy and musical performances. In a small intimate setting, they are known for providing a variety of entertainment to the art-conscious community. 

OUTPOST NYC DCG was established in 2009 as part of Deborah Colton Gallery (DCG). It aims to show new and newly rediscovered films, video and installation art, photography, painting, performance art and drawing and sculpture. OUTPOST NYC DCG is a platform for developing new experimental programing, often in collaboration with existing art venues and organizations, mainly in New York, but also nationally and internationally.

Since 2009, Parlor Gallery has been the heart of artistic and cultural renaissance and revival in Asbury Park, redefining the gallery experience through diverse and thought-provoking exhibitions which combine contemporary urban art with coastal charm. Featuring both emerging and internationally recognized artists, the gallery fosters artistic growth by providing a platform to educate and inspire, and to also bring art outside to public spaces through their collaborative art initiatives like the Wooden Walls Art Project.