Rock Soup

A soup kitchen for the homeless, set up, staffed and run by the homeless themselves, is the subject of the film. Kolwalski spent months in 1989 hanging out and filming habituates of a Lower East Side soup kitchen on the verge of seizure by the New York Housing Committee. The resulting film, Rock Soup, was aired on public television but, as in the past, Kowalski’s intensity often kept the viewing public at bay. The Sundance Film Festival invited Kowalski and Rock Soup to their 1989 event and then changed their mind abruptly when the director extended the invite to a fleet of homeless people who arrived by bus from Salt Lake City. In New York, a theatrical run at Film Forum was terminated when the film’s subjects smashed the windows of an adjacent restaurant where a post-premiere celebration was being held.