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Program 1
World Travelers
Of The Mind
A series of shorts from the
Czech Republic, Japan, the UK and US about struggle and perseverance.
These subjects fight to remember, to work, and to evolve.
PROGRAM#1
World Travelers Of The Mind
PROGRAM#2
Remembering the
Past
PROGRAM#3
Reframing The Frame
PROGRAM#4
Reinventing Cinema
PROGRAM#5
On The Verge
PROGRAM#6
Can’t Seem To Find The
Words
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Happy
Are the Happy
Sarah Jane Lapp and Jenny Perlin
1999, 16mm, 18 min. Czech Republic/USA
East Bay Premiere
How does one generation of survivors communicate
with the next? A journey into humor guided by the survivors of not-so-funny
lives. Student Academy Award Winner Happy Are the Happy takes a
haunting ride through the past and present of Bosnian, Jewish, and
Romany refugees.
Grandma
Sungyeon Jon
2000, Beta SP, 5 min, Korea
California Premiere
This poignant experimental animation traces
Jon’s grandmother and her experiences surviving World War
II when Japan occupied Korea. Language and culture clash as the
protagonist attempts to reconcile her new language and name.
Closer
Tina Gharavi
2000, 35mm, 24 min, UK East
Bay Premiere
This stunningly realized documentary is
a poignant character study of a working class lesbian. Sundance
Film Festival programmer, Shari Frilot says, “Tina Gharavi
takes documentary film to the next level!” Fiction and documentary
collide in this gripping film as "scenes" from the subject's
life are reenacted for the camera.
Dream
Masayo Nishimura
1999, 16mm, 2:20 min, Japan/USA
San Francisco & Berkeley Premiere
Director’s Choice Award Winner
at the Black Maria Film Festival -Dream follows a woman into the
subway station and evolves into a surreal trip to the moon.
Every Space They Wander
Jennifer Hardacker
1999, 16mm, 8 min, USA West
Coast Premiere
Narrated by award-winning experimental filmmaker
Su Friedrich, three short stories are adapted from folktales from
India, Jakarta, and Ireland. Juxtaposed with haunting images of
the NY subway, Hardacker reveals their relevance even today.
House Taken Over
Liz Hughes
1998, 35mm, 17 min, Australia
A house slowly crumbles as its inhabitants
continue to attempt to maintain order in the haunting and meditative
House Taken Over.
Window
Victoria Livingstone
2000, 35mm, 10 min, USA
Golden Spire Winner, Window is a remarkable
and poignant claymation which follows the protagonist through a
mundane day at work. We observe as he grapples with his search of
a better life in the midst of a regimented world.
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Program 2
Remembering the Past
Films that explore the landscapes of our
pasts through the retelling of histories.
PROGRAM#1
World Travelers Of The Mind
PROGRAM#2
Remembering the Past
PROGRAM#3
Reframing The Frame
PROGRAM#4
Reinventing Cinema
PROGRAM#5
On The Verge
PROGRAM#6
Can’t Seem To Find The
Words
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Introspection
Maya Yonesho
1998, 16mm, 1:30 min, Japan
US Premiere!
How does one communicate without a common
language? With an international cast of narrators Yonesho proves
“you can do it!”
Taxidermy: The Art
of Imitating Life
Eva Sophia Aridjis
1998, 16mm, 7:40 min, USA This
film takes a peek into the strange and artistic work of two Long
Island taxidermists. In crisp black and white Taxidermy pays close
attention to the detail involved in this work and comments on the
natural yet artificial nature of the craft.
Lost Treasures
Jenny Perlin
1999, 16mm, 2.5 min, USA
A short elegy to three women. Perlin hand-processed
this high contrast and damaged film in her effort to express the
disorientation produced by loss.
On Grandma
Michaela Pavlatova
2000, 35mm, 30 min, Czech Republic
This film seamlessly navigates between and
melds together live action documentary, optically printed archival
footage and intricately hand-drawn animation. Pavlatova explores
her grandmother's desires and adventures growing up in Prague. Her
matter of fact recollections of everyday occurrences not only paint
an intimate portrait of one woman's journey through life but also
portrays a broader picture of a country in political turmoil.
Flip Film
Ellen Ugelstad
1999, 16mm, 1:10 min, USA
This award winning film takes its viewers
on a ride through a city with a series of stark black and white
photographs compiled into a Flip Film.
Grace
Lorelei Pepi
1999, 16mm, 6.5 min, USA
An incandescent body floats through an animated
space merging the real and the constructed to portray a surreal
world.
Lineage
Erika Mijlin
1998, Beta SP, 18 min, USA
CA Premiere!
Using film footage and sound recorded by
the filmmaker’s father from the live broadcast of the Apollo
II moon landing, Mijlin reconstructs the event and reflects on the
experience of being an observer. Lineage seeks to relate the concept
of familial inheritance to the broader context of a shared historic
memory.
The Circular Ruins
Julie Goldstein
1998, 16mm, 6 min, USA
Through stop motion animation, a clay man
comes to life and creates water, fire, and air in his urban environment.
Inspired by a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
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Program 3
Reframing The Frame
Filmmakers who explore and exploit the confines
of the medium.
PROGRAM#1
World Travelers Of The Mind
PROGRAM#2
Remembering the Past
PROGRAM#3
Reframing The Frame
PROGRAM#4
Reinventing Cinema
PROGRAM#5
On The Verge
PROGRAM#6
Can’t Seem To Find The
Words
|
The
Last The Rest
Johanna Dery
1999, 16mm 5 min, USA World
Premiere!
Using wood cut animation and live action, The Last The Rest tells
the visually compelling and eerie story of a wingless bird.
Replay
Margaret Haselgrove
1998, 16mm, 6 min, Australia
US Premiere
Replay is a cinematic etude informed by questions
of sexual power and the anticipation of violence through repetition,
fragmentation and allusive, grainy images. The film was created
as one continuous optical effect through frame by frame mastering
of the film negative.
Tending Echo Park
Monica Gazzo
1999, 16mm, 16:07 min, USA
Gazzo lyrically manipulates images and combines
them with writings by Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Antonin
Artaud to create a poetic film commenting on gender and race and
the confines of ones physical environment.
The Shape Of The
Gaze
Maia Carpenter
2000, 16mm, 8 min, USA
This silent, contemplative, hand-painted and optically printed film
objectifies its subjects as the subjects objectify the filmmaker.
Edgeways
Sandra Gibson
1999, 16mm, 4 min, USA CA
Premiere
The found and fragmented footage that makes
up Edgeways strikes a provocative relationship between the physicality
of the film and the filmmaker’s vision and manipulation of
the celluloid.
Cut, Cut, Re-Cut
Sara Takahashi
2000, 16mm 32 min, USA World
Premiere!
Cut, Cut, Re-Cut is a “prosthetic
autobiography” which reveals the filmmaker’s process
of filmmaking as she unravels the secrets of her past. This gorgeous
and gritty hand processed film will keep you guessing.
Removed
Naomi Uman
1999, 16mm, 7 min, USA
With the use of nail polish, bleach and a
magnifying glass, the filmmaker literally erases the image of a
woman in a 70's porno flick.
The Sleepers
Amie Siegel
1999, 16mm, 45 min, USA
Shot entirely at night, using the architecture
of distant windows to explore the tensions between public and private,
intimacy and alienation, the performative and the real, the lyrical
and the vernacular. The film seeks to draw attention to and investigate
the real contradictions present in film language via cinema’s
primary preoccupation — looking, or scopophilia. To watch
is not only to become complicit with the voyeuristic act but to
engage actively in the fulfillment of narrative, and interpretation,
that the cinema implies.
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Program 4
Reinventing Cinema
Filmmakers who reinvent the hollywood narrative
and the role of its female protagonists.
PROGRAM#1
World Travelers Of The Mind
PROGRAM#2
Remembering the Past
PROGRAM#3
Reframing The Frame
PROGRAM#4
Reinventing Cinema
PROGRAM#5
On The Verge
PROGRAM#6
Can’t Seem To Find The
Words
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Illusions
Julie Dash
1983, 34 min, 16mm, USA From
the award winning director of Daughter’s Of The Dust comes
Illusions “one of the most brilliant achievements in style
and concept in recent American cinema.” Clyde Taylor, Whitney
Museum. The time is 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor; the place is
National Studios, a fictitious Hollywood motion picture studio.
Mignon Dupre, a black woman studio executive who appears to be white
and Ester Jeeter, an African American woman who is the singing voice
for a white Hollywood star are forced to come to grips with a society
that perpetuates false images as status quo.
The Escapades of Madame X
Kerry Laitala and Isabel Reichert
1999, 16mm, 10 min, USA West
Coast Premiere
The Escapades of Madame X is a stunningly
optically printed, hand-processed, black and white film that addresses
early Hollywood cinema’s establishment of a woman’s
passive role in narrative film. The female protagonist establishes
a new role that is sexually, intellectually, and physically empowered;
one who takes control and creates meaning through gesture and action.
Chaos Hags I and II
Courtney Egan
2000, Beta SP, 2:30 min, USA
West Coast Premiere
The bodies and voices of famous female movie
stars are reorganized in a collage and looped to create the Chaos
Hags.
My Am
Linda Goode Bryant
1995, 16mm, 52 min, USA
My Am is innovatively constructed and intricately
edited, with stark symbolic performances cut amidst staged encounters.
The depiction of a young African American woman in an almost empty
room listening to messages on her answering machine. Beyond the
room, an artist encounters a patron, young people talk on a street
corner; rumors circulate, gossip is exchanged. Varying from the
serious to the fantastic, the trivial to the entertaining, these
exchanges "glance the schizophrenic landscape on which African
Americans negotiate the conflicts and contradictions of their subjective
and `assimilated' identities.” Linda Goode Bryant
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Program 5
On The Verge
The mind and body diverge in this evening of shorts about loosing
ones faculties...
PROGRAM#1
World Travelers Of The Mind
PROGRAM#2
Remembering the Past
PROGRAM#3
Reframing The Frame
PROGRAM#4
Reinventing Cinema
PROGRAM#5
On The Verge
PROGRAM#6
Can’t Seem To Find The
Words
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Vedma
Allison Schulnik
1999, 16mm, 5:30 min, USA
An eerie, animated story of an evil queen, her fallen castle, and
loyal servant.
Just For You Girls
M.M. Serra
1997, 16mm, 1 min, USA
The title speaks for itself...
Beyond Voluntary
Control
Cathy Cook
2000, 16mm, 30 min, USA World
Premiere Beyond Voluntary Control is a visually lush film
that explores the obsessions, phobias, and diseases that constrict
personal and physical freedom. These ideas are communicated through
a surreal montage of found and constructed images.
A Feminist Creation
Myth
Evelyn Zehraoui
2000, Beta SP, 5 min, USA An
absurd journey through a world of fields filled with penis’
and horny milk shooting cats.
The Devil Lives
in Hollywood
Amy Lockhart
1999, 16mm, 6 min, Canada An
animated film set to a naively sung poem. Through simple hand drawn
animation, the film expresses confusion and disillusion about the
way the world is run.
Life/Expectancy
Michele Fleming
1999, 16mm, 30 min, USA California
Premiere
Black Maria Film Film Festival Director’s Choice winner Life/Expectancy
by Michele Fleming meditates on a woman’s midlife search for
meaning. This stunningly constructed film uses scenes from The Misfits,
Intolerance, Sunset Boulevard, and Lady From Shanghai as as visual
texts to unpack the protagonists story. “Ravishing, brutal
and emotive, this is one film unafraid to wear its heart and its
brains on its sleeve, and marks Fleming’s arrival as a major
American filmmaking talent.” Michael Hoolboom, IMAGES Film
Festival
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Program 6
Can’t Seem To
Find The Words
Characters who search for ways to
navigate smoothly through their troubled worlds.
PROGRAM#1
World Travelers Of The Mind
PROGRAM#2
Remembering the Past
PROGRAM#3
Reframing The Frame
PROGRAM#4
Reinventing Cinema
PROGRAM#5
On The Verge
PROGRAM#6
Can’t Seem To Find The
Words
|
Mrs
Rodriguez
Karen Rodriguez
1999, Video, 4 min, USA Mrs Rodriguez
employs a realistic domestic soundscape, the repetition of an image
and disjuncted text from a letter to explore how fear of cultures
and language collide. Slowly the narrative is revealed.
Night Cries
Tracey Moffatt
1990, 16mm, 19 min, Australia
10 year anniversary Screening On
an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal
woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s
attentive gestures almost mask a palpable hostility. Their story
alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children
to be raised in white families. The stark, sensual drama unfolds
without dialogue against vivid painted sets as the smooth crooning
of an Aboriginal Christian singer provides ironic counterpoint.
Tumbleweed Town
Samara Halperin
1999, 16mm, 7 min, USA
Join Todd, the Tonka Cowboy on his hitch hiking adventures through
Tumbleweed Town where gay cowpokes roam the Texas plains looking
for love.
The Ride
William Virginia Basquin
2000, 16mm, 9 min, USA
In this meditative adventure story about a transgendered cab driver
and a potentially penniless passenger.
Telly-Vision
Liz Hughes
1999, 16mm, 11 minutes, Australia
US Premiere
A pair of unhappy lovers search for a TV of their dreams. The nightmare
begins when they can’t fit it into their apartment.
Lunch
Sarah Shute
2000, 16mm, 3 min, USA SF
Premiere
A contemplative cost analysis...
Jamais Vu
Maria Langhi
1999, 16mm, 13 min, Argentina
US Premiere
Two nameless strangers wander through the streets and on the buses
of Buenos Aires. This methodical and mysterious film lets the viewer
glimpse into their world of power and desire.
Tourettes Tics
Janet Merewether
1993, 16mm, 6 min, Australia
US Premiere
What do Gilles de la Tourette’s disease,
animal impersonators, Freud;s patients, and the Ancient Greeks have
in common? Merewether’s fast and funny Tourettes Tics will
tell all.
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