(ASBURY PARK, NJ) -- The ShowRoom Cinema and Parlor Gallery proudly present the Jonas Mekas Film Festival, taking place July 17–27, 2025, in collaboration with OUTPOST NYC DCG and Deborah Colton Gallery. Honoring the life and legacy of Jonas Mekas (1922–2019)—filmmaker, poet, and avant-garde pioneer—the festival offers a rare opportunity to experience his deeply personal and poetic films on the big screen.
The festival kicks off on Thursday, July 17, with a screening of Guns of the Trees (1961). A festival reception will also be held on Friday, July 18, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at Parlor Gallery, in conjunction with that evening’s film program.
Across eight evenings, audiences will experience diary films, reflections on exile and belonging, and rare portraits of cultural icons like Andy Warhol and Martin Scorsese. The series concludes with Sleepless Nights Stories (2011), featuring appearances by Yoko Ono, Björk, and Marina Abramović.
Sebastian Mekas, Jonas’s son, will be present for select screenings to share personal insights and introductory remarks.
All screenings will be held at The ShowRoom Cinema (707 Cookman Ave., Asbury Park, NJ). Tickets are $20 per screening block. Tickets are available for purchase online.
Complete Festival Schedule:
Thurs, July 17 – Guns of the Trees (1961) – 86 min. Jonas Mekas’s first feature—which he wrote, produced, directed, co-photographed and edited—is an entrancing snapshot of the counterculture in the early 1960s and a work of beatnik existentialism concerning the fine line between generational hope and despair. Past and present intertwine as a young woman (Frances Stillman) searches for a reason to go on living amid a bout of paralyzing depression; she encounters a succession of characters (including a cynical intellectual, played by Mekas’s brother and frequent collaborator, Adolfas) who seem to represent some chance at salvation, but the dark cloud overhead refuses to dissipate. In Mekas’s own words, his scrappy yet ambitious and above all lyrical film “deals with the thoughts, feelings, and anguished strivings of my generation, faced with the moral perplexity of our times.”
Fri, July 18 – Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1990) – 35 min, Happy Birthday to John (1996) – 24 min, Zefiro Torna (1992) – 34 min. Three tributes to three key friendships in Mekas’s life: Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol follows Warhol across a variety of settings and situations between 1965 and 1982, featuring cameos by the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, Barbara Rubin, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, and countless others; Happy Birthday to John documents a small birthday party for Lennon, held in a hotel room in Syracuse, NY following the opening of his and Ono’s Fluxus exhibition, which was designed by artist George Maciunas; and Zefiro Torna compiles footage of Maciunas shot by Mekas over the years, arriving at an emotionally reverberant and deeply personal homage to the Fluxus founder (and fellow Lithuanian).
Sat, July 19 – Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) – 82 min. Documenting Mekas’s return to the Lithuanian village of his birth, Semeniškiai, for the first time since he and his brother Adolfas escaped from German labor camps and emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s, Reminiscences is arguably the greatest achievement within Mekas’s exploration of the film-diary form. We begin in Williamsburg with footage shot by Mekas with his first Bolex of his and Adolfas’s first years in exile, before skipping ahead to the brothers’ return to Lithuania in 1971, their reunions with family members, their experience of their home country as displaced people, and finally, their visit to the labor camp near Hamburg where they were imprisoned during World War II. An unceasingly poetic work on the experience of exile, Reminiscences remains a towering feat of personal filmmaking.
Sun, July 20 – Lost Lost Lost (1976) – 178 min. Continuing where Walden and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania left off—though moving backward in time—Lost Lost Lost is another epic of diaristic cinema, focusing on and using footage shot by Mekas between 1949-63. The film begins with Jonas leading the melancholy life of a political refugee on the streets of Williamsburg, but it soon mutates into an increasingly ecstatic document of the development of the NYC art scene in which he played a decisive, statesmanlike role. Moving from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from life in exile to the construction of a new cultural home, the meticulously assembled Lost Lost Lost is nothing short of a treasure trove of memories and images, diaries, notes, and sketches.
Thurs, July 24 – Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches) (1968–69) – 180 min. Perhaps Mekas’s masterpiece and the work that best embodies his lifelong filmmaking project, this epic film-diary captures pivotal years in arts and culture in New York City, especially for the New American Cinema and the cinematic avant-garde. A kaleidoscopic chronicle of people, places, happenings, and time’s passage, Walden refracts an ocean of documentary footage through the prism of Mekas’s emotional life by way of a rigorous edited-in-camera aesthetic. The result is a work that is both a landmark cine-portrait of artists and the city in which they live and a convulsive, energetic, and radically subjective take on the documentary, composed under the sign of Mekas’s own twist on the Cartesian cogito: “I make home movies—therefore I live. I live—therefore I make home movies.”
Fri, July 25 – As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) – 228 min. Mekas’s career-spanning project of documenting his life, times, and relationships finds perhaps its grandest expression in his most monumental film diary. Covering nearly three decades of Mekas’s life—1970 to 1999—As I Was Moving Ahead is a vibrant, frenetic 16mm record of daily life, trips abroad (to France, Italy, Spain, and Austria) and domestic (Madison, WI; Cape Cod), birthday parties, picnics, his children’s first steps, the changing of the seasons. But above all else it is a tribute to the friendships and relationships that positioned Mekas to be able to see the titular “brief glimpses of beauty” in the first place—“life’s unexpected raptures” that both justify his observational filmmaking practice and provide inspiration to go on living and making his beloved “home movies.”
Sat, July 26 – Notes on an American Film Director at Work – Martin Scorsese (2005) – 103 min. A gem in the vast cosmology of Jonas Mekas’ career, Notes on an American Film Director at Work: Martin Scorsese follows its subject during various days and nights shooting The Departed, often sitting in silence as Scorsese watches a monitor or consults with production hands from afar. Interspersed are two old friends, seemingly from different worlds, bonding over minutiae: Scorsese telling Mekas he was refreshed during Goodfellas‘ shooting by watching Brakhage shorts; Mekas comparing The Departed‘s plot to Andre DeToth’s Play Dirty; Scorsese complaining that his cable provider gave one of DeToth’s movies too low a star rating the other night. One could come away from it thinking they since have a better grasp of Scorsese as an artist than almost any critical study.
Sun, July 27 – Sleepless Nights Stories (2011) – 114 min. For two hours we stroll with Jonas Mekas through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, bars and clubs. We meet old acquaintances like Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovic, friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and also many new acquaintances. The father of the diary film begins with the words ‘I can’t sleep.’ Who hasn’t been in that situation. Sleepy and yet wide awake, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the day’s exertions. In Sleepless Nights Stories we witness (approximately) 25 tales from a thousand and one nights – remnants of films by one of the greatest avant-garde filmmakers whose life rewrote film history.
Parlor Gallery (717 Cookman Ave., Asbury Park, NJ) will exhibit Jonas Mekas Still-Framed artworks throughout the festival.
Presented with support from OUTPOST NYC DCG, a New York-based experimental arts platform founded by Deborah Colton Gallery (Houston, TX), the festival highlights Mekas’s lasting influence across generations and genres. Limited-edition artworks will be available for purchase in person and at www.outpostnycdcg.com.
The ShowRoom Cinema opened in Asbury Park, NJ, in April, 2009, as a single-screen, 50 seat movie theater, with a goal of bringing provocative and relevant independent movies and engaging special events to the city’s budding downtown. In 2012 the theater evolved into a 3-screen, independent cinema and became the leading entertainment destination in Asbury Park’s eclectic, art-infused downtown shopping district.
Through its eleven year run, The ShowRoom brought an important selection of independent, first-run films — including critically-acclaimed domestic and foreign features, documentaries, festival winners and shorts — to the Jersey Shore. It also hosted a variety of special one night only screenings, live performances and community-driven special events. The theater closed in 2020, but new owners Daria Parr and family are excited to welcome The ShowRoom back to Asbury Park. As the last year and a half has shown, the simple pleasure of seeing a new release on a big screen with a roomful of fellow film fans is an experience many of us didn’t realize we would miss until it was gone.
The ShowRoom will continue to deliver the same high quality film selection and impeccable customer service that the theater has become known for while working toward the big picture goal: restoring some of what was lost during the pandemic by inviting our cherished guests to share the energy and fun of going to the movies again.
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