Cinematic Era: 2001 Vintage

Terry traverses through the unconscious depths of his/her psyche to combat the single greatest threat to his/her existence.

A spoof about people trying to cash in on "The Lord of the Rings".

A taxi driver takes in charge a curious woman.

Carta alas... Huwag ka nang humirit: Directed by Jose N. Carreon. With Ace Vergel, Antoinette Taus, Wowie De Guzman, Piel Morena.

A film by Donna Cameron

The Hooley Dooleys: Roll Up! Roll Up!

Nicaraguan women tell us about their efforts to change the society in which they live, and about their collective struggle to achieve what has been denied to them. These women speak up and share with us their journey toward a better future for both men and women. Inés, Coquito, Avelina, Gerónima, are women who look ahead, and through a radio station claiming their right to live with dignity.

Short film by Okamoto Akio.

What draws this handsome youth to a peculiar and sizeable stranger? Find out in this startling award-winning short.

Two skateboarders search for the perfect swimming pool to skate, but $40,000 and a sex change later, they find true love instead. Henry and Fakie live a joyous simple life combing the city for a Blue Haven pool to skate. If only Fakie could find the forty grand he needs to bankroll his sex change. Luckily Fate intrudes to lend a helping hand but neither Henry nor Fakie anticipate that every weird accident is usually followed up by increasingly weird accidents.

A film investigating ancient writings with a visual reconstruction of the Avesta texts and beautiful settings.

A rare opportunity to see life among the Maasai as filmed by one of their own warriors. The filmmaker and narrator is a Maasai who is studying at a United States college. He returned to Kenya to film the lifestyles and ceremonies of his people before their culture becomes extinct. We learn that the traditional pastoral and nomadic life is under attack by outside forces who want to impose a money economy and privatize the land.

The everyday life of a lonely pensioner revolves around a dog and a TV set. The failure of the receiver forces him to contact his neighbor.

A musical journey from Tunisia to Cairo, and from Rajasthan to Istanbul and Senegal in search of Islamic music sources. The film delves into the world of Sufism by focusing on the close relationship between learning music and passing on this art through generations.

Among the Senufo people of northern Côte d'Ivoire, the balafon (xylophone with calabash resonators) is an emblematic musical instrument. This film shows balafon orchestras playing in five villages during the two principal days of funeral festivities, celebrations that include the most important rites, ceremonies and rejoicings in the life of the Senufo. During dialogues with Sikaman, a young musician who acted as research assistant for this film series, the master balafonist Nahoua gives the key to understanding how this marvelous music comes into being, and what it means.

This documentary is about the homeland and daily life of an indigenous tribal community in the tropical uplands of central Mindanao in the Philippines. In this small village called Bendum, the local community has successfully struggled after decades of commercialized logging and deforestation, to gain control over their ancestral lands

On the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, victims and perpetrators are coming together in traditionally based reconciliation ceremonies after a decade long civil war left the community bitterly divided. In the largest reconciliation ceremony yet to take, BBA follows fighters who have killed each others families as they come together to break bows and arrows in a traditional gesture of peace. On a more personal journey Francis Boisivere retrieves the bones of a chief he killed, ceremonially returning them to the bereaved wife, Immaculate Atorevi . He seeks forgiveness , she a release from the hatred she harbours.

Tapa cloth, or ngatu as it is called in Tonga, is cloth made from the bark of the mulberry tree. The inner bark is beaten into fine sheets and painted using traditional designs. After centuries of use, ngatu has literally become the fabric of Tongan society. In Tonga and throughout much of Polynesia, bark cloth has deep symbolic and ceremonial use. At birth, babies are swaddled in it. At marriage, newlyweds line their wedding bed, and at death, the departed are buried wrapped in it. This documentary investigates the highly collaborative process of making ngatu and the organizations of women who carry on with the tradition. While the process continues to be passed on from generation to generation, there are signs of change as a cash economy begins to infiltrate Tongan life. Young people show less interest in such labor intensive endeavor in the face of the older generation's belief that this tradition will never die.

The film is about a famous director and cameraman who was born in Perm and graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Perm University. He studied with A. Korolev, L. Yuzefovich, N. Gorlanova, who later became major writers. The author of the film also belonged to this party, where his name was Bob.

Ma Yingli's documentary, produced as part of Kroma Films' "Girls Around the World" series, presents the poignant story of Han Lin, a 17-year old girl prematurely made to enter into the workforce as a Go-Go dancer in order to help her family eke out a living in modern-day Beijing. Born at the center of the metropolis, on the surface Lin is an ordinary girl from a traditional Chinese family; upon closer inspection, though, she is mature beyond her years and faces an enormous burden of responsibility unfamiliar to most young women in the West.

The video presents a story of two women: one circulates the streets of Montreal, the other is grounded and standstill in her private space. The images of women dwelling within the exterior and interior spaces are complemented by a narration recounted with a female voice. The poetic story is doubled up by an echo-like delay on a second audio track. This fact emphasizes the ambiguous character of the subject as one and/or many. The 2:30 minute long text is recounted mainly in English, but there are three short audio segments where Polish, Italian, English and French sentences are pronounced simultaneously creating an uncanny audio-cacophony. This new non-language enriches the ideas of walking on one hand, and on being grounded, on the other.

Australia has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. The suicide rate in men under 25 has tripled in the last 30 years, and young men in rural and remote communities are particularly vulnerable. This reality has disturbing implications for society. When it affects you directly, it's shattering. In this very personal film, director Jessica Douglas-Henry and her sister Alix explore the impact of their brother’s suicide. In 1996 James Dalmann killed himself. He was found dead in the bathroom of his housing commission unit in Geraldton, Western Australia. James was only twenty. Although this film is about James, it's really Alix's story. It's about the people left behind, whose lives have been changed forever by the suicide of someone they loved. Although Our Brother James focuses on a personal tragedy, it is ultimately a film about survival and growth, about love, strength and hope for the future.

Mengbo turns to the Cultural Revolution, creating animations based on two widely-known storybooks and a technical guidebook. In recasting One Silver Dollar, an account by a soldier of the People's Liberation Army of his family's tragic history prior to 1949, Mengbo employs cinematic techniques to turn images appropriated from a static black-and-white picture book into an engaging and dynamic experience. The Bloody History of the Three Stones, a chronicle of the conditions suffered by workers in Tianjin City in the 1940s, is presented by Mengbo in a style analogous to the manual slide shows of his childhood, which, in the absence of television and movies, were a major source of entertainment. An animation of The Technology of Slides Shows examines a PLA manual for creating animated effects in slide shows. A soundtrack, of found music and sounds, accompanies each piece.

Kaleidoscopics brings together pornographic stills from the internet and bubbles at the edge of running water, putting both through the same digital processes. Eyes, faces and limbs surface and sink again in sequences of coloured tessellations, lead by a music soundtrack that overlays breathy sound with formal patterning.

An experiment in personal history. The footage was shot in the London docklands, and its trains and bridges prompt a meditation on nationality, identity and language, spoken in German with English subtitles. The speaker's first words, in German, are " I don't speak German".

Short film by Jean-Philippe Desclandes and Genevieve Gauckler

It's the middle of summer in a cemetery under the blazing sun. In front of a gravestone, the protagonist sends a shout. He keeps shouting "Go, go, go, Akiyama~" until he feels dizzy. What is the reason for this? Is this the grave of the Akiyama family in the first place? ("Remnants")

This film I found and found I could not change without degrading, too stunning was the as yet unknown hobbyist's joy in mixing potent, posed and oddly distant pictures from his private life with the symbols of small town identity politics Civic leaders of Boulder, Colorado organized the Pay Dirt Pow Wow in 1934 to bring miners and farmers together and lift their spirits with a community festival. Soon renamed Pow Wow Days, it was last celebrated in 1978.

Originally projected in the interior of a customized Dodge at the 2001 Armory Show in New York, The Van features Bag as three young female artists riding in the back of a van, en route to the Armory Show. Their gallerist Leroy, dressed as a pimp, is the driver of the van; he promises them major recognition and designer handbags. Fox, Honey and Fiona compete for Leroy's favor by detailing the inane—but not utterly improbable—pieces they're showing at the art fair, and the sexy clothes they'll wear to the opening. The name-dropping and catty glances escalate as each woman contends that she, more than the others, needs to use the van for her installation near the gallery's booth. As Bag derides the wish lists of the art-star hopefuls (the Turner Prize, the cover of ArtForum, Rosalind Krauss' critical attention, "more product endorsement"), she implicates the contemporary art world—herself included—in a bacchanal of greed.

The moment when malice takes shape Three young men and a woman are in a room in a flat. One of the men, Satou, has been shot dead, and the woman is crying, but it does not seem to be out of grief over Satou's death. Suzuki and Yamada are arguing about who should look out the window. They have no idea who has been shooting at this room, for what purpose, or at whom. They don't know what they're up against, where they are, or how many people they have. Did the police shoot at them because they had brought a woman into the room to rape her? If so, how did they find out? It could have been a mistake, but there is no way to be sure, and the reality is that there are dead bodies in front of them, and if they go near the window they could be shot. The leader of the group, Suzuki, is frustrated and Yamada tells him about the feelings he has had for Sato. Suzuki is emboldened by his accusation, but at that moment a second bullet is fired into the room .......

Short film by Liang Yue.

José Maylli, grandson of an old peasant woman, commits the crime of stealing cattle three times, this act is taken as an affront by the villagers who proceed to capture the cattle rustler, torture him and execute him en masse, finally condemning him to leave and never return, under penalty of death.

Workprint for a little prayer (H-E-L-P)

The set list includes all his best of the day: In the dark, Rich kid, My kinda lover, Whadda you want from me, A great Jam followed by Lonely is the night, ...

"Song Poem (Trips Visits) is a single-channel work I created using videotapes I found in second-hand stores, from home movies to hunting how-to tapes. It was created for a show titled Song Poems, which took as its departure a popular 1960-70s mail-order phenomenon, advertised in the back of magazines, offering to set poems to music in an array of styles and return them as 'singles.' The exhibition brought together musicians and video artists to set original poems by a variety of artists and writers to music and images. I created a video for an original poem by the show’s curator, Steven Hull, with music composed by The Pony Express, an alternative New York rock band." -- Robert Beck

Video remix artist Brian Boyce combines appropriated CNN footage of George W. Bush with clips from The Teletubbies used without permission. This remix was a part of the 2002 Illegal Art Exhibit sponsored by Stay Free! magazine.

"In a haunting and elgiac work titled Easy to Remember from 2001, prior to her turn to drawing, Simpson reanimated the jazz ballad of the same name in a film work comprised of fifteen individual singers humming the tune, in unison. Their unison is only approximate as each singer appears as a disembodied mouth, performing the melody while hearing it through headphones. Each mouth represents an individual interpretation, an interior moment of attempted mimicry." -Connie Butler

Appropriated television images and music accompany excerpts from a sound effects CD, all seeking connections between nationalism, television, and Voltaire’s satire Candide.

A small film crew tracks a Kazak family in Xinjiang, China's western-most province, from spring to winter. Unlike the people of Kazakstan, who grew into a nation of farmers and workers, the Kazaks retained their nomadic life and a close bond with nature. The crew follows a typical nomadic family with 11 children as the family travel wherever there is grass for their animals. They endure incredible hardships, sometimes going several days without food. In spite of this they have moments of joy and beauty, believing that nature will support them and that they will survive. The filmmakers' four-year-long effort shooting the film is part of a recent rise in Chinese filmmakers' documenting their country's ethnic diversity. Although it takes a classic ethnographic, observational approach, the film is stunning in its cinematic, epic style. Richly informative for teaching anthropology, Asian Studies, nomadic cultures and kinship. Filmmaker: Wei Bin

You are about to witness the shocking and senseless results of gang violence. In particular, the violence of L.A.'s most notorious gangs: the CRIPS & BLOODS.

“Agin’ the Wall” depicts a group of young Irish travellers and their efforts to overcome the odds and gain acceptance within the wider community.

Anne-Marie Schneider work from 2001

On "Planet T," an Elder is teaching a young girl that she has contracted a virus called "love." She must go to Earth to experience human love and understand its illusion before her soul can recover. The Elder also tells the woman that the first man she sees on Earth will be her lover. On Earth, at a solo concert by the famous singer Amy, an admirer, Qin Liang, is waiting outside the door, eager to see the idol. A beam of light lands on Amy's poster -- and the woman from Planet T appears as Amy. She goes home with Qin Liang, tells him her origin, and says she loves him and hopes to be his wife. Qin Liang regards her as crazy, but she's determined not to leave him.

67/97 begins by imagining the information collected when a bar code is scanned, and then asks: What if everything could be read by a scanner? What information would be retrieved, what secrets revealed? A barrage of text is generated as a laser reads bar codes and then food, objects, and the body, while the beeps of the scanner create an uncanny soundtrack. Cho employs the technology of scanning to meditate upon the process of information gathering and the construction of meaning. 67/97 is a lyrical and witty investigation of data systems, surveillance and information overload.

Short film by Shizuko Tabata.

8mm short film, Shizuko Tabata.

Kosovo in the spring of 2000. Winter is over but in a meteorological sense only. Ruins and pain. The marks of devastation in the sunny landscape. Wounds that never heal, the hesitating , vague gestures of a new beginning. Paradoxes. In black and white, with the broken images of memory imprints in color. Two words: deca and fëmijët , they mean children in Serb and Albanian. These expressions have no place in the irrational dictionary of war. It is the children though who are the most defenseless victims of this war governed by mad hatred. Their suffering has become an indelible chapter of the chronicle at the end of the century, the dawn of the new millennium. Besarta, Violeta, Edmond and Valdrin, Miljana and Jelena are Albanian and Serb children, the film tells their story in black and white with color Super 8 images shot by the children themselves.