Rooftop Films: Flying on One Engine (Event Over)

Fri., August 22, 2008

Flying on One Engine
Charming curmudgeonly doctor Sharadkumar Dicksheet lives half the year in a small, dingy apartment in Brooklyn, surviving on Social Security payments. The rest of his year is spent performing hundreds of operations a day in India, saving tens of thousands of lives a year. A portion of each ticket sold benefits his charity, The India Project.

Venue: On the lawn of Automotive High School
Address: 50 Bedford Ave, between N. 12th and Lorimer (Williamsburg Brooklyn)
Directions: L to Bedford Avenue OR G to Nassau Avenue
Rain: In the event of rain the show will be held indoors at the same location
8:00PM: Doors open
8:30PM: Sound Fix presents live music by Kiran Ahluwalia
9:00PM: Films
11:30PM - 1:00AM: Open Bar After Party at Matchless (557 Manhattan Avenue @ Driggs ) Courtesy of Radeberger beer
Tickets: $9 or $15 at http://going.com. $1 from each of $9 tickets, and $7 from each of the $15 ticket goes to The India Project and helps fund life-saving surgeries for poor and indigent children.

Preview: See short films from this and other programs at www.IFC.com
Presented in partnership with: IFC.com, New York magazine, Council Member David Yassky & Automotive HS

PROGRAM NOTES:

Flying on One Engine (Joshua Z. Weinstein | New York, India | 52:00)
Wheelchair bound, without a larynx, and diagnosed with a life-threatening aortic aneurysm, Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet now lives only (and barely) so he can travel to India to perform free operations in marathon-like surgery sessions where up to 700 children receive treatment for their cleft lips and other deformities. Although Dicksheet survives off of social security while living in his Brooklyn apartment, his life is drastically different in India where the eight-time Nobel Prize nominee saves hundreds of lives daily and is treated like a living god. Flying on One Engine shows how this quirky, funny, and sometimes difficult character overcomes his own ailments by helping others.

Joshua Z . Weinstein began making his film when he was just 22 years old. Dicksheet was the attending resident when Josh’s father was in medical school, and in the mid 90’s his father made his first trip to India to assist with the free operations. Josh tagged along two years ago when his father asked him to make a promotional video for Dr. Dicksheet’s organization, but once he began to capture his complicated subject on camera, he knew that he would be making something much more interesting than a simple promotional tool.

Young filmmakers raised on the over-long films dominating today’s multiplexes could stand to take a lesson from Josh and Flying on One Engine, his first full-length film. Clocking in at 52 minutes, his film is a compelling, touching, refreshingly economical, and surprisingly unsentimental look into the life of a complicated living legend. Dicksheet's accomplishments are tremendous, but it is almost as amazing that Dicksheet is even alive--most people do not survive a partially paralyzing car accident, larynx cancer, and 2 life-threatening heart attacks. When we watch him in his home in NYC he appears literally on the verge of death–he can barely walk across the room without losing his breath. But the second he arrives in India he finds the strength to perform over 70 operations in a day.

Still, some of the most charming moments in the film are the darkly funny little moments spent with him as he complains about how it depressed him when Liz Taylor got fat and laments the undue credit bestowed upon Mother Theresa. He is a real curmudgeon, and if any of us were to meet him without knowing his accomplishments, he might seem like any other grumpy grandfather. He has devoted his life to saving the lives of poor children, and it's hard not to get choked up when you see these kids transformed and witness lives saved by the hundreds. But Weinstein doesn’t hesitate to let us see the real man behind these miracles, and he rightly calculates that by showing us some of Dicksheet’s inner demons, he only augments our sense of wonder at what the man has achieved.

Rooftop Films is proud to get the opportunity to screen this film and especially to have Dr. Dicksheet and members of his team in attendance at the screening.

Plays With:
Yaptik-Hasse (Edgar Bartenev | Russia | 29:00)
Edgar Bartenev crafts an epic poem from his exhilarating footage of a group of nomadic Nenets who live in the Siberian tundra at "The End of the World", as the territory is known in the local dialect. They travel hundreds of miles around the region with their herd of reindeer, raise their families as they move across the tundra, and live off the land, seemingly as unaffected by modernity as one could ever imagine.