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The Dutch call it exploding cinema; the French the avant-garde; in Seattle we call it Alternate Cinema. A collection of features and shorts which aim to push the boundaries of traditional film culture, this year’s selections explore unconventional modes of visual, aural and emotional landscapes. Yet when we examine these works, they seem more and more to be in tune with ourselves, with our thoughts and with the very medium itself. Estaban Sapir’s The Aerial combines expressive elements of the silent era and graphic elements of comic books to comment on the state of our media culture. One11 and 103, the legendary John Cage’s sublime dance of camera, light and sound, makes its Seattle premiere. SIFF Tributee Sir Anthony Hopkins makes his directorial debut with the daring Slipstream, and Jiska Rickels’ 4 Elements presents an evocative meditation on mankind's timeless—and often precarious—connection to the natural world. Esther B. Robinson’s A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory documents a man who, while on the surface just another nameless member of the Warhol factory, was himself an editor, filmmaker, light designer, lover and son. The above is just a sampling of these invigorating and exciting selections from some of cinema’s most daring filmmakers.
Netherlands, 2006, 89 min.
A poetic visual essay about man's uneasy relationship with fire, water, earth and air, as seen through the experiences of firefighters in Siberia, king crab fisherman on the Bering Sea in Alaska, German mineworkers and Russian cosmonauts preparing a launch to the international space station. …
Argentina, 2007, 90 min.
In Year X in the City Without a Voice, a fascist media regime keeps the population forcibly silent. Plots and counter-plots ensue in this alluring allegory that, ironically, employs the language of silent film to salute the power of free speech. A stunning amalgam of comic books and ’20s-era science …
Lebanon, 2006, 21 min.
Based on Asmahan’s (the Syrian/Egyptian singer, 1912–1944) last film Gharam Wa Intigam (Passion and Revenge), the film’s cinematic meditations merge her songs with plot and actions to reveal an insight into the relationship between the star’s tragic life, colonial Egypt and the nature …
USA, 17 min.
A simple correspondence evolves into a poetic visual essay that draws unexpected connections among mining, memory and Microsoft. …
USA, 2007, 5 min.
Manipulated footage from classic black and white films is interspersed with images of dolphins in Double Lives to emphasize both the disconnect between the natural and artificial worlds and the restrictive nature of society in general. …
USA, 2007, 6 min.
For a Blonde... is a karaoke style video that re-enacts a scene from Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. The artist plays the role of John Ferguson at the moment where he re-discovers his Madeleine. "Karaoke" subtitles allow the viewer to perform Kim Novak’s part and complete the scene. …
Denmark, 2006, 88 min.
This provocative documentary gives an unprecedented close-up look at the chimères (ghosts), gangs of gun-toting, doped up, nothing-to-lose thugs in Haiti’s ultra-violent slum Cité Soleil, designated by the United Nations as the most dangerous place in the world. A tough, shocking film, but al …
Germany, 2007, 13 min.
This film traces the sublime and almost invisible bonds of motherhood and daughterhood over "one hundred years and two world wars". …
Taiwan, 2006, 115 min.
A comatose patient is cared for by friends and family while, in a parallel story, a beaten-down homeless man on the streets of Kuala Lumpur is taken in by an immigrant worker. Tsai Ming-liang made this meditative, humanistic and sometimes funny portrait of longing for Peter Sellars' New Crowned Hope …
80 min.
Foundational musings and remembrances of things past, this program explores the world of memory. With works depicting messages of friendship, records of love, historical disconnects and explorations of that all too elusive place called creativity, you'll find yourself in awe, amused, bemused, and oc …
USA, 19 min.
The satirical film traces the rise of baseball player Keith Hernandez from the Eddie Money concert where he first tried cocaine, through the 1982 World Series, through Herzog's thanking Mex for his contributions by sending him to the cellar-dwelling Mets (just think a player being traded for doing d …
Canada, 8 min.
Sometimes the ordinary moments make for the most spectacular; such is the case in this dance of memory and loss. …
Argentina, 2006, 85 min.
In remote Northern Argentina, a ferry captain seeking to protect the locals from illegal loggers casts a wary eye on a young, gay harvester who’s found most of his trysts among visitors. Their escalating adversity draws out hidden longings in this beautifully filmed study of isolation. …
2006, 8 min.
Overlayed newsreel footage of Robert Kennedy and images from the classic Hollywood western HIGH NOON blur the line between truth and fiction. …
Austria, 2006, 80 min.
This award-winning experimental documentary is a mesmerizing remix of the acclaimed 1997 film Megacities, combining its stunning original footage with an excellent new soundtrack by Sofa Surfers. A fiercely imaginative audio-visual journey that finds fragments of hidden urban life in New York …
USA, 2006, 6 min.
Sometimes the supernatural lingers plainly in the most ordinary places, secret only in as much as its trace goes unnoticed. Both a letter to an alchemist-filmmaker friend and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, this film is full of ghosts. …
Germany, 2006, 9 min.
Wondering what it takes to be a man? Feeling conflicted and confused? Don't despair. Look no further than the silver screen. A tongue-in-cheek ode to masculinity as chronicled by a legion of classic and contemporary Hollywood icons. …
9 min.
Over found footage from The Mendi—an ethnographic documentary made for the CBC's Man Alive television show in the 1970s—the narrator tells of his summer as a teenage assistant to the filmmakers. In the tradition of Buñuel's Land Without Bread. …
USA, 1992, 94 min.
John Cage created his only feature-length film in the year of his death. Combining randomly drifting patches of light with one of Cage’s richest musical compositions, this is a sublime, stunning acknowledgment of time from one of the most widely influential artists of the 20th century. …
USA, 2007, 100 min.
Imagine Charlie Kaufman in a peppy mode and you might get begin to get an inkling of this dazzling metaphysical comedy. Reality, fiction and the notions of storytelling intertwine in this eclectic narrative about a conservative New York businessman (Napoleon Dynamite's Aaron Ruell), his …
70 min.
The art of reduction, reusing and recycling is explored in this program featuring pop-art collages to cinematic archeology, including film sequences and images lifted from the safety of their original reels and contexts only to be re-born in new cinematic landscapes. The results are at once amusing …
USA, 2006, 3 min.
A combination of refinement and simplicity that raises the receipt to an intriguing document of historic interest and reduces the newspaper headline to trivial statement. In the country at war, everything gets a different meaning. …
USA, 2007, 110 min.
An inventive, multilayered journey into the mind of an aging screenwriter whose fictional universe begins to invade his real life. This bold and experimental film from famed actor Anthony Hopkins plays with the nature of cinema and pokes a little fun at the movie business in the process. …
USA, 2006, 76 min.
When conceptual artist Steve Kurtz’s wife died of heart failure, suspicion fell on materials that Kurtz was using for an art exhibition. Within hours, he was detained as a suspected bio-terrorist. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s brilliant documentary Strange Culture uses unconventional techniques to …
Poetic impression of a journey in pursuit of shadows using pages from a boy scout manual. …
Thailand, 2006, 105 min.
Following up Tropical Malady, director Weerasethakul confirms his innovative talent with a seductively mysterious film of self-reflecting halves. Beginning with two doctors in different hospitals, the fluid narrative travels across time and space to invoke the changing times of the …
USA, 2007, 78 min.
Virtually unknown today, Danny Williams shot more than 20 films at the Warhol Factory and designed the Velvet Underground’s groundbreaking light show before mysteriously disappearing in 1966. This intimate documentary unearths his films and explores his love and struggles with both Warhol …
