Katie Cokinos
By Teresa Giordano
If Johnny and Edgar Winter could get out of Beaumont, Texas and Janis Joplin and Robert Rauschenberg escape nearby Port Arthur to make their marks on the world, well then, so could Katie Cokinos. So she believed growing up in Beaumont. Not that it was a bad place to be. She loved her family and would not trade anything for the family’s monthly screenings of the super 8 films that her father constantly shot. She just believed there was more. More to the world, and perhaps more to her.
There were the movies she sat through as a teenager, Reds, All That Jazz, E.T., Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, that transported her not only from Beaumont into new worlds, but also to a place in her imagination where she wondered “why can’t I do that? Why can’t I make movies?” But she didn’t see women’s names in the top line credits so maybe women didn’t make movies. But women did become lawyers. So she attended Texas A&M, where she majored in philosophy and history with the intent of going to law school. Then came her inciting incident, the plot point that put her life’s journey into motion. It was a class called Philosophy of the Visual Media where she learned that film creates its own language and in the best cases that language adheres to a unique point of view. Film was a way to explore and express the world, new places, new people, and new ideas.
She founded the Art Film Society at school. With input from her professors she screened the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini. New wave and neorealist cinema opened her mind to narrative structures that were not strictly plot driven. She discovered that women did make movies. Maybe not the Hollywood blockbusters she grew up with but films that were more personal and intimate. She discovered the films of Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, Shirley Clarke. Post-college she left Houston for the larger film scene in Austin where she curated the Austin Film Society for five years, taking over from her friend Richard Linklater.
And she made movies. Portrait of a Girl as a Young Cat – a short film about the desires and despairs of a young cake decorator. How the World Looks Now - a short about how the earthrise photo shot from the moon affected the life of a retired English Teacher. I Dream Too Much - A coming of age story about a young woman who, after graduating college, resists her mother’s insistence that she take the SATs and become a lawyer. Water Keeps Time - A documentary about Saugerties’ Esopus Creek and the history and community surrounding it. And she is planning to make no less than five more movies
Katie brings her prodigious knowledge and love of films and her curatorial skills to the Saugerties Film Society where she programs weekly screenings of classic films.
