Lightning Over Braddock
Midnight weekend screenings happen on Friday & Saturday nights (meaning arrive on Friday and/or Saturday night by 11:45pm for seating, the movie starts after midnight)!
Director: Tony Buba Run Time: 80 min. Format: Online Virtual Ticket Release Year: 1988
Screening at Row House Online from NOW SHOWING
Detail instructions on getting your film to play here
Tony Buba’s first feature, LIGHTNING OVER BRADDOCK: A RUSTBOWL FANTASY – which established him as an innovator of the “exploded documentary” – is as eccentric a picture of America. Like Buba’s earlier short films, it chronicles the decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the hard-luck town which once flourished as “Pittsburgh’s shopping center.” It concerns a director (Buba, playing himself) trying, without much success, to make a movie with a crazy street hustler named Sal, who considers himself responsible for Buba’s (modest) success. Piecing together real and scripted footage, the pseudo-documentary presents an alternately deadpan and incisive portrait of the grim flipside to Reagan-era optimism.
Like Errol Morris, Buba has a fascination with the idiosyncratic details of daily life, and uses his formidable sense of humor to document the decay of industrial America. LIGHTNING OVER BRADDOCK, Buba’s magnum opus, might have its tongue in its cheek, but its heart is always firmly in the right place.
After your ticket purchase, you have THREE day to enjoy.