To Thank The Room

Duration: January 2025

Saturday 18 January 2.30pm, 7.30pm and Sunday 19 January 6pm.

Bookings: events.humanitix.com/thanktheroom-25

TO THANK THE ROOM
Winner Best Melbourne Documentary at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival 2024.

‘So few films try to capture everyday life… I enjoyed it so much. Just beautiful‘ – John Flaus – Australian screen and broadcasting legend.

Before there was the Northern Arts Hotel there was the Brooklyn Arts Hotel. A film about transition and change.
Maggie Fooke set up the 10 room Brooklyn Arts Hotel in downtown Fitzroy as a guest accommodation for ‘artists and lovers of the arts of all kinds – including conversation, activism and philosophy’ to stay, when visiting Melbourne.It was rather a well-kept secret, but Maggie and Brooklyn clocked up 25,000 guests stays over 13 years of operation – many of those return visits. In late 2019, Maggie emailed her regulars that she had reached the decision to sell the building and close the hotel. And that there would be a film. Join in and help me document Brooklyn’s last 100 days, she wrote. TO THANK THE ROOM is that film:

Documenting the courageous and compelling Maggie Fooke, along with her soft-voiced housekeeper Helen MacKay and Maggie’s feisty also-arts-focussed daughter Aphrodite through the final days of this beloved and ‘quirky’ institution. Maggie joins others in filming ad hoc, engages guests in conversation and the filmmaking process and we the audience are alongside her intimately as she, in her original wild way, is determined – at any cost – to enjoy and share her creation to the last drop.

Length: 77 minutes. 20m Q&A post-film.

Feature Documentary
Directed By Belinda Lloyd.
Featuring: Maggie Fooke, Helen Mackay, Aphrodite Feros-Fooke, and Bajjah [the dog]
Executive Producer: Maggie Fooke, Editor: Larry Lawson Original Score By Emily-Rose Sarkov
A KIND WORLD FILMS PRODUCTION

Saturday 18 January 2.30pm, 7.30pm and Sunday 19 January 6pm.