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Psst, We\'re Showing a Film on This Guy\'s Wall, and, Oh, Don\'t Warn Him

At a flash-mob screening of a short documentary about climate change and Occupy Sandy, the film was projected on a wall above an East Village gas station on Wednesday night.Yana Paskova for The New York Times At a flash-mob screening of a short documentary about climate change and Occupy Sandy, the film was projected on a wall above an East Village gas station on Wednesday night.

At a Hollywood film premiere, sequined starlets drift across red carpets. At an Occupy Wall Street film premiere, people trespass on gas station parking lots.

So it went on Wednesday night when 200 people - academics, environmental activists, dudes on bikes - descended flash-mob style on a Mobil station at Houston Street and Avenue C for a guerrilla screening of a documentary film about climate change and Occupy Sandy,  the movement's ongoing effort to assist the victims of last month's storm.

In classic Occupy fashion, the 20-minute film, “Occupy Sandy: A Human Response to the New Realities of Climate Change,”  was projected onto a wall above the service station's gas pumps by a vehicle called the Illuminator, a mobile media center built this spring by a crew of Brooklyn artists and with the patronage of Ben Cohen, the ice cream tycoon.

The gala event - if one can speak that way of an occasion whose precise location was announced by text and Twitter message only 15 minutes before it began - was an attempt to place both Hurricane and Occupy Sandy into the context of climate change.

The filmmaker, Josh Fox, whose movie “Gasland” examined the oil- and natural gas-drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, spent 10 days documenting Occup y Sandy's efforts in the Rockaways section of Queens and in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, as well as at the group's headquarters, at a church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

“I'd heard so much about this thing, I had to figure it out,” said Mr. Fox, bespectacled and boyish. “I wandered over there” - to the church - “with a camera and was just blown away.”

His movie, put together on the fly, included interviews with residents affected by the storm and with Bill McKibben, the author and environmentalist. The film was streamed live during the screening at occupytheclimate.com, where it can still be seen.

The complex origins of the unpermitted, which is to say illegal, event suggest the natural interconnectedness of the Occupy idea machine. The idea began with a woman named Elana Bulman, an Occupy Sandy organizer, who got to talking with friends about ways to connect Occupy Wall Street's storm-relief efforts to the broader environmental movement. Ms. Bulman found her way to Justin Wedes, a creator of Occupy Wall Street's summer camp, who has been working for Occupy Sandy, often in Sheepshead Bay.

About 200 people gathered in the glow of a Mobil sign to watch the film.Yana Paskova for The New York Times About 200 people gathered in the glow of a Mobil sign to watch the film.

Mr. Wedes knew Mr. Fox; indeed, he was interviewed for the film. Mr. Fox, meanwhile, was an old friend of Mark Read, the designer of the Illuminator, having been arrested in Mr. Read's presence more than a decade ago while passing out anti-something-or-the-other leaflets at a Citibank branch.

Those wanting to know the location of the screening were asked to send a text to a certain phone numbe r on Wednesday morning or to follow the hashtag #climatecrime on Twitter. An initial communiqué was sent about 9 a.m. on Wednesday saying that the screening would be “somewhere in the East Village.”

At 4:13 p.m., a second dispatch narrowed the location to “the neighborhood south of 10th St btwn Aves A & D”; a third message sent at 5:53 p.m. (“Hello friends! Thanks for your adventurous spirit!”) narrowed it further to the area south of 7th Street between Avenues B and C.

Finally, about 6:15, the site at the Mobil station was announced.

The organizers thoughtfully sent an ambassador to the poor service station owner, who seemed a bit nonplused at having a flash mob of Occupiers - not to mention a marching band - c onverging on his parking lot.

That said, everything went smoothly. A banner was unfurled and people driving by honked their horns. The band played well and loudly. “People are actually showing up; I'm amazed this is working,” Mr. Fox said. “There are folks here, and tubas.”

Then the film began. While the Illuminator's sound system performed fairly well, the image - bleached by the scouring lights of the parking lot - left a little to be desired. Not that it mattered to Joan Flynn and Steve Jambeck, a couple from the Rockaways who received help from Occupy Sandy in the early days after the storm.

“We were really lucky,” Ms. Flynn, 64, said. “They came in and pulled out the soaked rugs, the flooded carpets, the wet insulation.” Mr. Jambeck, also 64, added, “This whole thing is a reality check on the unintended consequences of 50 years of bad decisions over carbon use and corporate greed.”

When the movie ended, the audience, in the wa y of film premieres, was off to the after-party - this one, at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Mr. Read was packing up the Illuminator after another night's work.

“You know, I can't believe we did a whole film and no police,” he said.

Could that be disappointment in his voice?

He shrugged, made a face. “Maybe a little bit,” he said.

The film was projected from a van known as the Illuminator.Yana Paskova for The New York Times The film was projected from a van known as the Illuminator.