Aaron & Alex Craig On Their Collaboration With Sufjan Stevens, Rodeos, And Falling In Love With Ditmas Park

First, there’s the horse and a pair of legs drowning in leather fringe. The camera pans out and, in slow motion, you glimpse a man grimacing as he navigates a bucking bronco, riders with lassos merging rope with air, and strands of silver and balloons before the words flash onto the screen: “A musical and cinematic portrait of an American classic.”

“The whole film is like a moving portrait of the rodeo, capturing it and showing people what it’s really like,” said neighbor and cinematographer Aaron Craig, who, along with his brother, Alex Craig, shot the footage for Sufjan Stevens’ “Round-Up,” a slow-motion film capturing an annual rodeo that, for more than a century, has brought tens of thousands of people to Pendleton, Oregon, a small town that’s about two hours east of Portland and nestled against the state’s Umatilla River.

The film, which features footage of the Pendleton Round-Up set to a live score by Sufjan Stevens and the new Yam/Wire ensemble, premieres at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (in the BAM Harvey Theater) tomorrow, January 20, and runs through January 25.

“Even if you’ve been to 100 rodeos, you’ve never seen it in slow motion before; you can see the terror on people’s faces, and it’s a fright that makes them so uniquely cowboy and all-American real,” said Aaron, who, along with Alex (who too was a neighbor until a little more than a week ago, when he moved to the West Village), own the production company We Are Films. “When I was a kid and went to rodeos, I’d look at the cowboys and think, ‘These guys are like Superman.'” At the Round-Up, I realized these guys are real humans and just as scared as anybody else would be – you can see that realness in a much different way with the slow motion.”

The brothers, who grew up in Dallas, first connected with Sufjan Stevens about four years ago (around the time they moved to Ditmas Park), when they directed the singer’s “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” video – which ended up landing quite a bit of press on tech and film sites because, as the brothers told BAM, “the entire video was done in a single take and was technically complex.”

For the Round-Up project, Aaron and Alex first caught wind that they may be doing a project involving bucking broncos and lassos and a whole lot of fringe when Sufjan emailed them in 2013, asking if they’d ever shot a rodeo before. And while the two had been to plenty of rodeos while growing up in Texas, they’d never before merged their filmmaking skills with the land of horses and cowboy-hat clad men and women (and, in the case of the week-long Round-Up, music and dance by individuals from the Members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation).

“Our first meeting about this was in Ditmas Park, at Qathra,” Aaron said of the film that Alex noted included 60 hours of footage from five days of shooting in 2013.

“When we were filming, we didn’t really know how it was going to end up,” Aaron said. “Sufjan had gone to the rodeo the year before when he was on a road trip. We said, we’ll see what happens with it – we thought maybe it would be a five minute video we’d throw up online, and it grew up after that.”

“When it’s all said and done, we just want people to feel like they’ve experienced it firsthand – it’s one of the most classic American traditions, and it’s been seen by so few people firsthand,” Aaron continued. “In the whole film, it’s only music, no dialogue, so it’s like walking through an art gallery filled with photos of a rodeo… We’re really excited about this. We’ve been working on it for more than a year, and it means a lot to us.”

Besides working with Sufjan, the brothers have an extensive film history, which began with making videos on their mom’s VHS camera at the railroad tracks outside their Texas home (their first film, the brothers said, “had to do with time travel and we exploded a little car in it”)  and has evolved into full-fledged production company that has put out everything from a video filled with hauntingly beautiful images of Iceland (you can read more about his Iceland escapades on Aaron’s blog) to a Cold War Kids music video.

Both brothers have lived in New York for a while, with Aaron being here for about eight years and Alex having moved here in 2010. Aaron, who’s one year older than his brother, moved to Ditmas Park (around Milk & Honey) four years ago, and Alex followed suit about a year later.

“We’d never heard of Ditmas Park at all when another friend of ours said, ‘You gotta check out Ditmas Park – this place is crazy,'” Aaron said. “He took us to Ditmas Park, and we checked out an apartment and ended up getting dinner at Ox Cart. It was snowing outside that night, and I remember sitting by the window at Ox Cart and being like, this is a really nice town that I had no clue existed. The snow just made it perfect, and the food at Ox Cart was the best I’d had in a long time.”

Besides Ox Cart, both Aaron and Alex can easily rattle off their favorite spots in the neighborhood:  The Castello Plan, Milk and Honey, Qathra, and Collyer’s Mansion for Aaron – and Milk and Honey, The Farm on Adderley, and Café Tibet for Alex.

And now, after having lived in the neighborhood for several years, the brothers agreed: it has been incredibly easy to fall head-over-heels in love with the area.

“We think it’s probably one of the best neighborhoods in all of New York,” Aaron said.

“Round-Up” plays at Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM Harvey Theater (30 Lafayette Avenue between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street in Fort Greene) from January 20-25 at 7:30pm. Tickets start at $30. To purchase tickets and for more information, call 718-636-4100 or visit BAM’s website.

Movie stills courtesy BAM.