The Sky Socialist
The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs
April 20, 2026
One of the most essential American avant-garde films of the 1960s, Ken Jacobs’s transfixing meditation on the post-Holocaust world stars Flo Jacobs and was filmed entirely on their rooftop in pre-gentrification lower Manhattan.
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I Walked Into My Shortcomings, a new monumental compendium that brings together the writings, teachings and interviews of legendary American filmmaker Ken Jacobs, is on sale at the concession stand in the lobby of the Walter Reade Theater for $45 while supplies last!
One of Ken Jacobs’s signature (and most personal) works, The Sky Socialist is many things: an allegorical meditation on the post-Holocaust world, starring Flo Jacobs as “Anne Frank”; a handcrafted document of pre-gentrification lower Manhattan, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge; a monument to the force and immediacy of small-gauge filmmaking; and a mutable text to which Jacobs would return time and again throughout his career, reworking, revising, and reimagining its elements across various projects. Shot entirely on Ken and Flo’s rooftop, The Sky Socialist dazzlingly melds the personal with the political, past with present, and diaristic documentary with epic allegory, and the transfixing result is nothing less than one of the most essential American avant-garde films of the 1960s.
Restored by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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