From: PDX Film Fest (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Apr 18 2008 - 17:16:09 PDT
Its that time of year again!
The seventh annual Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival (PDX
Fest, for short!) is just two short weeks away! This year the festival will
be taking place at the historic Hollywood
Theatre<http://www.hollywoodtheatre.org/>from April 30 – May 4, 2008.
We will also be hosting an exciting sidebar
program of video installation work and multi-media performances at
galleryHomeland <http://www.galleryhomeland.org/>. This year's festival is
easily our biggest yet featuring five jam-packed days of provocative,
artistic and firmly uncompromising films and videos from around the globe.
The full schedule is now up for your eager eyes at www.peripheralproduce.com.
Check it out!
*Festival Highlights include:*
*OPENING NIGHT! Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell*
PDX Fest is excited to present the Northwest premiere of *Wild Combination*,
*Matt Wolf'*s visually absorbing portrait of the seminal avant-garde
composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer Arthur Russell.
Before his untimely death from AIDS in 1992, Arthur prolifically created
music that spanned both pop and the transcendent possibilities of abstract
art. Now, over fifteen years since his passing, Arthur's work is finally
finding its audience. Wolf incorporates rare archival footage and commentary
from Arthur's family, friends, and closest collaborators—including Philip
Glass and Allen Ginsberg—to tell this poignant and important story.
*Featured Artists: Travis Wilkerson & Shana Moulton *
We are incredibly excited to welcome documentarian *Travis Wilkerson* and
video performance artist *Shana Moulton* as our featured artists this year!
Travis Wilkerson is an internationally recognized documentary filmmaker,
whose work is firmly based in the tradition of Third Cinema, or activist
filmmaking. Wilkerson's work consistently tackles the challenges of
presenting the tangled threads of contested social history and making them
relevant to today's world, marrying a sophisticated interrogation of history
with a provocative approach to the documentary film form. Travis will be
presenting a special May Day presentation of his multi-media
performance, *Proving
Ground* (which premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival) as well as a
special screening of his award-winning 2002 documentary, *An Injury to One*.
Video and performance artist Shana Moulton is rapidly gaining international
renown through her witty yet strange video and performance series, *Whispering
Pines*. Following in the footsteps of such innovative multi-media
performers as Miranda July and Cindy Sherman, Moulton's work utilizes a
variety of mediums with an undeniably playful approach to explore the
isolation and confusion of consumer living in the New Age. Shana will be
presenting a very special *Whispering Pines* program featuring many of the
videos from the series as well as a live performance that will bring this
strange world to life right before our eyes!!
*The 2008 Peripheral Produce Invitational *
The Peripheral Produce Invitational (dubbed the 'World Championship of
Experimental Cinema') will once again pit filmmakers from Portland and
beyond against each other in a rock-em-sock-em, trash talkin' competitive
film showdown. At last year's Invitational, history was made as 91-year old
filmmaker *George Andrus* walked away with the trophy and our audiences'
hearts. This year George returns to defend his title against a brand new
batch of rabid filmmakers who hope to make the trophy their own. Will George
cast his adorable spell over the audience again or will a new superstar
usurp his throne? With all the filmmakers in attendance and the audience
deciding who wins, you never know what will happen in this battle-royale of
experimental film.
*
The Universal Language: A PowerPoint Presentation*
San Francisco filmmakers *Sam Green* and *Carrie Lozano* (*The Weather
Underground*) bring us a very special multi-media performance as they use
the much-maligned PowerPoint™ application to present something between a
rough-cut and a lecture on their new film project, *The Universal Language*.
The final film will be a feature-length experimental documentary exploring
the battered state of the utopian impulse at the dawn of the 21st century,
asking the question what has happened to our ability to imagine a future
based on humankind's noblest impulses? Featuring a live soundtrack by *Dave
Cerf*.
*
CLOSING NIGHT! Mock Up On Mu by Craig Baldwin*
This year's PDX Fest will close with the Northwest premiere of *Mock Up On
Mu*, the latest feature film from collage filmmaker *Craig Baldwin* (*Sonic
Outlaws, Tribulation '99*). A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and
even horror genres, *Mock Up On Mu* musters the creative audacity to take up
within its absurdly impossible 'collage-narrative' agency the profoundly
serious issue of the militarization of space. Based (mostly) on historical
fact, *Mu* explores the occult rituals of 3 seminal figures in post-War
California - Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder Jack Parsons, his partner
artist Marjorie Cameron, and Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
*The First-Ever Experimental Filmmaker Karaoke Throwdown! at galleryHomeland
*
An all-new interactive event joins the PDX Fest roster with this one night
only, one of a kind Karaoke Night! We have invited a handful of experimental
filmmakers to tackle the great unexplored territory of the Karaoke Video to
bring us a kustom-made katalog of your favorite karaoke hits! Come join us
as we try to take Karaoke to the next level!!
*Surreal Systems: The PDX Fest Video Installation Exhibit at galleryHomeland
*
For the third consecutive year, Portland artists *Stephen Slappe* and *Mack
McFarland* have put together an exhibition of video art for the PDX
Fest. *Surreal
Systems* glimpses at artists working within the wide field of video
installation, featuring work from fourteen artists and artist teams from the
USA and Europe. What creates a system? Who dictates the rules? And what
occurs when the rules fail? These are a few of the questions posed by the
work in *Surreal Systems*. This show promises Portland's heaviest annual
dose of installation-based moving images under one roof!
*PLUS* new films and videos from a ton of amazing filmmakers (many of whom
will be in attendance!) including *Stephanie Barber, Ben Russell, Linas
Phillips, Jeanne Liotta*, *Cartune Xprez, *and* Michael Robinson*! *PLUS
PLUS* workshops, parties, surprise performances AND MUCH MUCH MORE!!
For the full festival schedule, ticketing info, and last minute updates head
to:
www.peripheralproduce.com
See you there!
The PDX Fest Crew
------------------------------
This year's festival is funded in part generous grants from The Regional
Arts and Culture Council and The Oregon Council for Humanities. For a full
listing of our awesome sponsors, please see the website and our program!
-- the Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival April 30-May 4, 2008 at the Hollywood Theatre www.peripheralproduce.com __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.