Directed by Aimée Schaefer
DRAMA
This film is available from November 27-30, 2020. To watch or vote for this film please click on the orange “TICKETS” button below and purchase a ticket for BLOCK 6.
Synopsis
When his friend goes missing in the summer of 1989, Jimmy learns that the Island isn’t the only thing that’s changing. Based on true stories from the community of Roosevelt Island, NYC.
Aimée (pronounced EH-MEH) is a New Mexican film director, documentarian and screenwriter who began working in the film industry in 2006, journeying across the US and Mexico to participate in film projects in various capacities..
A recent graduate of New York University’s Grad Film Program, Aimée is a recipient of the Spike Lee Fellowship and Hollywood Foreign Press Association Fellowship.
Aimée is especially interested in the symbiotic relation between narrative and nonfiction storytelling, focusing her stories on contained/underrepresented issues and communities. Residing in New York and New Mexico, Aimée is dedicated to the creation of socially conscious media and community storytelling.
Riding the subway one winter day, I was jolted from weariness by a commotion in the train car. Someone was stirring the crowd of people that had just got on at Jackson Heights, Roosevelt Ave. I looked for the perpetrator.
He was a young man or pubescent boy, whose jeans were a little short, zipped into a puffy jacket and facing the widow of the train, focus fixed on the tunnels we were traveling through.
He howled and whined, echoing the sound of the train’s wheels and brakes, like he was talking to it, like he was lost in the rapture of this maze of tracks. People shifted, watched. He made them feel uncomfortable and I searched the car for his care taker. Who was with him? Was he alone?
My mind was about made up to stand up and say something but then, I noticed the subway map clutched in his bare hand, the way someone had tied his scarf in a this-thing-aint-fallin-off-n-gettin-lost knot.
As we approached the upcoming station, Roosevelt Island, the boy announced the stop, mimicking the voice that trailed his a few moments later.
He was free, engaged with a train in a tunnel that was speeding and screeching on tracks underground and underwater. The mundane train car that we loathe to board in the morning, having the time of his life…
I don’t remember now what happened next, if I got off the train before he did–I think he deboarded first, I was headed LES from Queens. But I saw him again. Months later.
His missing sign was posted everywhere, him looking much younger and disengaged, Avonte Oquendo, a non-verbal autistic boy, gone missing from his school. For months the signs hung, the authorities finally got involved and they searched. Subway announcers even called his name out on the intercom, asking that “Avonte, walk to the lights”, and be found.
He was found, later that year, in pieces on a beach in Queens. The police wrapped it up quickly, saying he must have fallen into the East River. Law suits were filed, laws may have been changed. But I’ll never forget that boy, who simply disappeared and was gone.
