A curated program of short films by Indian women filmmakers |
Aunty Gs , Geeta Malik , 5 min , 2004 , 16mm , Los Angeles , CA
Meet the ladies from the original Bay Area...The Bombay area. The secret, double life of dutiful Auntie Ji's. Five South Asian ladies go through their everyday routines; making breakfast for their families, playing ball and throwing back some beers.
Vilayati Tarti (Foreign Land ), Kharbanda , Remy , 11 min , 2005 , Mini-DV , Brooklyn , NY
The experience of displacement from the perspective of six South Asian women who migrated to West London , United Kingdom , during the early 1960s.
Acting Like a Thief , Shashwati Talukdar , 15 min , 2005 , Mini-DV , Jackson Heights , NY
Once nomads, the Chhara now live in an urban ghetto on the edge of a large industrial city in western India . The British labeled them a " criminal tribe " and today they are still guilty until proven innocent. Nobody will hire them. To survive, some sell illegal liquor while others engage in petty thievery. But now a group of young people are using theater to fight back against a century of prejudice and oppression.
Bollywood Terror , Talukdar , Shashwati , 2.5 min , 2004 , Video, Jackson Heights , NY
The US leadership has been watching Bollywood films from the sixties. How else would they know what to say about Terrorism?
Outside the Saying of It , Vaidehi Chitre , 18 min , 2005 , Mini-DV , Carbondale , IL
A personal documentary of an Iranian-American filmmaker in Illinois , following him through his daily life as he relates his experiences of war and revolution in Iran , and the scars they left behind. He talks about being part of a diaspora, looking “different” during times in the United States when looking different is difficult, and about living in a country at war once again.
Untitled, Shripriya Mahesh, 9 min, 2005, 16mm, New York, NY
Untitled is a film about a man stuck in a boring and mundane life. One day he accepts a flyer to a gallery opening and on a whim decides to attend. He finds what he is looking for in an unusual painting.
[sponsored by Avid Video as part of Friday's screening program] |
Exploding Buds dir.Petra Schröder
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Curated Submission-Based Screenings
FRIDAY PROGRAM
[sponsored by Avid Video]
Trina's Collections , Ellen Lake , 7min, 2004, digital video, Oakland , CA
Trina is an eclectic collector. Her collections have to do with pop culture and with women, it's what she writes her books about. In the room where she writes she has the things that inspire her the most, girl action figures and superheroines. In the kitchen she has vintage aprons and dishes (popeware, queensware, and the very beginning of a kennedyware collection - one plate). In the bathroom are bathtub figurines, made out of rubber of course. Then there is a tiki room for her saints, tikis, and hawaiiana collection. And throughout the apartment she has old books, magazines, comics, and ceramic figurines.
Ellen Lake received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland , CA in 2002 where she studied sculpture, film, video, and installation. Her series of experimental short documentaries about collecting have been such a hit with us in their unique ways of looking at people's lives and the world they create to live in, we are excited to be screening two of our favorites from her series so far.
Norman and Brian's Collections, Ellen Lake, 8min, 2004, digital video, Oakland, CA
Norman and Brian have been together for 26 years and have been collecting together for 26 years. They even joined together two apartments in the building they manage for the sake of their collections. They collect vintage toys, mickey mouse, lunch boxes, odd & curious money, primitive art, art nouveau, and animals. now serving, Bridget Farr, 6min, 2005, DV, Ottowa , Canada
An examination of an eccentric couple's decision to get hitched at city hall. now serving was produced as part of the digi60 challenge where participants are asked to complete a project within 60 days.
Born in Ottawa , Bridget Farr creates using both moving and still celluloid exploring notions of female identity, mass consumption and how the media affects the two. A graduate of both film studies and the photographic arts, her films have been screened at festivals internationally, and her photographic work has been displayed alongside some of the world's foremost female photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Tierney Gearon. It has been ten years since Farr began her career as a professional artist, and she's just getting warmed up.
Knospen wollen explodieren (Exploding Buds), Petra Schröder, 20min, 2005, Hamburg, Germany
What would Kate be without Echo?
Little beast Kate needs her friend Echo, because she is ruinously in love with Bruno. He is an eccentric artist, who deprives young talents of their vital energy for his ecstatic parties. Thereafter Kate recovers in the wild cave of her friend Echo. Kate claims all of Echo for herself, until Echo discovers the violent power of love.
Petra Schröder was born 15.03.1974 in Trostberg, Bavaria.After studies at the academy of art in Hamburg she worked as storyboarder, modelmaker and puppetry. She absolved her post degree studies in scriptwriting at the filmacademy Ludwigsburg under the instruction of Christoph Fromm, Keith Cunningham, Michael Gutmann etc.
Freak Girls, Tamara Vukov, 4min, 2004, mini-dv,
Hurry, hurry, step this way! The strangest sights on the island! Knife throwers, burlesque dancers, lady boxers, trapeze performers, beauty queens, female contortionists. Remixing public domain archival footage of Coney Island and early vaudeville performers from the Prelinger and American Memory Archives, freak girls is a tribute, both playful and haunting, to the women who pioneered the art of the female spectacle. Freak Girls is one in a six-part remix compilation, Volatile Works does Coney Island , produced by the Prelinger archives.
Tamara Vukov (aka pomegrenade) has been active in experimental and documentary film and video production, community radio and sound, digital media, and social activism for over 10 years. She is a member of the Montreal-based Volatile Works media arts collective.
July August September October November, Kristina Borus, 3min11, 16mm, Charlotte , NC
A jealous filmmaker's formalist revenge on a much-lusted-after indie film actress...This colorful experimental film is full of identifiying clues hidden in plain sight, from the arangement of words on the screen to the multi-layered soundtrack. The images of the storybook-paced film consist of photographs hand-traced onto strips of film, a ghostly and illegible superimposed memoir, and intimate pixelvision footage. The filmmaker craftily steals the viewer's gaze from the indie starlette.
Kristina recently earned a degree from UNC in Women's Studies and Media Production; she now makes films instead of money.
What I Remember, Maureen Bradley, 6min, 1998, Super 8 & Betacam SP, Victoria , Canada
What I remember is a melancholy recollection of two stories of first love. The narrator relates two anecdotes from her youth, seemingly unrelated, but linked by both their sweetness and tragedy. What does she remember about first love? Akwardness, embarassment, secrecy, and abandon. The moral of the story? Once you fall hard, you better duck. The visual track, hand processed and manipulated to create a feeling of longing and remembering, explores a childhood compulsion and sadism which foreshadows the tragic conclusion to the story-murder, and the impossibility of “true love.”
You Fake , Maureen Bradley, 6min13, 2003, digital video , Victoria , Canada
What do real women do in bed? After a bad one-night stand, Morgan looks for solace from her best friend only to be confronted with self-righteousness. Their disagreement results in a high-stakes bet to find out how many dykes fake it.
Maureen Bradley is a media artist, filmmaker and writer living between Saskatchewan and BC. In addition to films, she also appeared as a videographer on the CBC TV series Road Movies. She is currently developing a feature-length screenplay adaptation of the acclaimed Canadian author Michelle Berry's novel What We All Want.
The Devil Makes Her Own Dessert, Thea Faulds, 2002, 8min, DV, Toronto , Canada
This video explores the changing aesthetics of rock n' roll as it moves from analog to digital culture. The devil decides she must infuse rebellion back into rock n' roll in a new form. Her answer is to make a delicious dessert, using cells from Joey Ramone, to re-infect consumers with the rock n' roll gene.
Thea Faulds is a Canadian video artist and producer with a particular knack for a feminist take on vintage horror that Ms. Films just cannot get enough of. Her approach is to use low-fi video and film to explore the history and context in which woman's work is represented in popular media. Thea works as a technician at Ryerson University and when she's not working on a video project on the side she is writing articles for the horror magazine 1313. This will be the third year we are honored to screen one of Thea's films and also to have her participate in the festival from her home in Toronto , Canada . The Devil Makes Her Own Dessert was created for a video residency she was invited to participate in at Trinity Square Video, on the theme of “Devil Music”.
SATURDAY PROGRAM
[sponsored by Cozy, Inc.]
B-Girl, Emily Dell, 12min, 16mm, 2004, Los Angeles, CA
B-Girl is a glimpse into the life of a young female breakdancer, Angel, and the world of underground hip hop. An outsider in this male-dominated world, she has to claim her place in the circle and prove her place. She stays to practice late at night, working at home and building her strength, and ends up surprising everybody.
Emily Dell studied filmmaking at New York University 's Tisch School of the Arts and then became an independent director of narrative and documentary films while finishing her education at the University of California , Berkeley , where she received her Bachelor's degree in both Neurobiology and Third World Literature. Emily worked on the Sundance 2003 Independent feature Dopamine. In addition to other work, she served as Scientific Advisor to the film, which won the Sloan Award for scientific accuracy. Ms. Dell's previous films include Elegant Violence, a documentary about the Cal Women's Rugby Team and the music video Angel for the San Francisco band Mheadphone.
Body and Soul, Kat Eiswald, 6min, 2000, DV, San Francisco , CA
A film "composed" to accompany the work of Astor Piazzolla; the renowned Argentinean composer who revolutionized tango, Body and Soul lets us become voyeurs as we follow a woman who tries on a stranger's clothes after breaking into her house.
Kat Eiswald approaches filmmaking by starting with the score and creating a visual accompaniment. She is currently working on a film in Argentina . Sight Unseen , Katie Koskenmaki, 15min, 35mm, 2002, Houston , Texas
When an aspiring designer stumbles upon her neighbor throwing out three mannequins, she takes them home to model her designs, little realizing that her new companions' painted eyes have seen more than they should have.
Katie Koskenmaki wrote and directed Sight Unseen as her master's thesis at Columbia University. The film won a $10,000 grant from New Line Cinema and received Faculty Honors and a Milos Forman Fund Award. Katie's first short film, The Windigo , played at twenty-six festivals internationally. She currently works as a writer and story analyst straddling Los Angeles and Houston.
Daypass, Deborah Chow, 12min56, 2002, 35mm
A wildly delusional romantic returns from the grave to further pursue the love of his life on the evening of her first daypass. When he arrives at a local convenience store and finds her with a new boyfriend, he embarks on a campaign to win her back.
Deborah Chow grew up in Toronto , received her undergraduate degree from McGill university , and her MFA in film from Columbia University . She directed her first film at McGill, and continued making films while working for several years in film and theatre in Montreal and Toronto . Her feature-length screenplay version of Daypass was awarded the Comedy Central Award for Best Comedy Screenplay, and she was recently awarded the Kodak New Vision Mentorship under the guidance of the acclaimed director Patricia Rozema. She attended the annual Talent Campus for emerging writers and directors at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival and is currently developing her first feature.
Amnesia, Cecilia Araneda, 14 min, 35 mm, 2003, Winnipeg , Canada
As people start disappearing from around her one by one, a woman begins to realize it is her own life that is vanishing. Wounded by memories of all she has lost in her life, she is unable to connect to the one person she needs the most.
Cecilia Araneda was born in Santiago , Chile . Her family fled to Canada after Chile 's infamous coup d'etat. She holds a B.F.A. (hons.) in Theatre from York University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from U.B.C. To date, Araneda has completed five short films – two of which have garnered awards – and is in production on her sixth. Araneda currently serves President of the Winnipeg Film Group. In addition to filmmaking, Araneda is also a published poet and prose writer currently completing her first novel.
Three films from Hope Tucker's Obituary Project
Lolo Ferrari , Hope Tucker , 1min30, video, 2001, Cordova , TN
Big Star , Hope Tucker , 3min, 2003, digital video, 2003, Cordova , TN
Noel , Hope Tucker , 5min, 2005, digital video, Cordova, TN
An obituary whittles one's social contribution down to its barest form, so that the last ninety years of a life can be eclipsed by an escape from a burning building. An exploited French porn star with a large but anonymous fan base might have no obituary at all, garnering only an AP wire report. Beyond the newspaper obituary page, a songwriter's identity remains as obscure as his motives for penning a popular holiday standard.
The Obituary Project is an ongoing film and video project, with some fifteen pieces completed to date. These explore the obit as social construction and biography, fiction and non-fiction. The works I craft make no pretence to being direct translations of factual life stories. They are elegies, meditations, and memorials. Each is constructed after extensive research but explores only a particular facet of its subject. Sometimes the inspiration for a segment of The Obituary Project has been a particular person, sometimes the unacknowledged circumstances of that life, and sometimes the mystique they've left behind in death. The project rearranges the contours of biography, to reclaim or expand a neglected identity, by acknowledging the traits and attributes by which we learn to recognize and which become identifying markers of authentic life. In this way, I ask my audience to consider the fabricated nature of biography and identity through my own admittedly incomplete fabrications.
Waiting for Jenny, Emily Haddad, 10min, 16mm and video, 2005, Stillwater , MN
A policeman tries to help an old woman find her sister.
Emily Haddad is a filmmaker from Stillwater , Minnesota . Her films include Be the Peace (2003), Traffic Jam-A Citizen's Journey (2004), and Tara 's Party (2005).
The Chosen Family , Maureen Bradley,13min, 2001, digital video, Victoria, Canada
Families, whether chosen or biological, have a single aim - to drive us nuts.
Soaked, Stephanie Daniels, 9min11, 2004, mini-dv , Jersey City , NJ
An out of work ballerina heads into New York for her final callback. She prepares for her big moment, ohming her way through her makeup. Backstage, the tension between balding, over-the-hill choreographer, Tobias, and company's resident prima ballerina, Nina, mounts. Tobias is about to reinvent himself with a new work. Nina dismisses and scorns it all. The ballerina sucks in her pride and her gut, and steps on the stage dreaming of Giselle and Swan Lake . But instead the nightmarish reality is that the new ballet is much twitching set to Beethoven.
Stephanie is an independent film and TV director/producer. She is the recipient of PROMAX and Emmy awards and was creative Director of Trio On-Air. She lives in Jersey City , NJ and directs, writes, edits, and produces projects for various networks.
Zest, Kirsten Slungaard, 17min, 2005, Mini-DV, St. Paul , MN
Sam is a small town boy whose interest in gourmet cooking makes him the target of ridicule and disdain in his narrow-minded community. With the help of Natalie, a free-minded “new girl” in town, Sam learns to embrace his passion for non-traditional fare and confronts his critics in a dramatic food fight finale.
Kirsten Slungaard is a 16 year old filmmaker who makes documentaries and narrative films; her film Ananke screened at the 2005 Ms. Films Festival.
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