Streamed online August 4 through August 10
Zoe Beloff’s latest film The Tramp’s New World is about the American writer and film critic James Agee and an unrealized screenplay he wrote in 1948 for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. Deeply disturbed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Agee imagined New York City destroyed and pictured how, in the aftermath of disaster, Chaplin’s Little Tramp might show us how to start anew. Based on Agee’s original notes, Beloff’s interpretation of his “thought experiment” focuses on the writer’s imaginative journey and the possibility of imagining a peaceful, post-capitalist society arising out of devastation. (Zoe Beloff, 2021, 62 minutes)