Program Descriptions

CROWDOG - PORTLAND
DIR: VANESSA RENWICK This unsentimental chronicle of a two-year journey is a personal documentary of acute clarity and powerful resonance. —CV (7 mins.)

THE DOWAGER'S FEAST - PORTLAND
DIR: JOAN GRATZ  In Oscar-winning animator Joan Gratz's newest "clay painting," powerful, abstract images swirl to the music of Portland's Three Leg Torso. (5 mins.)

JUST LIKE A MAN - PORTLAND
DIR: HALEY ISLEIB  The story of long-suffering Lucy's struggle with conflicting emotions toward her self-absorbed childhood friend. With its consistent comic tone and very strong visual touches, I was astounded at how sure this filmmaker's hand was. A real surprise.—CV (12 mins.) JUDGE'S AWARD
 

THE LIVING  - MISSOULA
DIR: JOEL BAIRD, RICK PHILLIPS   With photographic precision, Baird and Phillips shed a flashlight on the secrets of the night. (4 mins.)

LOVES ME, LOVES ME NOT - SALEM
DIR: DAVID FICKAS  By turns both mournful and frightening, this chronicle of a violent relationship blurs the line between documentary and drama with truth and sensitivity. (27 mins.)
 



SHEER PANIC - VANCOUVER, BC

DIR: JONATHAN GIBSON   Hysterical animation. A great joke. —CV (2 mins)

THE MISADVENTURES OF SPITTLE & FUDD - PORTLAND
DIR: TENNESSEE REID NORTON   Thoroughly disgusting, fabulously gross and altogether horrific. —CV (3 mins.)

STARCHED - PORTLAND
DIR: JOSEPH MALINA  Although Swingers has a lot to answer for, this one's a cut above: beautifully shot, clever dialogue and strong performances. —CV (7-1/2 mins.)
 



THE VOICE OF GOD - MISSOULA
DIR: JOEL BAIRD, RICK PHILLIPS A sublime little piece of minimalism about one of the grandest subjects. (1 min.)

YOUNG TURKEYS -VANCOUVER, BC
DIR: IAN BARBOUR  The title suggests a film about turkeys. It is in fact the story of three filmmakers who have decided—gleefully aware of their own over-indulgence—to film themselves killing, cleaning, cooking, eating, and filming a turkey. - CV (10 mins.) HONORABLE MENTION
 



 
OPENING NIGHT RECEPTION
McMenamins invites you to partake in a reception for the Festival filmmakers following tonight's shorts program.

ATTIC SECRETS - OLYMPIA
DIR: HEIDI BOLLOCK  This powerful tale about incest and survival, told with strikingly inventive images, astounded me every step of the way. This is the work of a real filmmaker.—CV ( 10-1/2 mins.)

BURN - PORTLAND
DIR: SARAH MARCUS  An evocative personal documentary from the point-of-view of a woman as she reminds herself of the child she once was. - CV (4-1/2 mins.) JUDGE'S AWARD



 
DIRT - PORTLAND
DIR: CHEL WHITE  Oddly reminiscent of a 50's sci-fi film, a man's strange obsession with dirt starts as a childhood game, but eventually manifests itself on a most surreal level. A post-modern Invasion of the Body Snatchers. —CV (4 mins.) HONORABLE MENTION

ELEMENTS IN TRANSFORMATION - EUGENE
 


DIR: YING TAN  Graceful computer generated images flow with seamless mystery in this cross between NASA footage and Tibetan mandelas. (3 mins.)
 
 

THE GEOMETRY OF BEWARE - VICTORIA, BC
DIR: RICHARD RAXLEN  Vintage found-footage animation and exquisite geometry mixed by a modern hand. (6 mins.)



 

GOD'S CLOWN - PORTLAND
DIR: STEVE SANDOZ  Fart jokes in a monastery. Need we say more? Hilarious.—CV (13 mins.)

JOHNNY BAGPIPES - PORTLAND
DIR: TODD KORGAN  In the proud tradition of Korgan's earlier Have You Seen Patsy Wayne?, meet the hardest rocking bagpipe player to ever walk Portland streets. Coming out to his Irish father wasn't easy; nor will realizing his dreams to have a plaid tour bus, or jet, and to open for Metallica. (12 mins.) JUDGE'S AWARD

LIVE! NUDE! GIRLS! UNITE! - EUGENE
DIR: JULIA QUERY WALLACE   At the Lusty Lady in San Francisco, the strippers fight to unionize while the filmmaker faces the personal dilemmas between feminism and sex-worker's rights. The results are touching, empowering and funny. (12 mins.)

PEEL OUT - VANCOUVER, BC
DIR: JAYSON THIESSEN  Hanna Barbera-type animation with the ability to disgust.—CV (2 mins.)

UNTITLED - VANCOUVER, BC
DIR: ANDREW POWER   A curiously poignant examination of alienation.—CV (5-1/2 mins.) 

THE DIRT ON MOM - BATTLEGROUND
DIR: DOUG ABERLE  Charming animation made with pipe cleaners that is strangely reminiscent of Father Knows Best.—CV (9-1/2 mins.)

SPLIT SCREEN: MEET JOHN PIERSON
John Pierson, author of the essential Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Cinema (1996), is among the gurus of the independent film world. In a self-made career as a producers’ representative, his advice and guidance has helped more than two dozen independent feature films to the marketplace, among them She’s Gotta Have It, The Thin Blue Line, Slacker, Laws of Gravity, Roger and Me, Go Fish, Clerks and Crumb. Following up on the success of his book, Pierson and wife Janet have created Split Screen, a weekly, half-hour magazine show for the Independent Film Channel (not carried in Portland) featuring a behind-the-scenes look at filmmaking with the famous and not so famous. With segments ranging from interviews and antics with John Waters, Errol Morris, Matt Damon and Steve Buscemi to strange tales of fledgling filmmakers with a gleam in their eye, Pierson has his camera on the pulse of an exploding indie film scene. Today Pierson will screen segments from his show, answer questions and generally be on the look out for the next great story. FREE ADMISSION

THE PAUL ROBESON FUND FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA:
FUNDING FOR MEDIA AND CULTURAL ACTIVISM
One of the most difficult areas of funding is support for the production of social issue media. As the only on-going source of national funding committed exclusively to the support of activist media, the Paul Robeson Fund, supported by the Funding Exchange, has been on the cutting edge of supporting such acclaimed films as Harlan County, U.S.A., Paris Is Burning, Tongues Untied, Panama Deception, Defending Our Lives and Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien. Named for singer, actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, the fund solicits projects in all genres and from all parts of the country. Today we are please to host a panel comprised of Robeson Fund Program Officer Jan Stout, Seattle filmmaker Sandra Osawa (Usual and Accustomed Places) and Portland Film producer Larry Kleinman (Aumento Ya!), both Fund recipients, and Portland filmmaker Kelley Baker (Dangerous: Kaye Boyle), and cable access producer Eric Stacon, each experienced in producing and funding media with a message. In addition to discussing the Fund and their own work, the panel is intended to be a resource for anyone with a project in need of funding strategizing. FREE ADMISSION

SHORTS PART I (Repeat)
See Thursday, November 5 description.

CARRIED AWAY - SEATTLE
DIR: PAUL KOSTICK  Sitting before Vermeer's "Girl at an Open Window," under-employed Les Martin has a flawed revelation. Moments later he flees the museum with the Dutch masterpiece in tow. The cast of personalities that orbit him seems to have more of an agenda for the painting than Les does. From erroneous news reports of a radical organization claiming credit for the deed, to his estranged wife, to a surreal guerrilla artist and a chorus of art-world types, Les sits amid the chaos of his decision, waiting for an epiphany to reverse things. Shot in Seattle, this feature-film debut by Paul Kostick is funny, quiet and edgy, ultimately proving how passively we choose our fortunes. (87 mins.)


Short:

WEIRD - PORTLAND
DIR: GUS VAN SANT  This "director's cut " music video for teen sensation Hanson mixes gazing fascination and a strange white room. (5 mins.)

GET THE MONEY AND SHOOT:
FUNDRAISING AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT FOR FILM/VIDEO MAKERS
A WORKSHOP WITH MORRIE WARSHAWSKI
Securing funding while maintaining a career as an independent mediamaker can be a competitive, elusive and often overwhelming proposition, especially in this era of reduced government and grant support for noncommercial and/or independently produced projects. This workshop on the art and business of realizing one’s financial and artistic goals as an independent mediamaker is essential for those desiring to advance their projects or hone their fundraising skills. Combining a holistic and practical approach, the sessions share street-tested advice and present real-life case studies. A detailed handout packet will be distributed.
Note: this is a two-session workshop which may be taken individually or together.

TUITION: Part I only $85, Part II only $35; Both Sessions $105, $80 for NWFC Certificate Students.

Morrie Warshawski, writer and national media consultant, whose clients over the past 20 years include dozens of independent film/video artists as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has served on numerous grants panels and written over 400 proposals. He is author of Shaking the Money Tree: How to Get Grants and Donatinons For Film and Video.

Sunday November 8
9 A.M. - 5 P.M.

PART I —FUNDRAISING
The first session is intended to help filmmakers attractively position their project, identify and address their strengths and weaknesses as fundraisers and draw upon appropriate fundraising tools. Topics include: adopting an effective fundraising mindset, identifying prospects, approaches to foundations and corporate sources through telephone inquiries, letters and personal contacts; fundraising parties; in-person pitches to individuals; direct mail appeals; and elements of the successful written proposal.

Monday, November 9
6:30-9:30 P.M.

PART II—CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Session two encourages participants, whether entry level or mid-career, to look beyond individual projects and develop tools and approaches supporting long range career planning. Topics include creation of a personal mission statement, marketing with integrity and video promotion clips that work.

EXHIBITOR'S ROUNDTABLE
The Festival welcomes media arts presenters and programmers from throughout the West for a gathering to discuss the issues surrounding the development of new forums and audiences for independent film and video, as well as audience education and outreach. In addition to discussing the NW Festival's Best of the Northwest Tour, participants will address development of new touring programs showcasing the work of regional artists and approaches to joint funding and marketing.
SPONSORED IN PART BY THE WESTERN STATES ART FEDERATION
ADMISSION IS FREE  - TO REGISTER, CONTACT THE FILM CENTER BY NOV. 4

OREGON ARTS COMMISSION MEDIA ARTS FELLOWSHIP AWARD
Each year since 1979, the Oregon Arts Commission has awarded a Media Arts Fellowship to an Oregon film or video maker whose work has shown outstanding accomplishment or promise. The Northwest Film Center is pleased to be the administrator of the Fellowship and tonight we congratulate the 1998 recipient, Portland artist Jacob Pander, who will screen highlights from his work-in-progress Still Life, a documentary portrait of his father, painter Henk Pander.

FOLLOWED BY:

SHORTS, PART II (REPEAT)
See Friday, November 6 description.

NATIVE AMERICAN VISIONS

USUAL AND ACCUSTOMED PLACES - SEATTLE
DIR: SANDRA OSAWA   This remarkable documentary is a collection of profiles in courage: the indigenous peoples of the Northwest and their more than 100-year battle to retain treaty-protected fishing sites. It is a story that reaches far into family histories, as Osawa personalizes a political struggle with testimony and photographs from those who remember. Osawa's portrait is bravely complete, including rare documentation of Native affluence, as families prospered through the fishing industry—just part of the cycle of history in which Native Americans, seeking to retain their rights, consistently prevailed in the federal courts, but lost politically at the state and local level. (48 mins.)
WITH

BACKBONE OF THE WORLD: THE BLACKFEET - BOZEMAN

DIR: GEORGE BURDEAU  Set against the northern Rocky Mountains, Backbone of the World is the story of veteran filmmaker George Burdeau's journey home and his tribe's crucial struggle to heal and forge a new identity. Under Burdeau's mentorship, a team of young filmmakers use a mélange of documentary, experimental, and cinema vérité techniques to join ancient legends with a contemporary community dilemma. In the process they reveal a people inhabiting two worlds—modern America and the Blackfeet Nation, giving a new voice to a generation of disenfranchised youth. As one elder recounts, "Youngsters don't know the wilderness; just downtown." Burdeau allows these young Blackfeet to see the whole of their culture with strength and clarity. (56 mins.)

EYE POPPING DADDY
AN EVENING IN 3D WITH AL RAZUTIS
For more than 25 years, Vancouver, B.C. experimental film and video maker Al Razutis has been a pioneering spirit in the media arts. His recent explorations delve into the realm of stereoscopic image making and tonight he premieres work made for large screen video projection and 3D glasses. Meditations (1996) explores the ocean and landscapes on and around B.C.’s Saturna Island as it pays homage to Maya Deren’s seminal Meshes of the Afternoon; Virtual Flesh (1997) fashions the human body into sculptural form as eleven men and women morph within a transparent membrane; France 1997, a dream-like voyage, is culled from images of a journey from Paris to Marseilles to Nantes, organized around such themes as architecture, Catholicism and meetings of chance; and Nagual (1998) shot in Baja, draws its inspiration from the writings of Carlos Casteneda. 3D glasses will be provided for this special evening of alternative vision. (90 mins)

AND SHE WAS
DIR: JIM BLASHFIELD  Selected as one of Rolling Stone's 100 Best Music Videos of All Time, And She Was brings the Talking Heads' song to life with lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners and other suburban artifacts levitating through a shifting, color-xeroxed landscape. (4-1/2 mins.)

GREAT COGNITO
DIR: BARRY BRUCE & WILL VINTON  More grotesque than it is humorous (and healthily disrespectful as well), Barry Bruce's clay animation presents a stand-up comic whose shtick is mutating into the people he impersonates. In the course of his free-associating account of WWII, he becomes everyone from the Andrew Sisters to Winston Churchill to the Japanese army. (4 mins.)

I THINK I WAS AN ALCOHOLIC
DIR: JOHN CALLAHAN WITH KELLEY BAKER & LAURA DITRAPANI  "He likes making things simple and clear. Simple as a drink, clear as a black-out, easy as pie. See what Saturday morning cartoons should look like on MTV if we lived in a different society. Callahan exposes the history of his own drunken self-destruction and recovery with zero self-pity, sub-zero righteousness and maximum laughs. Beavis and Butthead, eat your hearts out."—B. Ruby Rich. (4-1/2 mins.) 

GROWN-UP
DIR: JOANNA PRIESTLEY  "Everybody from Germaine Greer to Gloria Steinhem to Betty Friedan are writing about aging, but what about middle-aging? Priestley does a brilliant job of reclaiming 40. Optimism, jokes, great drawings, good hands...an animation that just might make twenty-somethings wish they were older." —B. Ruby Rich. (7 mins.)

BRIDE OF RESISTOR
DIR: MARK GUSTAFSON  "From the creator of Mr. Resistor comes this very clever sequel. This time the little electronic guy is looking for love in all the wrong places. An AC-DC dilemma gives Mr. Resistor a whole new outlook on life." —Dan Ireland (6 mins.)

CREATION
DIR: JOAN GRATZ & WILL VINTON  The story of Genesis explodes on the screen with mesmerizing results in this work of "clay painting," based on a black folk poem and narrated by James Earl Jones. (9 mins.)

PHOTOCOPY CHA CHA
DIR: CHEL WHITE  The spectoral power of the photocopy machine illuminates a rhythmic danse macabre of bodies transformed by the machine's eye. (3-1/2 mins.)

CERRIDWEN'S GIFT
DIR: ROSE BOND  Using cameraless animation by painting directly on each frame of clear 35mm film, this magical rendering of an ancient Celtic myth tells how the Welsh people received the gift of poetry and prophecy. When Cerridwen, the brewer of the cauldron of inspiration, mistakenly gives the potion to the wrong person, she must chase down the culprit over land, through air and water. With a swift and fluid motion, the beat of wings becomes a splash of fins as everything changes during the chase. (9 mins.)

SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES
DIR: JIM BLASHFIELD  With the iconoclastic spirit of surrealism, Blashfield transforms a detective story about the mysterious disappearance of Herbert Emilio, Jr. into an investigation of time, space and domesticity gone awry. Maybe a blink between dreaming and waking, maybe a film noir peopled with flying hands, dancing noses and Donald Duck heads, maybe a humorous, satirical adventure into a world that defies any logical explanations, this collaged and color-xeroxed work possesses a strange and delicate power that is altogether riveting. "A perfectly executed work of animation art." —The New Yorker. (12-1/2 mins.)

MONA LISA DESCENDING A STAIRCASE
DIR: JOAN GRATZ  This seamless survey of modern art takes the viewer on an astonishing journey through this century's greatest works by recreating them in "clay painting." Using dynamic motion, with each work melting into the next as easily as turning a page, Gratz has created a visual tour-de-force that earned her an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject. (9 mins.)

A COW AT MY TABLE - VANCOUVER, BC
DIR: JENNIFER ABBOTT  Vancouver media artist Jennifer Abbott's expose on the world of agribusiness and meat production is a visually stunning and disturbing examination of the social forces that conceal, distort and, from her persuasive point of view, legitimize factory farming with perilous repercussions to animals, humans and the environment. Weaving together interviews with animal rights activists, industry representatives and animal welfare experts with archival and unflinching investigative footage, she presents a story far more complex than one with only two sides, raising issues comfortably out of sight as we cruise the supermarket aisles. (90 mins.)

ANIMATED WORLDS: TWO DECADES OF PORTLAND ANIMATION
See Wednesday, November 11 description.
Special Admission: $3

A PLACE CALLED CHIAPAS - VANCOUVER, BC
DIR: NETTIE WILD  On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), made up largely of indigenous Mayan peoples, overtook five towns and more than 500 ranches in Chiapas, the poorest state in Mexico, and demanded control over their lives. Leading them was Subcomandante Marcos, who, while neither Mayan nor from Chiapas, was invested with a profound commitment for social change and an unerring sense of media tactics. Marcos continued to hold Mexican Army troops at bay, both politically and militarily, with an Internet campaign of harangues and poetry aimed at the international media, leading what The New York Times calls "the world's first post-modern revolution." In 1997 Vancouver filmmaker Nettie Wild and her crew traveled to the jungle canyons of Chiapas, eight months later emerging with the materials for a fascinating portrait of the elusive and fragile life of a revolution and the people who must change the world to survive it. (90 mins.)