Recession Reel

Tickets are on sale now for New York City's Blackout Film Festival 2009, set to start rolling next Saturday.

The festival was inspired by and named for the failure of a Northeast region electricity grid that left the city dark in August 2003  -- a day when "fear and confusion gave way to reckless abandon, freedom from responsibility, and a touch of delirium from the relentless heat," the festival's site says.

Every year since, the theme of the festival entries revolves around a theme central to the New York City community. No wonder that this year the theme is "The Great Recession." No other American city has its identity so tied to finance as NYC, but the films in this series go beyond shots of tumbleweeds rolling down Wall Street. There's a short film about a woman whose house goes into foreclosure, a cartoon that explores the upside to the recession at a neighborhood bodega and one called "The Job" (below) that highlights the role reversal in the job search that many in middle management understand all too well.

The films are like an archive of the experience of this most terrible year. But hopefully it will soon seem as distant to us as the face of Henry Fonda in 1940's "The Grapes of Wrath" seems to us now.

Photo courtesy of Blackout Film Festival.