Chicago Underground Film Festival and Filmmakers Summit 2008

Moving from one hotel in Bethlehem to another in East Jerusalem, the filmmaker encounters a series of problems involving a ceiling, a video camera and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Dirty Pictures is the seventh episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world's hotel rooms.

It is hard to believe but children born in 1990 are now in college. Even though we are currently soaked in 1980s pop culture nostalgia, a 90s nostalgia boom is right around the corner, fueled by grunge babies who know more about My So Called Life than Family Ties. The Early Nineties is a short collection of interconnected personal narratives exploring a childhood and the relationship between mother and son. All actors are played by director Andrew Mailliard, from himself at age 4, to his adult mom; all combined in a hand-drawn world that is equally dreamlike and yet oddly familiar.

Ellie is the story of an evangelical minister who, after four failed marriages, broken relationships, an exorcism, and thoughts of suicide, finally found the courage to become the woman he had always dreamed of being. Finally able to reconcile his religious beliefs with his transgender identity, on his 70th birthday, Eliot became Ellie and began a new ministry as a street performer in Provincetown, MA. No longer the preacher of God's wrath and judgment, Ellie now preaches tolerance and love by shamelessly being a 'hot, sexy chick' that belts out Frank Sinatra songs for the throngs of tourists who visit the bustling seaside resort.

"Rising fundamentalism and a government that cites faith to defend war actions have helped grow a desperate society. Dipping between ecstasy and despair, transcendence and absurdity, this movie journeys to a hidden space where you can lose your way, lose yourself in the moment, lose your faith in a belief system" - J.M.

Completed through the process of epunging everything off of my cell phone. Last summer my point and shoot camera died and I ended up documenting with my cell phone more frequentlyu. Most of the content was taken without any intention of making a video, and the material was primarily edited in the order the information was labeled by my cell phonel. This is an exercise in happenstance. Any seemingly relevant connections were mostly accidental.

‘The Eye You Lost In the Crusades’ is a super 8mm film set to the music of Califone. It is a story of loss and regret with final impressions of a redemptive grace. A father attempts to reconcile the sudden loss of his children, but the devastated corners of his mind only provide memories rendered as snapshots and flickering film. In search of a more pure recollection, he wrestles with his anguish. The grainy, ethereal landscapes are depicted in the hues and textures of an inner turmoil. As the film comes to its close, deliverance is within reach. Our father kneels before a green sea, a baby is born, a woman waves and the last frames blink before dying.

Cinema is about the illusion of movement. The film strip is made up of individual pictures in succession. The Phi phenomenon explains how the brain creates bridges from frame to frame, filling in the gaps, creating the illusion of smooth movement during the black intervals between frames. The perception of movement is processed in areas 17 and 18 of the visual cortex. Neurons in V1 and V2 are responsible for identifying objects in motion, their speed and direction, and global motion across the visual field. This information is processed and passed down to V5/MT where all stimuli are integrated, specific neurons determining specific perceptions, such as upward motion or forward motion. These perceptions can be tricked - cells adapt to motion stimuli and in the absence of that stimuli, produce the opposite perception. Staring into the center of the turning spiral causes forward motion detectors to adapt to that stimulus; the still picture of the train then appears to swell out.This film follows research started in my 2002 film, 'Charlemagne 2: Piltzer' which concentrated on the perception of colour and the creation of phantom colours not present on the film strip through flickering. In 'Faux Mouvements,' forward and backward motions occur together, movement in different directions is combined. We perceive motion in images that are in fact still. We can also see references to the spiral of the film reel, and the negative and positive of the film process.The music is by Gerard Pape, then director of the Iannis Xenakis music creation school in Paris. Using granular synthesis he attempts to achieve the same goal for the ears as I have for the eyes: the illusion of spatial spiral motion.This film was made at L'Abominable - the Paris do-it-yourself film lab. I myself shot the footage, hand-processed and printed it, edited, cut the negative and made the final prints, by hand, all on 16mm film. No computers were used! It could have been made 50 years ago with the same equipment.