an iPhoto slideshow /movie/ subtitle poem, composed from images that were shot from my seat in the cinema, and ideally run live on iphoto slideshow continuous loop with enabled random ken burns effects, and duke ellington's the moochie.
USA loop EXP
WARNING! Many of the malls, downtown archi-torture and suburbs are sacrificed in this animation. It begins with John Deere tractors rolling onto the screen. Then by some super natural divine power, these vehicles explode into fragments. Later they are infiltrated by ancient Cambrian 500 million year old DNA and re-congeal into mechanical Cambrian animals. These humourous and diabolical creatures somehow transform into saviors of the natural prairie grasslands. Mechanized farm machinery has completely transformed the prairies over the last 100 years. This animation addresses how the great plains have been almost completely wiped blank of any natural grasses or/and plants that existed before Europeans arrived.
CANADA 5 min ANI
& Chris Cresci
As clearcutting continues to ravage California's coastal redwood region, Farmer, an environmental activist, decides to tree sit to defend the McKay Tract. A hundred feet up in the ancient redwood canopy, Farmer must battle the elements and avoid isolation as he fights for a sustainable future.
USA 15 min DOC
(Love, Intertwined)
Marta can't have children. Her husband has an affair with Mila, Marta's own sister and single mother of Daniel. When Daniel's father shows up, the lives of all three turn around.
SPAIN 23 min NAR
Dream webs stretch across the palette of a fading consciousness. Tattered fragments unfurl in the gossamer lands of wilting clarity.
USA 12 min EXP
Rachel S. Fox
Dan Weed’s passion for farming started early. Growing up on a small farm in Connecticut left an indelible impression on him, and though he was too young to remember the difficulties that led his parents to retire from the dairy business, the empty barns remained on their property untouched and in disrepair for much of his life. On his 15th birthday, Dan decided to use his life’s savings to buy a young dairy herd and bring the barns back to life again. Now Dan must contend with the pressures of raising a herd, sharing land with his parents, and bearing the financial burdens of farm life, while still in high school.
USA 24 min DOC
and Nick Jordan
Between Two Rivers is a film about Cairo, Illinois, a historic town with a dark and troubled past, located at the confluence of the Ohio & Mississippi rivers, where the North meets the South in the heartland of America. With lyrical and striking contrasts between the past and present, the documentary presents a dramatic and moving picture of this unique place and its people, struggling to survive in the face of severe economic, social and environmental pressures. Between Two Rivers sets Cairo’s tumultuous past against the backdrop of the latest crisis to afflict the community: the record-breaking floods of spring 2011, when the rising Ohio & Mississippi rivers threatened to engulf the town, forcing an emergency evacuation.
UNITED KINGDOM 96 min DOC
Inspired by educational agriculture movies, Blueberryland documents the labor and culture of the wild blueberry harvest in Maine. The harvest moves from white spring flowers and stacks of beehives in the fields, to rakers harvesting berries that are sent to the factory for processing, ending with the burning of the old vines that allows new growth to flourish in the following years. In the manner of educational process films, Blueberryland shows the steps involved in the labor-intensive harvest of this common, popular fruit, while diverging from the traditional by remaining observational in style. Blueberryland avoids text and narration and encourages the viewer to immerse themselves in a meditation on movement, sound, and landscape.
USA 36 min DOC
An experimental narrative based on the murder of Scotty Joe Weaver, a young gay man from rural Alabama. Rather than depict the events surrounding the murder, "The Buried" explores the repressed psychic space of the murderer. Mentored by experimental filmmaker Nina Menkes, the film creates a fractured and taxing masculine space, a film drifting towards the root of the crime.
USA 21 min EXP
The Chambered Nautilus explores the idea of the Nautilus as a metaphor for the creation, transformation and the evolution of life. In nature, the nautilus shell grows in a spiral shape and consists of a series of ever-larger chambers in which that animal lives for a season until it outgrows that particular space. The Nautilus then enlarges its shell by the addition of a new chamber, suitable for its next stage of its life. Drawing from Oliver Holmes’ poem of the same name, The Chambered Nautilus is animated underwater film in which objects continually transform, dissolve and evolve. Made from over 100 original photograms, and dozens of nineteenth century collage elements, this 16mm film is entirely hand made.
USA 4 min ANI
This film is the result of a collaboration between Julie Perini and a small stream. Julie scratched a line into black film leader and left it in a stream for a week. The dirt, rocks, and water in the stream created the flecks of white that you see, and the soundtrack.
USA 2 min EXP
During the summer of 2011, Julie Perini created Collaboration with the Earth, which involved cutting a moving-picture advertisement for General Electric into two-second strips and then unearthing one strip of film each day for twenty days. She then pieced the film back together so viewers can witness the gradual decay of the image and sound in the film. The result is an array of brightly colored abstract compositions borne of Julie’s collaboration with dirt, worms, water, and other earthly forces.
USA 1 min EXP
Confessors is a short, personal essay that attempts to retrace bits of lost or inaccessible family histories. The artist’s grandparents give him a can of film marked “x-rated” without explanation, as well as an old 8mm camera. The film was lost before he was able to watch it. The resulting video is a consideration of the ephemeral nature of home movies and the lives they can’t help but fail to preserve
USA 19 min EXP
An African-American twenty-something finds his Nigerian-immigrant stepfather passed out drunk in their apartment building hallway and is manipulated by a friend into murdering him.
USA 27 min NAR
(in collaboration with poet LIsa Gill)A small book of personal poems about the night sky made its way into my hands and the whole thing struck me as quite theatrical: hence a virtual proscenium stage for poetry to play itself upon. Text-as-text, text-as-image, avoiding poetic illustration by way of poetic illustration. Sound composed for 60 cycle speaker hum and Tibetan bell.
"Medusa, Herodototus, Pascal. Contemplation is a monstrous task. Count the days I didn't look up as history." Lisa Gill, from Dark Enough
USA 7 min EXP
An elliptical cinematic song cycle, The Deep Dark journeys into the psyche with animation, projected shadows, fleeting lights, and ethereal vocal incantations.
The film is composed of layers and cycles edited to early experiments of a looping rhythm and vocal track by songwriter and experimental musician Emily Lacy.
Music was originally performed live and has been recorded in one track.
USA 7 min ANI
"Deep Horizon" involves a montage around the deep ecology of southwest Louisiana during the Gulf oil spill in July 2010. Shot at the closed beaches and nearby swamps, bayous and oil fields...a biosphere of crisis implicating algae, alligators, egrets, humans...
USA 8 min DOC
DEVIL’S GATE explores the metaphysical undercurrents of a Southern California landscape scarred by fire. The film lyrically depicts the physical and mythological terrain of Devil’s Gate Dam, located at the nexus of Pasadena’s historical relationship with technology and the occult, and intertwining with its central figure, Jack Parsons, who some believe to have opened a dark portal in this place. The film merges an observational portrait of a landscape transformed by fire, ash and water with a fragmentary textual narrative, providing a view into man’s obsession with controlling and transcending the forces of nature and spirit. It can be seen as unearthing a subconscious of the landscape, as the echoes of the past reverberate in the present and infect our perception and experience of place.
USA 20 min EXP
Nick is a gay Korean-American man living in Koreatown Los Angeles with his partner Brian and their dog Chloe. When Nick attends his baby nephew's dol, a traditional Korean first birthday party, he finds himself yearning for a life just out of reach.
USA 12 min NAR
A man has a strange experience that ends up affecting the people around him.
USA 3 min ANI
James T. Hong
http://www.yinjuchen.com/end_transmission.html
A decoded, alien environmental message, structured as a hypnotic experimental film, forcefully and poetically warns us of their return and the planet’s re-colonization.
TAIWAN/NETHERLANDS 16min EXP
The working day expands and contracts in San Francisco’s bubble, boom and bust.
OR
Working minutes and commuter hours, soft ambience and hard architecture, resistance and surveillance, public and private space. San Francisco 2010.
OR
Time, work-discipline and financial capital.
OR
A frenetic fusion of working minutes and commuter hours, soft ambience and hard architecture, resistance and surveillance, public and private space—San Francisco rides the economy of boom and bust in the 21st century.
USA 6 min EXP
Fin de Siècle reveals the metaphysical dimensions of the Victorian era and examines the pervasive preoccupations of the time with superstition, novelty, spirituality and death.
USA 8 min ANI
Angeni, a young masculine female track star, who dreams to become the world's fastest woman runner, is made to feel her strength and talent to be invalid when she faces the imposed sex verification test after winning an important race.
Tormented by medical scrutiny, which makes her believe that she is abnormal, Angeni's sense of self is undermined, and her athletic dream is shattered by a social institution in need of classifying her.
TAIWAN & USA 13 min NAR
Start Tonight
Sonya, a 17-year-old Russian immigrant, lives in a claustrophobic Brooklyn apartment with her dad and his ever-growing menagerie of cats. When the landlady threatens to evict them, Sonya ventures out for a night she will never forget.
USA 16 min NAR
Beginning with a written description of Mike Kuchar’s film of the same name scrolled over images, which counter the text, Fragments explores the fracture of attention. Disjointed architectural ruins, neoclassical embellishments, sculptural remains, and foam detritus are infused with sounds of ubiquitous technologies that permeate the everyday as the video builds into a song of temporality and permanence. Fragments is as much a meditation on the ruins of ancient civilizations as it is homage to telephones and tourist slide shows.
USA 11 min EXP
“Ghost of Yesterday” - a collage of rotoscoped home movies - is inspired by childhood memories of religion and altered consciousness. The film explores our collective abandonment of analog imagery and is my personal attempt to reconcile with digital imagery.
USA 5 min EXP
Girl Next Door is an experimental documentary about a cluster of apartment dwellers in a North Portland neighborhood that combines factual and fictional information to create a portrait of a micro-community.
USA 20 min EXP
A found footage film constructed primarily of decayed/abused fill. Spliced into and physically stuck to 16mm magnetic audio tracks of another film I removed the bits of picture. Then, reprinted it in an attempt to gain an understanding of the images left unobscured by blotches of mag, and in doing so I literally watched its continued demise; its further fall into chaos. Similarly, the audio is primarily the original audio, including the noise from the magnetic track, both verbatim and manipulated.
USA 5 min ANI
A-Zhi returns home to Taiwan for the first time in many years just as his younger brother, A-Yong, is leaving with friends for “huan dao,” or a round-the-island scooter trip. An accident with A-Yong's scooter causes them to spend time together in a dysfunctional reunion.
USA/TAIWAN 20 min NAR
An encounter with the transfaluminal ideoglyphs of a forgotten people.
USA 15 min EXP
Ceramic sculptures and 2d digital animation are used to describe the complicated feelings of grief and loss.
USA 3 min EXP
SAYURU'S EMBROIDERY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2wRXKaf6a0
Every time Kiyumi writes one poem, her friend Sayuru embroiders one leaf on a book cover that she will use to cover Kiyumi's rainbow colored book of poetry.
JAPAN 30 min NAR
“In Labyrinthine (2010) Biermann takes forty-one shots of memorable and iconographic moments in Hitchcock’s classic Vertigo (1958). The shots are superimposed on top of each other creating a hypnotic labyrinth of repetitions and transformations...
The images have a stuttering and discontinuous logic which arrests and focuses on perceptual phenomena which slips away when seeing the film. Biermann opens these intervals of the imperceptible and enlarges them and turns them into art form of its own. It is as if he uses the technologically enhanced object quality of the images to explore the optical unconscious by means not envisioned by Walter Benjamin.”
Eivind Rossaak
USA 15 min EXP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mpuoBsUDt4#watch-main-area
“History is complicated.
Nations are complicated.
The political is complicated.
Suffering is not.”
Focusing on the history and victims of Japanese biological warfare, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, historical revisionism, and the legacy of World War II in China.
“Lessons” highlights how nationalism and the United States have influenced the Sino-Japanese history conflict, and how governments, ideology, and propaganda affect the reception and perception of “historical truth.”
USA/CHINA/GERMANY/TAIWAN 106 min DOC
The Mansion of Happiness is an animated 16mm film inspired by poet Robin Ekiss’s book of the same name. Drawing its title from the first board game released in the United States in 1894, The Mansion of Happiness explores the philosophical boundaries between myth and memory and between our inner and outer worlds. Comprised from original photograms, and hundreds of nineteenth century collage elements, the film takes us through a landscape of “miniatures, dolls and toys, magic acts and mysterious maternal passageways .”
USA 5 min ANI
(Attack of the Killer
Mutant Chickens)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ2Q0Fd6YN8
In the near future, Bangladesh is terrorized by killer mutant chickens.
Masud Khan, Dhaka city’s number one mutant chicken chef, doesn’t know why things got to be this way. All he knows is that people still want chicken on the menu, and that he and his team of heavily armed chicken hunters are the only people crazy enough to put chicken on the table.
But one chicken sets its sights on Masud for revenge. It fathers killer mutant offspring and leads them in battle against their human enemy. All hell breaks loose as Masud and his team engage in mortal combat for their lives, for humanity and for tasty chicken biryani. It’s time for the ultimate poultry showdown.
BANGLADESH 15 min ANI
Avery Sutton lives a life that is governed by her fears. When a stranger asks for help, she is sure that it is a kidnapping attempt. Avery follows her instinct but begins to question her choices, wondering if the world is really as scary as she's heard.
USA 10 min NAR
While hiding in an attic, two teenagers discover personal artifacts from the 1940s. As they dress in the outfits of the time period, they begin to playfully assume elderly identities.
USA 10 min NAR
(1: memento mori)
the first part of THE NEVEREND STORY triptych;
ephemeral minds find love in the universe;
let's rot.
USA 5 min EXP
In this handmade film, composed of more than 4000 collages, the actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role. Night Hunter evokes a disquieting dreamscape, drawn from allegory, myth and archetype. Music and sound by Larry Polansky.
USA 16 min ANI
& Jon Schmalz
*filmmakers will be in attendance
Our story concerns a couple in their early 30s - Paul and Molly - who inherit a river house on a plot of land just outside of Austin, Texas. They excitedly spend their nights and weekends there, fixing it up and trying to get a hang of rural life. Gordon, a farmer in his 50s who has leased and tended the acreage for decades, is hesitant to accept his new landlords as members of his home; Molly and Paul have not yet earned their country credentials, so he takes it upon himself to test their fortitude. As Gordon's trials intensify the couple is faced with the threatening consequences of their own inexperience.
USA 68 min NAR
http://ontheedge.niu.edu/videos.html
Seven women courageously step out of America's shadow of shame, homelessness, lugging family troubles and deep-seated anxiety as they grapple to avoid returning to their nomadic existence. Their brutal honesty reveals not only the turmoil and tragedies that led to their homelessness but also their vulnerability of returning to a life of invisible struggle to survive. Their stories give new meaning to life “on the edge.”
USA 23 min DOC
Shot over a three-month period, PANIC ROOM documents a small Tokyo apartment before and after the East Japan earthquake and the ensuing nuclear outbreak in 2011. The ordinary apartment, a seemingly uneventful domestic space, suddenly becomes a mirror of both a collapsing physical reality and a shaken personal state, creating an intertwining parallel between the external and the psychological that reflects the panicking times of the great catastrophe.
HONG KONG 6 min EXP
"Pennipotens" is based on the Flemish fairytale "White Caroline and Black Caroline," first recorded by Edmund Dulac in 1916. Out of spite, a mother repeatedly tries to kill her "beautiful" daughter, although her attempts are always secretly foiled by her beloved "ugly" daughter.
USA 18 min ANI
Pop is a three minute humorous abstract interpretation of the history of life on earth from beginning to end, just in time for 2012.
CANADA 3 min ANI
Danny, 39, a sometimes artist, takes a job as BOBO, a children's birthday party clown. Armed with a joke book and a duffle bag full of props, Danny heads out to a party in the Rhode Island suburbs, where he must use his wits against both the kids and adults.
USA 18 min NAR
http://coilproductions.com/cp/Removed_Trailer.html
Water can be intimate or expansive, life giving or life destroying. It is eternal, ephemeral, and in a constant state of change. Removed is an open-ended meditation that asks the viewer to reflect on what it means to be removed. Removal can be self-imposed, voluntary or forced, each with its own particular consequences. The imagery of a harbor dredging is slowed down and altered. This deliberate temporal manipulation allows the viewer to disengage from normal time and provides an avenue for deeper meditation. Expectations of cause and effect are challenged, forcing the viewer to reevaluate his or her relationship to the imagery and its meaning.
USA 12 min EXP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1qqbs5Avgo
Sia has returned home in an emotional twilight, paralyzed by a secret she can't confront. When a friend from the past arrives through their reconnection she is able to find solace and an equilibrium.
AUSTRALIA 12 min NAR
http://bigwhiskeystudios.com/Big_Whiskey/Films.html
Through the process of challenging the old maxim “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” Sterling Hallard Bright Drake parses the line between truth and memory in solving the mysteries surrounding one of the world's most notorious and talked about tombstones. The result is a surprisingly funny and unexpectedly profound meditation on the seemingly inexhaustible optimism and promise of youth, the subsequent inescapable mortal realities of aging, and the bittersweet double-edged sword that comes part and parcel with true love.
USA 15 min DOC
Movements of bowlers form an aggressive arpeggio of sound and image against backgrounds of playful abstraction and calls for civic engagement.
USA 11 min EXP
Mystical and unknown territories are explored from macrocosmic to worlds as seen through a microscope…. Man-made landscapes, mediated through technology merge with the realm of the real in this imaginary terrain, as a series of transmutations take place. Science and the natural world collide. Glow Cat, part land animal and part sea creature makes an appearance as a chimera bringing a healing presence in this world of sinuous permutations.
USA 9 min EXP
Discovery of a film fragment showing a creature that appears to be blond starlet from the neck up. Possibly the love-child of Fay Wray and King Kong, it is said that she lives among us, in the shadows, passing as human.
USA 13 min EXP
Two parents insert themselves into their son's diary and assume several roles until the diary realizes their presence. As the passages fall apart and the son violently tries to get rid of his parents, a film crew appears-framing specifics-searching for concrete answers to an echoing repression. There is Wind That Blows explores the relationship between closeted repression, film making, narrative representation, family history and agency.
USA 31 min EXP
Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escourts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.
-Michael Robinson
“Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson's These Hammers Don't Hurt Us, one of the filmmaker's most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combines Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time" music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante.”
-Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot, Winter 2010
USA 13 min EXP
"Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each."
USA 6 min EXP
http://www.tidyupmovie.com/index.php?page=trailer-en
Tidy Up tells the story of two estranged siblings that struggle to deal with family issues. A young Japanese man, AKIRA enlists professional support to clear up the house that his deceased mother turned into a hoarder's castle, but finds himself in a situation that he wasn't prepared for. The problem is his elder sister, who has willingly moved back in the house to carry on the legacy of her mother's hoarding. Will he be able to persuade his sister to put an end to their family saga?
JAPAN/USA 15 min NAR
http://www.arte.tv/fr/Blow-up---Carte-blanche---Ufo-Dreams-par-Johanna-Vaude/3663080.html
« UFO Dreams » is a sound and visual experience about UFO's and Aliens modern myth. A dream into stars, UFO and Extra-Terrestrial mind...
FRANCE 6 min EXP
A meditation on urban green spaces and the post-industrial cityscape, Up On The Farm explores Brooklyn Grange, a one-acre rooftop organic farm in New York City. Connecting the built and natural environments, this video documents an imaginative experiment in green urban redevelopment, and takes a look at an attempt to transform the roof of a century-old former factory into a sustainable, pastoral haven.
USA 16 min DOC
A portrait of a Korean immigrant who owns and operates a video store in Hollywood. The film explores how movies relate to our lives and live in our conscious.
USA 8 min DOC
http://www.wokeupblack.com/individualvideo.php?id=6
Woke Up Black follows the lives of five Black youth for two years, highlighting their their struggles, triumphs and dreams as they start their journey into adulthood. The film places at its center the voices of Black youth - their ideas, attitudes and opinions that are so often overlooked in today's society.
USA 60 min DOC
