Tour Program

Program 1 (Digital)

“Tyger” (Guilherme Marcondes)
Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film; Daily Audience Award Winner
Santa Monica, CA ~ 4.5 min ~ Animation
A giant tiger mysteriously appears in a big city. It will reveal the hidden reality in an otherwise ordinary night. Inspired by William Blake poem "Tyger."

“By Modern Measure” (Matthew Lessner)
Nahalem, OR ~ 6 min ~ Experimental Narrative
An amateur French sociologist presents his observations on a day in the life to two young Americans who meet by chance outside a Taco Bell on October 8, 2006.

“Help Is Coming” (Ben Mor)
Los Angeles, CA ~ 7.5 min ~ Experimental
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, three youths survey the desolate wasteland only to find a suspicious looking package.

“Proximity” (Inger Lise Hansen)
Norway/United Kingdom ~ 3.5 min ~ Experimental
An upside-down time-lapse camera is moved frame by frame on a track along a beach inverting the ground and the sky. The camera moves through four shots recorded in different weather conditions. The result is a mysterious and disorienting space in accelerated time, where the originally solid ground at the top of the frame appears to be sliding past like a lava-stream.

“Sift” (Sally Van Gorder)
Doha, Qatar ~ 9.5 min ~ Experimental Narrative
An intimate glimpse into the thoughts of fifteen young Arab women as they sort through the shifting and often contradictory expectations accompanying changes in the rapidly developing Arabian gulf country of Qatar.

“Flow” (Scott Nyerges)
Brooklyn, NY ~ 4.5 min ~ Experimental Animation
A meditation upon the perennial flow of the water around us, made with painted 35mm and 16mm filmstrips and live video footage.

“A Little Night Fright” (Mischa Livingstone)
Los Angeles, CA ~ 2.5 min ~ Narrative
When the bedtime story ends and the lights go out, a little boy exacts revenge on his tormenting older brother.

“The General Returns From One Place To Another” (Michael Robinson)
Tom Berman Award For Most Promising Filmmaker
Chicago, IL ~ 10.5 min ~ Experimental
Learning to love again, with fear at its side, the film draws balance between the romantic and the horrid, shaping a concurrently skeptical and indulgent experience of the beautiful. A Frank O'Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.

“The Boy In The Air” (Lyn Elliot)
Prix Devarti Award for Funniest Film
State College, PA ~ 2 min ~ Experimental
An enigmatic advertisement inspires a letter. The corporation writes back.

“Ski Boys” (Benny Zenga)
Honorable Mention Award
Toronto, ON Canada ~ 9 min ~ Experimental
The lost reels of the Ski Boys documents their inventive exploits in rural Ontario during the early seventies. This film reveals the bizarre footage of these "folk stunt" artists to the public for the first time despite the implications of rewriting history and blowing your mind.

Program 2 (Digital)

“Film For Tom” (Stephen Connolly)
Griot Editorial Award for Best Editing
United Kingdom ~ 12 min ~ Experimental Narrative
A lyrical homage to Connolly’s friend and formative influence. Tom is eloquent and effusive, yet finds no resolution to issues that haunt him. To whom is he speaking - is it a lecture? And in the film a dramatic off-screen event complicates our apprehension of a domestic space. The film is structured by a recording Connolly made of Tom speaking a year before he died.

“L’Education Nautique” (Christian Laurence)
Montreal, QC Canada ~ 3 min ~ Experimental Narrative
"You will be cold. You will be scared. You will want to give up. Only true heroes triumph." This film is exhibited in two parts. The first is shot in 16mm and hand-processed by the filmmakers themselves. The second is the exact same script, shot in HD. One actor, one storyboard, one soundtrack. Two different moods.

“Breathing Chamber” (Carlos Marulanda)
San Francisco, CA ~ 15 min ~ Experimental Narrative
Mysterious breathing problems begin to change a boy's life as he finds himself suffocating in his familiar surroundings. Confined to a breathing tank in the basement, he spends his days in front of a TV engulfed by the images of the outside world and the ghostly visits of his family.

“Travel Diary” (Ken-Ming Liu)
Jersey City, NJ ~ 7 min ~ Animation
A 2D animation using digital collage, video, photography, stop motion, composting and traditional illustration skills., attempting to illustrate the stark differences between countries and cultures in various ways and awaken the desire to travel.

“Establishing Shots” (Chris McNamara)
Detroit Film Center Award
Windsor, ON Canada ~ 12 min ~ Experimental
Focusing on the opening visuals of movies, this video disrupts these fundamental cues of time, place and character. Fragmented narrative strands in the form of foreign-language voice-overs and subtitles test audience assumptions and expectations. The voices and text might all represent different characters and points of view, but they also encourage viewers to read between the lines of a linear narrative and to find other poetic possibilities.

“Where You Are Is Not Where You Are Going” (Jennifer Hardacker)
Ann Arbor, MI ~ 2.5 min ~ Animation
Should I stay or should I go? Is the grass always greener on the other side or is there no place like home? This short asks these questions and more. Traveling shots are made all the more frenetic and kinetic through animation.

“Hairlady” (David Birdsell)
Los Angeles, CA ~ 8 min ~ Experimental
A musical exploration of one man's hair and the woman who collects it.

Program 3 (Digital)

“7am” (Imogen Stidworthy)
Liverpool, UK ~ 5.5 min ~ Experimental
Partly shot in the Beijing in the Temple of Heaven Park, Stidworthy's film focuses on the early morning exercises of individuals among the trees. The slow motion of these movements is juxtaposed with hand-held video footage shot in Shanghai of hip-hop competitors as they sit, chat, pose and try out their gymnastic dance moves.

“Wolves in the Woods” (B.J. Schwartz)
Los Angeles, CA ~ 6 min ~ Narrative
It's a beautiful day for a game of hide-and-seek. A young boy counts, children scatter into the woods, and a five year old Katrina finds the perfect hiding spot. But there is more at play in the woods than children. An innocent game may have deadly consequences.

“Waving The Flag” (Sheila Sofan)
Pasadena, CA ~ 4 min ~ Animation
A film about patriotism, the flag, and what it means to be an American. Using manipulated photography and digitally painted images, politics and consumerism are explored from the point of view of an ambivalent patriot. “Waving The Flag” is a collaboration between animator Sheila M. Sofian and poet Harryette Mullen.

“Friend Film” (Colin V. Barton)
Oakland, CA ~ 6 min ~ Experimental Animation
This is a eulogy to lost friends, either by death or disassociation. River Phoenix appears as the archetypal figure of my generation. This film lives in a space of a junkies death walk, and their final exit from the earth. Hand-painted 35mm original with optical printing are at the source of this work; with a little help from an electric toothbrush and washing machine.

“Monument” (Alain Delannoy)
Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada ~ 12 min ~ Animation
A hand drawn animated film about a boy who embarks on a journey that leads him to discover not only the hidden meaning of his environment, but his very destiny. This film is about loss, courage and hope, and was inspired by elements found in the filmmakers French Canadian heritage.

“Hammer and Flame” (Vaughn Piikian)
India ~ 10 min ~ Documentary
There is a place on the coast of northern India where ships come to die. This film opens a window on this strange, disturbing and hallucinatory world, where men and women labour day and night to break down the giants of the ocean piece by piece using only the simplest of tools.

“Dear Bill Gates” (Sarah J. Christman)
Eileen Maitland Award
Philadelphia, PA ~ 16.5 min ~ Experimental
A simple correspondence evolves into a poetic visual essay exploring the ownership of our visual history and culture. Combining original and archival film, video and images from the internet, “Dear Bill Gates” draws unexpected connections among mining, memory and Microsoft.

Program 4 (16mm)

“Black and White Trypps Number 3” (Ben Russell)
Honorable Mention Award
Providence, RI ~ 12 min ~ Experimental Documentary
The third part in a series of films dealing with naturally-derived psychedelia. Shot during a performance by local Rhode Island noise band Lightning Bolt, this film documents the transformation of a rock audience’s collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.

“A Room With Askew” (Gregory Godhard)
Sydney, Australia ~ 5.5 min ~ Animation
Trapped in a strange room where nothing is as it seems, a hungry little creature awaits a meal that may never happen.

“Orbit” (Kerry Laitala)
San Francisco, CA ~ 8.5 min ~ Experimental
Candy apple light emissions create a series of photic stimulating events that tickle the retinas. "Orbit" takes one into the realm of the mistake… a playful pulsation of mis-registered images made when a lab accidentally split the film from 16mm to regular 8mm.

“Silk Ties” (Jim Jennings)
New York, NY ~ 9 min ~ Experimental
Jennings mostly shot 'Silk Ties' in New York's Garment District from the vantage point of a work truck. Filmed while parked on the street and driving in traffic, Jennings captures the rhythms and sensation of this vibrant street life. Edited mostly in-camera, 'Silk Ties' reflects the working-class sensibility of its environment.

“Market Street” (Tomonari Nishikawa)
Honorable Mention Award
Japan/U.S.A. ~ 4.5 min ~ Experimental
Having great interest in the projection apparatus and human visual perception, Nishikawa carefully juxtaposed images of Market Street, a main street in San Francisco, by single-framing, in order to create certain happenings on the screen. The result may look abstract, yet representative enough to show the characteristics of the street.

“Block" (Emily Richardson)
London, UK ~ 12 min ~ Experimental
Day through night, Block is a portrait of a London tower block, it's interior and exterior spaces explored and revealed.

“Ema/Emaki 2” (Takashi Ishida)
Tokyo, Japan 7 min Experimental Animation
A progression of ornate calligraphical illustrations building upon one another to create a cinematic palimpsest.

“Pump” (Sinisa Kukic)
San Francisco, CA ~ 5 min ~ Experimental
A study of a merged entity, a bicycle and the cyclist, and its movement through a synthetic environment: an urban landscape. Originally shot on super-8 and optically printed to 16mm.