Cinematic Era: 1999 Vintage

In feudal China, women, usually with bound feet, were denied educational opportunities and condemned to social isolation. But in Jian-yong county in Hunan province, peasant women miraculously developed a separate written language, called Nu Shu, meaning "female writing." A thoroughly engrossing documentary that revolves around the filmmaker's discovery of eighty-six-year-old Huan-yi Yang, the only living resident of the Nu Shu area still able to read and write Nu Shu. Exploring Nu Shu customs and their role in women's lives, the film uncovers a women's subculture born of resistance to male dominance, finds a parallel struggle in the resistance of Yao minorities to Confucian Han Chinese culture, and traces Nu Shu's origins to some distinctly Yao customs that fostered women's creativity.

The Dean of the American Film Institute speaks on the portrayal of utopia in film.

Experts ranging from Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo to scientists from NASA weigh in on the evolutionary future of mankind and machinery.

This is not only the story of everyday life in the big cities; it is a reflection on the change of human, social and aesthetic values.

"You would make a good lawyer" is a film about employment, and the cages we all inhabit. The title is taken from a fortune that I kept receiving from fortune cookies, which seemed to capture the irony of my predicament perfectly. (JB)

College Girls: Directed by Robert Delos Reyes. With Hazel Espinosa, Jasmine Tolentino, Rosemarie Rose, Nicko Montes.

A documentary about the Cordillera enriched by the Ifugao's creation of the Banaue

The film uses reproduction, repetition, and interframe windows to work with the essential elements of film. The film is made from contact prints between 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm on Super 8 in a darkroom, using Man Ray's revolutionary technique, the photogram. This technique is the result of close contact between several formats. The images become the object instead of being mere material. Then the film is blown up to 16mm with an optical printer. The image/non-image elements of the film present an illusion (pornography) that the filmmakers have created on the film stock (the screen). This illusion allows the viewer to discover the source of the film: the film itself as material, the mechanical movement projected through light.

Beethoven: Complete Violin Sonatas - Anne-Sophie Mutter

While studying in Beijing, China, Yoh leaves her wallet in a taxi. He is depressed that he will not get it back, but the next thing he knows, a Japanese man in the taxi has delivered it to him. A delighted Yoh goes out to meet the person to thank him. The person was a woman called Tomomi, also a student studying abroad. Despite meeting each other for the first time, their conversation is lively and Yoh immediately falls in love with her. When Tomomi told him she wanted to see him again, he gave her his pager number. The next day, Yoh sends a message to her pager.

Is this Japan in the near future or a place that closely resembles Japan? In a town where the weather forecast always ends with an announcement about a 'dull rain', people live their lives constantly worrying about the rain. The 'dull rain' is said to be the vapour that forms when a substance called H.U.A.N. in the air combines with another substance called Violence (VIOLENCE), which rises into the sky and forms clouds. However, neither clouds nor rain is visible to the human eye, nor do we know what happens when they fall.

A university student named World. She thinks about things in her head more than anyone else, but her actions often run on empty, and from the outside, she leads a dull life. His girlfriend is cold, his friend, with whom he has had a rivalry since primary school, is steadily shaping his future dreams, and the girl he fell in love with at first sight is his girlfriend. When he starts to feel tired and doubtful about himself, he ends up reading a diary dropped by his girlfriend. It contains a story that drives the world further into chaos and spinning out of control.

Tahoka presents not only an artistic homage to Native peoples land, but it also problematizes contemporary nomadic journeys that have been shaping the Texan historical and geographical contexts. The lonely and exhausting walk with a heavy suitcase across the lake, visually complements contemporary promenades that move in and out of different languages, histories, countries and cultures.

Filmed in the high atlas in Morocco. 1999

A computer-generated video work starring Mengbo as a war correspondent interviewing a computer clone in the midst of a battle. The footage is a surreal, poignant and profound exchange on the nature of militarism and violence, both real and virtual.

Animated short film presented at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 1999 by students from GOBELINS, the school of image.

Film by Masaki Hanami, 1999. The days of youth that can never be repeated. It's an orthodox story, but the pain and catharsis are depicted in this work by entrusting it to the act of "running."

Three worker-owned businesses show what it's like to work collectively, manage a business and deal with problems in a truly democratic way. The Cheeseboard Bakery and Cheese Shop with 18 workers, Rainbow Grocery with 150 workers, and Inkworks Press with18 members, all located in the San Francisco Bay Area, are successful worker-owned businesses, and members of NoBAWC.

The two clips chosen are the theft of a necklace from a department store and a look at the erotic possibilities of ice cubes, but the burden of narrative passes to the music, a performance by Maria João & Grupo Cal Viva, which, like the visual images, repeats the same ideas with variation after variation, but builds to its own unnerving climax. The clips are re-worked into cinemascope format as a double screen that shows sometimes mirrored images and sometimes contrasting ones. Occasionally, they overflow onto the full screen.

A documentary charting the early years of the Aztec civilization in ancient Mexico.

A hot summer at George Sand's house in Nohant. Her children, friends and Fryderyk Chopin are staying at the summer resort. The relations between them are extremely confused, full of long-accumulated resentments, regrets, but also deeply hidden passions. The main character in the whole story, however, is George Sand. In her shadow, under her caring supervision and watchful eye, Chopin's talent flourishes. His music is everywhere at home.

Film 35 mm – charcoal and pencil on paper. Created, directed, designed and animated by: Mario Addis

Goofy takes to the water to master the art of wakeboarding, but his attempts at difficult stunts leave him high and dry.

A dramatic, medieval tale about an evil queen and her court jester. He performs for her, she forces him to kill himself, and then he explodes, and his gooey innards cover her entire giant castle and it magically morphs into something less evil.

Untitled haphazardly records two lessons: one a father’s instruction to son on the proper handling of a firearm, the other a son’s instruction to father on how to use home-video equipment. The firearm instruction is recorded with the lens-cap accidentally left on, replacing the image with a cryptic bulls-eye symbol of pulsing shadow and light, shifting with the camera’s auto-focus.

Short film by Jan Peters

After being forced to move out of his apartment after he runs out of money, a young man named Tanaka decides to make a go of life on the streets. He finds a sheltered, deserted spot in the spaces between the city buildings, and things seem to be going fairly comfortably for him. After a short time, however, he discovers that the tiny corridors between the buildings seem to extend for miles in every direction, and that there is a tribe of violent people living in them, led by a strange old man. Will Tanaka be able to live in peace with them, or will he have to fight for his life?

The filmmaker lives in a dark and cold stone-paved town, far from her homeland in Taiwan. Leafing through photographs, her grandmother unravels a memory. Meanwhile, the French-speaking son of a Chinese man, who had arrived in France as a coal mine worker one century ago, speaks about his life. This film captures the emotions of wanderers caught between nations and history.

A declaration of love for one's vocation in life.

When Jimmi Montana sets up and kills the son of a Yakuza boss, he doesn't know who he's messing with. The Yakuza boss sends out the "Black Death" after him. Silent film with English intertitles.

August learns a lesson in love and humanity as his candy cane becomes a popular Christmas reminder for people throughout the world.

16mm film that came out of a soundtrack called Très Lent by Tarrl Lightowler & Matthew Swiezynski which was a nihilistic amalgam of 840 layers of Erik Satie's Vexations. Layers were recorded and re-recorded on a reel to reel with the erase head covered up. New melodic elements added in 2013.

A boy who knows his nail polish recounts his favorite colors and the stories they recall.

An experimental short exploring the absences and buried histories that follow the act of leaving home, filtered through the many routes that leaving home takes for a "Canadien" daughter of Yugoslav immigrants: cultural displacement, assimilation, mother/daughter histories, sexuality and memory. Childhood and recent Super 8 footage is intercut to create a repository for family portraits, cultural memories of the balkans, immigration history, and personal reflection.

A therapist and her client have the same dream. For both women, its is moment of celluloid synchronicity.

This film juxtaposes the director's grandmother's romantic attempted suicide at seventeen with his affair with a boy from Latvia.

A 1955 lesbian love triangle.

A cast of five handcrafted puppets bring the audience through a luv story about early confused hot queer luv... with live puppet sex scenes and real broken hearts.

It is a travel diary that covers the topography of the landscape, both in nature and in urban graphic and architectural details: commercial signs, door numbers, tiles, statues, pictograms, arabesques, emblems, allegories ...

"This two-screen dual projector film extends Brown's use of chemically tortured celluloid to the breaking point. A collaboration with his long-time sound colleague John Kamevaar, 'Fine Pain' is an extended dialogue between image and sound - like a prolonged riff of free jazz between two masters. The discordant tensions of this film will keep you on the very edge of your seat, astonish you with the mesmerizing range of colour and abstraction and the over-modulated sound vibrations." (Pleasure Dome program notes, Toronto, March 2000)

They took part in the largest airborne assault in WWII. They have fought in the jungles of Vietnam and the rugged terrain of the Balkans. And no matter what the generation, there is an unbreakable bond only they can understand. They are members of the elite 101st Airborne, otherwise known as the Screaming Eagles.

This documentary recounts how the National Park Service relocated the Cape Hatteras Light to safety from the ever eroding Atlantic shoreline.

Great Lakes historians offer the backgrounds to individual lighthouses on both the Michigan and Wisconsin shores, along with entertaining anecdotes about noteworthy lighthouse keepers, ghost stories, and comprehensive information about restoration efforts. Includes information on Pottawatomie, Cana Island and Eagle Bluff lights in Door County, WI ; North Point, Milwaukee, WI ; Wind Point and Racine Reef ; Southport Lighthouse, Kenosha, WI. ; Grosse Point, Evanston, IL. ; and Sand Point, Escanaba, MI.

Cruising and bluesing with a sequence of four slides found on the street, (believed to be the Andrews Sisters) resampled and animated.

Bondage in Belfast.

The hands of time won't stand still for anyone, not even a community Christmas program Grandpa Jim is scheduled to make a guest appearance in a special Christmas program in Branson, Missouri. Backstage at the program , it is chaos--the children are out of control, and the director is out of patience. To make matters worse, Grandpa Jim's truck breaks down on the way to the performance. Fortunately he is able to convince a reluctant police officer to give him a lift to the program, or we all would have missed out on a wonderful presentation filled with original music, new talent, and a lot of fun. The entire family will enjoy this special treat as they consider in a more meaningful way the great gift God gave us--His only Son.