Chicago Underground Film Festival and Filmmakers Summit 2008

This is a personal document of Sarah Stark’s 70th and last birthday. Her cancer was in remission and she felt really great, so much so that she gave a spirited, Cassavetesesque performance for the camera. She goes through old pictures of her 1956 trip to Greece and gushes candidly about her romantic ‘affairs’ overseas. The video footage of her secluded, rural life contrasts shraply with found 16mm film footage of her as a young Houston socialite.

A series of eight 30-second films, all based on the same original frames of super 8mm film, manipulated through various methods on the optical printer and blown up to 16mm film...

“Peering into the spaces that separate dwellings on a short street in the city. Featuring interviews with varied members of a varied (and quickly-changing) neighborhood.” – R.T.

This story begins with an ending. A woman is dead. Susana Villa-SeÒor, a 29-year-old single scientist living in a central Ohio suburb has killed herself. Susana had suicidal tendencies; this last successful act is one in a series of desperate attempts. Susana's lab work improved the design of artificial limbs. Her research was extensive and personal. Stella, Susana's twin sister, is a very successful corporate professional working in the city. She is utterly in control of her environment and aspiring upward although emotionally stunted and vacant. Stella is trying to function as an adult in spite of a lingering and unresolved child-hood trauma; she was kidnapped as a young girl and held by her captor for four years. As Stella's corporate professionalism begins to weaken under the pressure of her grief, she slowly and compulsively takes up where Susana left off. Stella eventually begins attending meetings for people who have survived multiple suicide attempts--an array of broken and comic individuals who unknowingly help her confront her loss and sorrow. For Stella, her sister is lost. She is loss and history. Her recovery is handicapped. She is surrounded by trauma, drifting from no sympathy to pure empathy. Stella accidentally crashes her car into a tree which to on-lookers, seems like a failed suicide attempt. In the end, Stella remains a bad driver, though now she feels the company of those who reflect and share her emotion. Can she be healed? Can Anyone?

“Inspired in part by a poem by Toronto poet Ryan Kamstra, ‘The acrobat’ is a consideration of the relationship of gravity and politics‹the beauty and necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps, the significance of allowing oneself to fall. If the force of gravity is in relation to both mass and proximity, how does the force of politics resonate across space and time?” – C.K.

'Action Film' is a manipulation of a well-known Hollywood action film. This video makes abstract the image, while maintaining a sense of the original film's action and suspense. This particular piece of footage was chosen to make into an abstract film, concentrating on the rhythms and colors, but not made so abstract that one cannot recognize the original film. The music for Action Film by Brian Lamere heightens the 'action' in a way that gives new meaning and expectations to the images. The music suggests, without relying on imitation of, the score that one would expect from this kind of Hollywood film. This furthers the audience's recognition of the film's original genre and invites the viewer to consider the disruption of narrative expectations through abstraction.

A middle class couple in retirement takes a leisurely excursion to the park for a picnic. The serenity of an intimate meal in nature is shattered by the appearance of a distraught mime on the run from a mysterious threat. As the mime explains his predicament through an elaborate performance, the man and woman grow bored and indifferent, hoping to just pay the 'street performer' and be on their way. Their efforts fail. Before there is time to escape, they evolve from idle spectators to unwilling participants in an imaginary crime.

A family’s place in the widerness, somehow outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of foreboding. There’s no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived.

What if every single person in the world took a year out of their life to do all the things they've always thought about doing? Start and finish a movie, make someone's dream or wish come true, spray-paint an inspirational message on city property, burn their regrets to the ground. And with this thought I began compiling a list of 52 things which I would complete, one a week for the next year of my life. But as with any great challenge, it became far different than I could have ever expected.