HARVARD INDEPENDENT FILM GROUP IN-PERSON

Q&A with Writer/Director Alexander Olch'99

Official Selection New York Film Festival 2008
Official Selection AFI/Silverdocs 2009
Nominated for Writers Guild Award Best Documentary Screenplay

“CRITICS’ PICK! A love letter to fading memory and the passage of time.”  –  New York magazine

“Both a near uncategorizable feat of experimental documentary filmmaking and a gorgeously constructed emotional portrait of a man grappling with the deepest of artistic and personal issues.”
– Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker magazine

“The most moving documentary of the year … beautiful and 
heartbreaking” – Anthem Magazine

“Extraordinary.” – William Johnson, Film Quarterly

“A stirring autobiography-by-proxy culled from 200 hours of footage… an act of memory preservation and facilitation whose eloquence, largely free of pat analysis, captures the messy, paradoxical emotions that often remain irreconcilable to the grave.” – Nick Schager, Slant Magazine


Richard P. Rogers (1943-2001, Harvard College '63) was a NYC baby boomer, born to privilege: a Harvard-educated WASP who became a first- rate independent filmmaker (QUARRY and ELEPHANTS both opened at Film Forum in the ’70s) and a gifted film teacher. But he was also a tortured, neurotic soul who freely admitted to being jealous of Steven Spielberg and simultaneously ashamed of the impulse. 

Torn between narrow class loyalties and broader professional goals and political values, Rogers found the time to juggle multiple relationships with the skill of a world-class Lothario, but was unable to complete an 
autobiographical film he had worked on for 25 years. His former student Alexander Olch ('99) collages a trove of material, including extraordinary scenes of Rogers’s mink-coated Gorgon-mom, and new 
fictional sequences with Wallace Shawn as Dick. 

THE WINDMILL MOVIE is a heady, fascinating brew that brings together one man’s parentage, culture, education, and ambition — letting the chips fall where they may. -Karen Cooper, Film Forum Director



Monday, June 22nd
8:00pm Show Only


Film Forum
209 West Houston Street
New York NY 10014


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Open To The Public
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