The Last Race

Director: Michael Dweck

Institute History

  • 2018 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Riverhead Raceway is a rare beast. For decades it has hosted showdowns between local residents who bring their Mad Max–inspired stock cars to do battle on a quarter-mile track, passions spilling out of the cockpit when the checkered flag drops. Forty such tracks used to exist on Long Island alone. Today Riverhead is the last. Acclaimed photographer Michael Dweck’s evocative portraiture turns the raceway into a theater of catharsis while the track’s owners struggle to maintain an American tradition as a real estate boom surrounds them.

Dweck’s stirring imagery takes you inside a race and eye to eye with the cars’ snarling grills and white roll bars that protrude like bones out of scarred metal. Yet a patient camera lets us know the drivers as everyday people and learn that Riverhead is tied to a deep sense of identity. The track is on the only piece of undeveloped land in the area—it's worth millions—and the only thing keeping the bulldozers at bay is track owners Barbara and Jim Cromarty’s love of the track and its community.

Screens with Marfa
An isolated town in the Texas borderlands. A place out of time. A shrine to minimalist art. Home to a remote festival. A place where unexplained lights tremble in the night sky. And then there's the giant lemon.

— H.C.

Screening Details

Credits

As you use our Online Archives, please understand that the information presented from Festivals, Labs, and other activities is taken directly from official publications from each year. While this information is limited and doesn't necessarily represent the full list of participants (e.g. actors and crew), it is the list given to us by the main film/play/project contact at the time, based on the space restrictions of our publications. Each entry in the Online Archives is meant as a historical record of a particular film, play, or project at the time of its involvement with Sundance Institute. For this reason, we can only amend an entry if a name is misspelled, or if the entry does not correctly reflect the original publication. If you have questions or comments, please email [email protected]