JUDGE'S STATEMENT
Being from the North Southwest, or more accurately, the northerly corner of the upper middlin' West, aka Berkeley, it was great to spend some time in the Northwest, a region that seems to have more clarity about place, and, better yet, a film festival dedicated to its own. Not that the films and videoworks were specifically regional. In fact, there wasn't a fish ladder, Harry & David's fruit pack, or hirsute fur trapper in the bunch—actually there was one trapper and he was scruffy.

MY WINNERS: Andy Blubaugh, though, is not scruffy in the least, but in SCAREDYCAT, his newest semi-jocular gem, he gets beat up a bit. How Blubaugh matches a street-side mugging to his compulsive need for order makes for a great piece of self-deprecating art. David Russo is also driven by compulsion, but in his case, it's pure practice, art practice that is. In I AM (NOT) VAN GOGH, his stop-motion techniques, if that's what they are, have a virtuosity that actually dizzies your dome. And to top it off, Russo takes some jovial jabs at the bony body of arts funding, all the while showing us that 24-frames per second beats out one fram of oil-base any old time. REGARDING SARAH, Michelle Porter's unforgettable fictive short, is about a technological salve for time. As her memory recedes, the eponymous Sarah surrounds herself with countless camcorders, recording her every waking moment. Porter's great revelation is taht the real pleasure is to be found in the lived moments, not in the retrieval of zeroes and ones, even if living doesn't last. All things definitely come to an end in Calvin Lee Reeder's unpredictable PILEDRIVER, a seemingly syrupy romance that swerves off the shoulder of expectation. PILEDRIVER asks you to settle in for the sugar–boy meets girl wiht the flutter of heart-strings–then it turns the treacle into trauma: a regular Hallmark card to horror.

There's not much in this bunch that you could render as regional, render in the sense of extracting the great Northwest from the flesh of these films, or the dozens of others in the festival. Rather, there's just an all-wheel drive toward originality, verve, and shrewd insight that should make any province proud. Now sadly back in Berkeley, I straighten my Pendleton comforter, dreaming of cherry pie at the Double R Diner.

JUDGE'S BIO
Steve Seid is the Video Curator at the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past fifteen years, he has organized over 600 programs of video art, film, and new media. These programs typically circulate around cultural, historical, and aesthetic ideas with experimental media being the prevalent form showcased. Seid also oversees and on-going video preservation project and conducts annual workshops on visual literacy for high school teachers. He has taught video aesthetics and history courses at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the California College of Arts, and the San Francisco Art Institute. His large-scale program, "Whose Side Are You On?: The Border," toured Brazil under the sponsorship of Itau Cultural.