Buster Keaton and Roberta Cantow films to be screened in Woodburn Urban Park on Culture Night
On Culture Night, Friday, September 18, Waterside Together and Eastside Cinema will be holding their final outdoor cinema screening at Woodburn Urban Park from 7pm to 9pm.
Waterside Together is a PEACEPLUS Shared Green Spaces project that brings together members of the Protestant, Catholic and BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) communities in the Waterside.
Woodburn Urban Park sits at a meeting point between communities.
Over the past year, Waterside Together has been developing activities in the park that encourage people to stop, stay and experience the space together.
Its outdoor cinema screenings with Eastside Cinema and Excite offer another way of doing just that.
For this final screening, the project will be showcasing short films by Roberta Cantow and Buster Keaton, alongside a miniature short film created by local children from Top of the Hill and Lincoln Courts.
The children’s film is the result of a workshop delivered in spring 2025, inspired by archival footage of the Waterside from the NI Screen collection.
Participants explored the sounds of the past, using found and everyday materials to recreate the noises heard in the historic footage.
The result is a playful new interpretation of the Waterside’s history, created by children who live in the area today.
The screening will take place under a marquee, so there’s no need to worry about the September weather! The team will have blankets available to get cosy, along with popcorn to enjoy during the films.
About the films:
Roberta Cantow’s Clothelines (1981)
Clothes flapping in the wind, a soft polyphony of voices. Clotheslines are a physical and metaphorical thread of a shared history: communication between women, households, streets, families, and generations; the signs given by different articles of clothing, the chatter across the fence or through the window.
Buster Keaton’s Neighbours (1920)
Under a shared clothesline, two families are divided by a single wooden fence. Around this fence, ladders, laundry, and bodies collide, exposing the arbitrary nature of physical boundaries and their disproportionate influence on social relationships.
Buster Keaton’s One Week (1920)
A newlywed couple’s self-assembled house is undone by an escalating series of forces: malice, accident, nature, and industry itself. A progression that exposes the false promise of autonomous domestic construction.