Another Experiment by Women Film Festival – The 2nd Festival – November 5, 2011 – presented at MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP 66 East 4th Street NY NY 10003

PROGRAM NOTES –

Two Screenings: 4pm and 8pm – Each Show $8.55 Online – ($10.00 at the door).

5:30pm: Panel discussion  is free of charge- please note this event will be taped

from 3 to 9 PM

YOU! THE LAST FOUR SECONDS by Angela Ferraiolo; USA
An interactive video installation that uses computer and video will join your own present to your past— by showing four seconds of whatever action is performed in front of the camera as still frames laid side by side.

4 PM SCREENING (admission $10- separate admission for each show)

THE MIRRORED CURTAIN; Lori Felker; USA; TRT: 10.50; Co-cinematographer: Robert Todd
“Let’s See It” on this brand new episode of “Take Me There”. Experience the duality of a singular location anywhere and all over the world, where there’s always something to see and almost everything to imagine. This is a travel show, marking an adventure to a place, a non-space, an unnamed border.”

AXIOM; Sally Grizzell Larson; USA; TRT: 1.00; Digi
The rhythm of clapping hands, the repetition of images in equally timed segments: We are lulled and seduced. Like any other high-functioning receptor, the human brain is indiscriminate about what it picks up. How then do we resist the seemingly benign when we’re mesmerized by it in spite of our better judgment

THE BOROUGH; Kelly Oliver; USA; TRT: 1:34; Digi
“There are a lot of ugly things in this world. I wish I could protect you from them”.

MY FATHER WAS A GANGSTER; Noe Kidder With Tin Tay; USA; TRT: 2.26; Digi
Noe set out to make a portrait of herself as a missing person in New York City and ended up taking a portrait of her friend Tin, who tells a childhood story about her father in Singapore.

PHOTOGRAPH OF WIND; Lynne Sachs; USA; TRT: 4.00; 16mm to Digi
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word “maya” means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.

DROP STILL; Courtney Krantz; USA; TRT 6:53; 16mm to Digi; Starring: Jen Rosenblit
DROP STILL originates from a body of work focused on emergent elements from the female body that evaporate with time. This film is a study in light and the encounters that can arise between a proximal and perspectival camera and a moving body.

AND THIS FOREST WILL BE A DESERT; C & A Projects (Carolyn Radlo & Alanna Simone); Music by Wardruna; TRT: 2.33; Digi
This stop-motion film about the state of the world (plastics, panic and paradise) presents a translucent landscape of sparkling trash inhabited by the polar bear (a cute, picturesque animal— actually a fearsome beast) who serves as the poster-animal for campaigns against global warming. Rapid text appears over the images, condensed versions of three different mythologies and three different fires: the battles of Ragnarök, the Nordic end of the world; an account of a recent forest fire caused by changing weather patterns; and Muhammad’s ascent to the highest fiery heaven. Each layer reiterates the background source of our worried fantasies and fears of destruction despite the beauty to be found right here, right now.

THE KITCHEN SINK; Lili White; USA; TRT: 11.24; Digi
Tangled voiceovers about food & its production reference war & famine; Monsanto; the Pleiades constallation;  attributes of  the Moon Goddess (gas flame and waterfall found in Duchamp’s installation); poppy crops in oil producing regions & homages to Chaplin’s table ballet & Melies’ Moon Voyage. The implications stretch between humor and horrific reality, joining Earth to Sky, desert to garden, sustenance to starvation.

ONE MISSISSIPPI; Rebecca Louise Tiernan; UK/USA; TRT: 5:05; Music:’Soon I Will be Done’ by Amigo Male Singers D.O.P: Ben Jones; Hair & Make-up: Fiona Gallagher; 16MM to Digi
A psycho-narrative of four girls playing skipping rhymes in a barren field with a lonesome Scarecrow.

5:30 PM PANEL DISCUSSION (free of charge) – please note this event will be taped

REFRESHMENTS following the panel discussion

8 PM SCREENING ADMISSION $10 at the door (separate admission for each show)

REOPENING THE PAST; Liliana Resnick; Croatia; TRT: 11.20; Digi
“What happens when the past walls the mind?” Although it has been 15 years since the war has ended a few women still await the return of their missing husbands. The feeling of destruction that war brings about is still very palpable in Croatian society, and it will remain so until there is a collective effort to recuperate and to forgive. REOPENING THE PAST is an experimental dance film using my dance performance footage to tell this story.

18FPS, 45RPM, 3SPI; Rachael Guma; USA; Super 8 performance with vinyl phonograph recording; seamstress: Rachael Guma; TRT: 5 minutes or so…
Super 8 found-footage film of the needle of a sewing machine blown up to 16 mm, hand-sewn, re-photographed back to Super 8, and hand-processed. The image of a pulsating needle as the thread punctures through the surface of the film strip, while the sound of a stylus needle scratches the surface of a rotating record player.

TRANCE ACTIONS; Alice Cohen; USA; TRT: 6.54; Digi; Animation/Music: Alice Cohen
Trance induced video meditation with sound collage

HANDMAID; Mo Hyun-shin; TRT: 4.00; Digi;
Director, Scenario, Editing, Sound: Hyun-shin Mo; Director of Photography/ Executive Producer: Hyung-seok Lee; Art Director: Hyo-eun Cho
Hands, which used to mediate the value of sacred labor, now exist in myth only. The hands cutting out leather repeat the sacrificial cycle of being subjected to rational beings. A hand’s essence lies in making actions, more so than any other human organs such as face. Its nature resembles that of a natural-born maid.

HOW MATA HARI LOST HER HEAD AND FOUND HER BODY; Amy Ruhl; USA; TRT: 21.39; Digi
Writer, Director, Animation: Amy Ruhl;Director of Photography for Live Action: Atley Loughridge;Costumes: Vanessa Riegel; Original Score: Jedediah Smith; Original Songs for Dance Scenes: Julian Lynch; Starring: Andrew Maloney, Amy Ruhl, and Richard Saudek
An imaginary biography of a real historical figure, Mati Hari— exotic dancer, courtesan, and spy executed by firing squad for espionage in World War I. Adding elements of fantasy to an already implausible life story, the film blends both original moving collages with archival photographs of the Belle Époque and World War I experience in order to create an entirely new perspective on the archetypal “femme fatale.”

BODILY HEAVENS; Stephanie Wuertz; USA; TRT: 4.33; Digi
A whirl of whorls, a dis-astral staccato that evokes a nostalgia for the intimate sublime. BODILY HEAVENS, is the first in a series of works created under a microscope using a single slide of microscopic imagery re-photographed at varying positions and levels of magnification that immerse the viewer in a world that seems both macro- and microcosmic, human and anti-human. The work is concerned with uncovering the repressed in vision and by authoritative discourse surrounding the body, working against the intended use, it luxuriates in the surface, texture, and tactile qualities of the material.

FORBIDDEN FRUIT; Cinzia Sarto; Italy; TRT: 6.00; Digi
Hastening shadows obscure the wavering sky; traveling in a darkness lit by commercial harts and erotic toys until a body barges into an other and a fluorescent light shine on the image of “original sin”. The encounter of lovers is from the start a collision that will bring them to orbit around each other, bewildered and frustrated until the inevitable violence of a final rip. In daylight an other man and woman fall like fruits from a tree. They wonder a beaten path erased by the snow; trudging toward the possibility of an embrace.

STORY OF THE OCTOPUS WITH A HEART-SHAPED HEAD; Alessandra Cianelli; Italy; TRT: 11:44; Digi
Cianelli, is a native of Naples where the octopus plays a central role.
This is sonorous fairy tale, a reading , a video projection, food ,music happening, ephemeral ice sculpture…“Once upon a time there was a Heart beating. He was inside a small living human being, For nine months, he had been inside a human being in which He had been lulled by the liquid movement of the dark water and nourished by the placenta (….) When they were born they stopped being lulled (….) The beating Heart, that is a pump, that is a plunge, that is an unceasing jump(….) couldn’t survive (….) in a full moon night of February He plunged himself into the only true water: the see The Heart, in quest of an identity and in order to survive, throws itself into the sea, the water that is the most similar to the liquid of the placenta. There He couples himself with an octopus by substituting what we would call the “head” but that in reality is the stomach(….)

MY WINDOW; Anabela Costa; Italy; 8 minutes; Digi;
CHROMADEPTH GLASSES donated by AMERICAN PAPER OPTICS
Edition:Anabela Costa; 3D Animation: Luis Rocha da Silva; 3D Consultant Luis Lobato; Special Effects: Anabela Costa; Music/Sound design: Emidio Buchinho
MY WINDOW is a film about the personal take and how it can be translated through sight, lighting and colour giving exposure to an artistic universe that reflects time and its relation to movement— CHROMADEPTH GLASSES enhance this world