1997   /    1998   /    1999   /    2000   /    2001   /    2002   /    2003   /    2004   /    2005   /    2006

Program 1
Lost In Translation
Films which explore the gap between history and memory, between language and communication.

PROGRAM#1
Lost In Translation

PROGRAM#2
Interior Worlds

PROGRAM#3
Dark Mirrors

PROGRAM#4
Born in Flames

Dover Street
Imelda Pricherit
1999, 16mm, 2 min. USA, San Francisco Premiere
A silent collage of images and text.

Passages
Lisl Ponger
1996, 16mm, 12 min. Austria
In this layered meditation on travel and the travelogue, Super 8 and 8mm films made by
tourists circa 1940-1960 are coupled with a meditative soundtrack as each person recounts memories, revealing travel as a post-colonial journey through space and time. Lisl Ponger creates an imaginary map of the twentieth century on which the stories of emigration are engraved like well-worn tracks of memory.

Egypt
Kathrin Resetarits
1997, 16mm, 10 min. Austria
Winner of the Ann Arbor Film Festival Award for best sound track, Egypt is a film which is almost silent. A film about the sign language of deaf-mutes, a language which, like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, links the symbolic terminology of words with the mimetic and analogous representations of graphic gestures. Sober black and white scenes show how “shark”, “widow”, “Marilyn Monroe”, a James Bond sequence, a Viennese song or the account of a treasure hunt undertaken by two holiday makers in Egypt look in sign language. This film is an introduction to an unfamiliar way of experiencing the world, where one sees the sounds without hearing them.

The Tongue
Sara Varon
1997, 16mm, 6 min USA California Premiere
This colorful animated story follows the exploits of a charismatic but avaricious tongue. Through this allegory, the film explores themes of communication, excess and information overload in our high tech age.

The Whole History of That
Jenny Perlin
1998, 16mm, 17 min USA California Premiere
In this deeply witty film, the filmmaker embarks on a search for her great-grandmother's family, a search which takes her from Ohio to Prague to the small town of Pribor-where Freud as a recurring character. In the end, Perlin’s exhaustive search turns up only fragments of an imagined history and unanswered questions about the reliability of memory and history.

Fever
Paula M. Froehle
1998, 16mm, 7 min USA San Francisco Premiere
A visually dense, poetic exploration of the bond between a mother and child. ECUs of quotidian objects, distorted “synchronous” sounds, and floating text intermesh to convey the fluctuation between security and danger, confidence and doubt when a child falls ill.

Leche
Naomi Uman
16mm, 30 min USA/Mexico
This non-traditional documentary draws the viewer into the daily life of a cattle ranching family in Aguascalientes, Mexico. From making cheese to branding bulls to milking cows, Leche re-frames the viewers perspective with non-synchronous sounds and languages, blended with text and beautifully hand held cinematography. This lyrical black and white film was hand-processed in buckets and hung dry on a clothesline. Golden Spire Winner

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Program 2
Interior Worlds
A humorous, shocking, and subtle look at the human psyche.

PROGRAM#1
Lost In Translation

PROGRAM#2
Interior Worlds

PROGRAM#3
Dark Mirrors

PROGRAM#4
Born in Flames

Program 3
Dark Mirrors
An evening of mystery, suspense and horror.

PROGRAM#1
Lost In Translation

PROGRAM#2
Interior Worlds

PROGRAM#3
Dark Mirrors

PROGRAM#4
Born in Flames

Take Off
Gunvor Nelson
1972, 16mm, 10 minutes, Sweden
“Ellion Ness, a thoroughly professional stripper, goes through her paces, bares her body, and then astonishingly and literally, transcends it. While the film makes a forceful political statement on the image of women and the true meaning of stripping, the intergalactic transcendence of its ending locates it firmly within the mainstream of joyous humanism and stubborn optimism.” B. Ruby Rich

Under My Skin
Jacqueline Matisse
1998, 16mm, 1 min Australia US Premiere
Fi Fi ends an uncomfortable relationship.

Razed By Wolves
Kathryn Ramey
1998, 16mm, 8min USA West Coast Premiere
This experimental film repositions the fairy tale princess in an urban, nocturnal landscape.

Women Are Not Little Men
Lisa Hayes
1998, 16mm, 15 min Canada California Premiere
An insider look at how those scalp ripping industrial accidents really happen. Using training manual text by “some man at a big corporation” and 1950s images of women at work, Hayes humorously demonstrates the ridiculous lengths to which male managers went to prove women’s inferiority and help men adapt to the growing female workforce.

The Red Shoes
Ann Owen
1998, 16mm, 8 min UK US Premiere
The Red Shoes is an animated adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale about a girl who wants a pair of red shoes. Owen's deadpan narration, combined with horrifyingly literal visuals turn what was meant to be a simple morality tale on the sins of pride into a gothic nightmare. This story is often read to young children -- it makes you think, huh?

Deep Creep
Kate Haug
1998, 16mm, 7:14 min USA California Premiere
Deep Creep is an exploration of science and sexual melancholia. Haug exposes the scatological dreams of anxious and unfulfilled womanhood.

Mercy
Abigail Child
1986-1989, 16mm, 10 min USA
Mercy dissects the game mass media plays in private perceptions.

Hub Cap
Patty Chang and Anie S8 Stanley
1997, Super 8 (Video), 6 min., USA
Using death-by-sex narrative images mixed with a reconstructed radio talk show, Hub Cap confounds desire, disgust, film reality and sexual fantasy to produce an unappetizing look at anticipation, fear and the horror genre. Not for the weak at heart.

Idolle
Petra Schroder & Anja Perl
1999, Video, 7 min, Germany
The animated story of the rivalry between and flower and a dog.

Lady Fingers
Rita Gonzalez and Rachel Mayeri
1998, 8mm/video, 8 minutes, USA
Starring local artist/performers Carolyn Cooley and Zoe Kroll, LADY FINGERS is an un-split 8mm horror movie about the unearthly love of a cosmetician at a mortuary for a reader at a stenography school. The film explores the twinning and isolation inherent in lackluster jobs and the idea of women as food. One half of this film was shot upside-down in reverse motion—creating a sort of poorman’s split screen and a cast of doppelgangers.

Safety In Numbers
Amy Harrison 1999, 16mm, 6 min USA World Premiere
Safety In Numbers takes a look at one woman's attempts to quiet the chaos in her mind.
One psychotherapist, while not a film critic per se, has hailed S.I.N. as a "touching portrayal of mild obsessive compulsive disorder with a touch of agoraphobia."

1998 Corporate Sponsorship Parade
Tahlia Drori
1998, 16mm, 2:45 min USA San Francisco Premiere
A low budget horror movie based on actual events.

How To Be A Good Wife
Joan Nidzyn 1997, 16mm, 5 min USA West Coast Premiere
This piece offers a stinging commentary on sexism in mid-century America. Combining found footage of bathing beauties, an archetypal fairy tale, a wistful Bobby Darin song and intentionally matter of-fact text, Nidzyn creates a deft satire.

The London Story
Sally Potter 1987, 16mm, 15 min UK
This lively, accessible spy spoof revolves around the unlikely alliance of three eccentric characters and their mission to uncover government foreign policy duplicity. Beautifully and humorously choreographed against London’s most famed locales. In technicolor! Produced in association with the British Film Institute and Channel Four Television.
“Miraculously outrageous. One of a handful of films which successfully mime and deconstruct Hollywood’s production values. “ Bruce Jenkins, Walker Art Center.

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Program 4
Born in Flames

PROGRAM#1
Lost In Translation

PROGRAM#2
Interior Worlds

PROGRAM#3
Dark Mirrors

PROGRAM#4
Born in Flames

King of the Castle
Jacqueline Matisse
1998, 16mm, 4:53 min Australia Northern California Premiere
This wonderful clay-mation tells the story of the relationship between a father and his daughter, the daughter and her cat, the cat and the father, the father and his chair.

Born In Flames
Lizzie Borden
1983, 16mm, 80 min USA
When Lizzie Borden’s seminal feminist sci-fi thriller opened in 1983, even Variety called it, “impertinent, audacious, and abounding in fresh ideas” the review went on to add, Born In Flames “imagines America after a Social-Democratic cultural revolution, and manages to address the racism in the contemporary feminist movement at the same time. In a period where women realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same—for women, anyway.” Eschewing straightforward dramatic narrative for a collage-like mix of almost documentary scenes of guerilla media take-overs and bantering radio announcers Born In Flames is a refreshing reminder that we can indeed create our own news and bring on change through media.

“Born In Flames sports a grimy, smeary look which pays tribute to its birth in the trashy aesthetics of post-modern street art….Black women, lesbians, leftist intellectuals, punkers, single mothers, the Women’s Army, political militants, and spiritual new-lifers give the film a multi-voiced texture that springs from the real-life personas of the mostly non-professionals Borden recruited as actors.”—Afterimage

“Part sci-fi fantasy, part feminist adventure story, part rock cacophony, part slapstick satire, it presents a quirky, textured portrait of the country ten years after the second American revolution.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

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