Member Screening: Ramblin’ Gal

Join us for this month’s Member Screening showcasing the scripted feature Ramblin’ Gal by Filmmaker Lu Ann Horstman (NYWIFT Member) and Roberto Monticello (Co-Director). The filmmakers will be available for a Q&A immediately following the screening.

The screening series provides members with the opportunity to show their work in a theatrical setting. Screenings take place at Anthology Film Archives, followed by networking at a nearby bar.

Ramblin’ Gal
Lu Ann Horstman (Writer/Co-Director/Co-Producer/NYWIFT Member)
Roberto Monticello (Co-Director)
RT: 106 mins, 2011, Musical

A housewife and mother of four leaves Kansas to pursue a songwriting career in New York City. When she hopped on the family motorcycle, with her guitar strapped to her back and her songs stuffed in her duffle bag, everyone thought she was crazy for having the audacity to believe that the things she wrote in her songs were important. They spoke for the under-represented woman that elitist feminists had overlooked…left behind. The Women Jane Howard profiled during the Second Wave Feminism. in her book titled “A Different Woman” (E.F Dutton, 1973):

“Its theorists interest me less than those Closet Feminists,  as I have come to think of them, who wrest sup from the trees, fish from the seas, or fashion quilts from scraps of cloth. Yoked to they menfolk, to whom they are faithful and whom they survive, they flourish on a fraction of the options granted most of us. Without being ideological about it or even articulating it at all, these women embody the movement’s best principles. They don’t confuse strength with gender, nor do they use their sex as an excuse to avoid responsibility. There are still a lot of these American noblewomen around. Maybe before their breed dies out, which as society grows more complex and labor more abstract it surely and sadly will, the rest of us can learn something from them.”

Ruby believed the songs she wrote for and about these women were important…could even have some culture-changing impact when the rest of the world heard them…fulfilling the prophetic words of Rob Siltanen  “…the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do…”

Lu Ann Horstman moved to Los Angeles from Princeton, Minnesota to pursue acting in film and television, then switched to writing songs, plays and screenplays. Eventually she moved to New York where she cut an album of her original songs, as well as incorporated them into a women’s lib musical comedy entitled Sisters and Brothers. Her play The Devil’s Departure ran at the Reprise Theatre in NYC, as well as the American Theatre of Actors. Ramblin’ Gal, the independent film she co-produced and co-directed, was praised by critics in Variety. She wrote the screenplay and songs for the film, and won Best Screenplay, Best Soundtrack and Best Actress at the 2013 World Music and Independent Film Festival in Washington, D.C.

Roberto Monticello has completed 28 films in 9 countries, and has directed 56 play productions, and written 19 of them. He has won nine different awards, the latest being The Film Humanitarian Award from the Queens Film Festival. In addition to writing and directing films, Monticello has devoted much of his life to human rights and environmental causes. He has journeyed to Ethiopia three times during the famine, once as a refugee camp director. He has survived beatings while traveling through South America in pursuit of Nazi war criminals, lived with Peruvian Indians in the Andes and recorded human rights abuses in Afghanistan during the Russian presence. He was with the U.N. at Hotel Rwanda. Also wounded in Guatemala while investigating the killings of Native Indians. Monticello is currently concentrating on ending the U.S. Embargo and Travel Ban to Cuba, bringing a boatload of medicine twice a year and making films there with the goal of promoting a peaceful resolution. Monticello is also producing a documentary, Looking for Cuba, which deals directly with the U.S. Embargo; and has written two Cuban-themed feature scripts: Son Cubano, an action-filled tale about the seeds of freedom in Cuba, and Free Again: La Lupe’s Story, the true-life drama of the legendary singer La Lupe.

Special thanks to Carlina Rivera and New York City District 2 for discretionary funding for the NYWIFT Member Screening Series.

And thanks to Tito’s Handmade Vodka, the Signature Vodka of NYWIFT