Program 1: Personal Anthology

Learning Stalls (Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin) A compedium of special effects-type technical experiments involving rudimentary, morphing, Flash-type animation superimposed onto human forms and exercises on multiple exposure, the amateurish video unfortunately overplays the novelty of wire meshing, image compositing, and dynamic, spirograph-like digital renderings to the point of abstraction and tedium.   The […]

Program 8: Me and My Camera

La Tombola (Ximena Cuevas) Cleverly conceived as the titular, cheaply produced, campy Mexican variety show as the video artist is among an odd assortment of guests that also include a flamboyant celebrity who owns a gaudy, ostentatious estate, an uninhibited exhibitionist who is eager to expose herself at the slightest prompting, and an uptight, conservative […]

Program 6: In This World

Ssitkim: Talking to the Dead (Soon-mi Yoo) My favorite entry from the festival so far, Korean filmmaker Soon-mi Yoo visits Vietnam to examine the suppressed history of the South Korean military’s involvement in the annihilation of a rural village during the Vietnam War (due in part to President Park Chung Hee’s efforts to win political […]

Program 8: Who Do You Love?

Mother, Father, Son (Oliver Hockenhull) Composed of a series of family photographs and military archival footage, Hockenhull traces his father’s reluctant participation in the assault of Dresden as a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force (a bombing that his father would subsequently describe as a “war crime”) and in the process, creates a powerful […]

Program 9: Thème Je/The Camera I

It is unfortunate that some filmmakers still seem to confuse self-critical emotional nakedness with physical nakedness, and it is especially unexpected to see this in an artist of Françoise Romand’s caliber and artistic maturity (her documentary Mix-Up is a sublime and intelligent psychoanalytical discourse on identity in light of two middle-aged British women who were […]