The Fall '06 Archives: Episode Four aired on Wednesday October 4th 2006

The Fairy Tale of Everyday Life
Intertwining embedded messages from fairy tales to popular culture with the reality of daily life, this fairy tale depicts the life of many women, including marriage, birth, death and the continuation of the myth. Based on personal experience this video addresses the idea of how we internalize embedded cultural messages and also attempts to question and draw attention to the value of what has been commonly recognized as women's work and the domestic sphere.















Good Mommy
Confronting the ambivalent feelings women often experience in regard to their children, and in particular, the constant demands of an infant, this video describes the conflicting desires, guilt, burdens, fears and longing involved in giving birth and raising children. The origin of this work came about from my own dreams about motherhood and the related stories of other women's description of similar dreams.

Filmmaker Bio:
Kristi Ryba is a video artist and a painter/printmaker living and working on Johns Island near Charleston South Carolina. She has shown her video animations both locally and in New York, Atlanta, Boise ID and Cranbrook, MI. Since 2002 she has been making stop frame video animations using dolls, (the embodiment of all that is female) to serve as standardized human forms through which she examines cultural roles, relationships and common experiences such as growth, transition and change. Her next project is about the life of three sisters growing up with a mentally handicapped brother, through which she will explore the fears and prejudices associated with being different and the effect of mental impairment within a family.

kristiryba.com















Her Heart is Washed in Water & then Weighed
Ripe red tomatoes. A clinical examination of brain tissue. Pudgy baby feet swinging high above the ground. What do these images have in common? They can all be seen in Her Heart is Washed in Water & then Weighed, an irreducibly complex meditation on monuments, mortality, and female mobility that takes its title from a procedure in the autopsying of a human corpse. Filmed in Super 8 and 16mm in Rome, Italy and Iowa City, Iowa, Her Heart is Washed in Water & then Weighed also features the Coliseum, my back yard and my mother’s story about roast chicken, but when you die everything you know – including this - disappears.

Filmmaker Bio:
Sasha Waters is an award-winning documentary & experimental filmmaker, and associate professor at the University of Iowa. Her diverse range of films & videos all address, in one manner or another, the experiences of culturally marginalized populations and the subversion of social, sexual and political hierarchies of power. Waters’ work has broadcast and screened widely in the U.S. and abroad, including on the PBS series Independent Lens, the Sundance Channel, the Ann Arbor Film Festival & Tour (twice) and the Videoex International Festival of Experimental Film in Zurich. She has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Iowa Arts Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo.













The Abortion Diaries
A documentary featuring 12 women who speak candidly about their abortions (and other stuff). Their stories weave together with the filmmaker's diary entries to present a compelling, moving and at times surprisingly funny "dinner party" where the audience is invited to hear what women say behind closed doors about motherhood, medical technology, sex, spirituality, love, work and their own bodies.

www.theabortiondiaries.com

Filmmaker Bio:
Penny Lane is an independent filmmaker living in western Massachusetts. Her collaborative and solo experimental, narrative and documentary video work has screened at AFI FEST, Int'l Film Festival Rottersam, San Francisco Int'l Film Festival, Seattle Int'l Film Festival, Women in the Director's Chair, Santa Fe Art Institute, MOMA, and DUMBO Art Under the Bridge. She earned her MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and her BA in American Culture at Vassar College. From 2003-5 she was a core producer of the Hudson-Mohawk Independent Media Center, a group dedicated to making journalistic work that challenges the assumptions of the mainstream media. She has also worked extensively with youth at media centers such as Children's Media Project and The Ark, Inc. Currently she is a visiting assistant professor of video at Hampshire College.

The Fall '06 Archives: Episode Five aired on Wednesday November 1st 2006

The Juarez Mothers
Zulma Aguiar is an Electronic Artist originally from Calexico,California in search of "the truth" behind the Ciudad Juarez femicides. She discovers that the only reality she cared about in the end was the stories of the mothers of the femicide victims. Zulma interviewed as many mothers as she could with all of her own personal resources and the support of her university, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and traveled to Juarez several times to meet face to face with the realities of the feminine ground zero. The mothers explain the story one more time and makes the point that in the end the reason why these women are being killed and left to die is simply because they are poor. In the faces of the mothers is where corruption and negligence is expressed with pain and sorrow for their own loss.

Filmmaker Bio:
Zulma Aguiar is a video artist, podcasting blogger, interactive installation artist, feminist, border artist, human rights activist and a Chicana from Calexico, California whose expertise lies mainly with video, she learns about misogyny, global conflict, separation, border cultures, diasporas and the love hate relationship between all adjacent societies living near, or around political boundaries. She is living in New York City.

ChicanaFeliz.com














rendez-vous
More than 200,000 Koreans have been adopted internationally. Thousands of these adoptees return to Korea every year to search for biological kin. This is one woman's experience of meeting her birth mother. Conflating the story of familial reunion with the trajectory of an illicit affair, Rendez-vous presents an intimate glimpse into a widespread transnational phenomenon.

Filmmaker Bio:
M. Weimer is a videomaker and artist currently living in Los Angeles and New York. She has screened and exhibited her work in South Korea, Europe, and the U.S.














What the Water Saw
The video explores a mystery at the depths of the sea. The film is structured to mimic the ocean’s moods, creating a varied psychological space for the viewer. Equally important, the visual construction of the film moves between form and formlessness. This play between form (appearance) and formlessness (withdrawal) echoes both the ocean’s tides, and the idea of light and dark, or creation and destruction (death).

Filmmaker Bio:
Vanessa Woods graduated with a BA in art history and visual arts, cum laude from Barnard College. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship for Film, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute’s prestigious MFA Film Fellowship, where she is currently pursuing her MFA degree. Woods has produced five short films that have been screened internationally including the Centre International d’Art in France, The Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. Woods is currently working on three new films, including a feature-length documentary titled Mimita, which follows the lives of a family of women raising their adopted child in Bronx, New York.

www.vanessawoods.com














Our Hope
In the villages of western Kenya, AIDS has robbed hundreds of thousands of children of their parents. Who's caring for them? Tumaini Letu (Our Hope) follows the lives, struggles, and indomitable spirit of three women left to care for these orphans. Rasoa Kivairu is raising ten grandchildren. Anna Khautu is a single mother of five. And Anna Aredo has taken in four nephews. With limited resources but great resolve, they must overcome many challenges to ensure these children have a chance at a better future.

Filmmaker Bio:
Natalie Halpern is a new filmmaker with a passion for documentaries that capture the immeasurable capacity of the human spirit and the vulnerabilities of children living in poverty, and examine other critical social issues confronting our world. Previously Halpern was a television news reporter/bureau chief, as well as a radio producer focusing on coverage of Latin America and Eastern Europe. Born in Hollywood, California, but raised in Miami, Florida, her love of film was nurtured by her mother who took her to a movie almost every week from the age of four. Halpern received a B.S. in Journalism and a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University. In 2005, she completed a documentary film program at the Maine International Television and Film Workshops. Tumaini Letu is her second film. She currently lives in Arlington, Virginia.














WORLD PREMIERE!!!
Go Global
What happens when consumerism starts close to home and travels over distant lands only to come back to haunt us?


Filmmaker Bio:
Branda Miller is an Artist, educator and activist who has been working with independent media since the 1970s. Her experimentation with media arts is integrally linked with community organizing. In her collaborative work with groups around the country, Miller involves participants in varied aspects of production so they take control of their own representation. The tapes produced in her youth empowerment workshops focus on issues such as teenage pregnancy, dropping out, crime, prison, drugs, and AIDS, offering a realistic yet upbeat treatment of what growing up in America is like today. Over the past 20 years, Branda has developed a portfolio of intriguing, award-winning works, examining topics in areas such as environmentalism, consumerism, social behavior and cyber culture.

rpi.edu/~milleb/
















Self Study Course
Self Study Course is an experimental self portrait of the filmmaker's journey into the subconscious. Through a narrative voice of society, that manifests itself in the form of a self hypnosis recording, she explores the contradictions between self ridicule and self appreciation.

Filmmaker Bio:
Diana Arce is an experimental filmmaker, installation and performance artist currently residing in Berlin Germany. Born in Anchorage Alaska, and raised all over the United States, much of Diana’s work deals with themes of internationalism, culture, politics, and space.

visualosmosis.com















Passing> 13 things about Nella Larsen
Most people have never heard of Nella Larsen, a mixed-race Harlem Renaissance writer, whose career was brilliant but tragically brief. Recently, an increasing amount of scholarly attention has been given to Larsen's work yet there exists a frustrating lack of visual documentation on her life. This video essay/experimental short montages the few existing archival photographs of the writer with contemporaneous found footage. It attempts to introduce this groundbreaking writer to new audiences while reimagining the life of a mysterious woman whose life mirrored her art in its liminality.

Filmmaker Bio:
M. Weimer is a videomaker and artist currently living in Los Angeles and New York. She has screened and exhibited her work in South Korea, Europe, and the U.S.














52 Bis
Filmed at my grandmother’s house in Paris, France 52 Bis leads the viewer through a house of memories, empty rooms, photographs that have been left behind and one light illuminating and obscuring what’s inside. The continual shift between the positive and negative image serve to exploit the idea of presence and absence, or alternately the internal and external. The negative images become the bones of the house, or the bones of memory within its continually shifting spaces.

Filmmaker Bio:
Vanessa Woods graduated with a BA in art history and visual arts, cum laude from Barnard College. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship for Film, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute’s prestigious MFA Film Fellowship, where she is currently pursuing her MFA degree. Woods has produced five short films that have been screened internationally including the Centre International d’Art in France, The Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. Woods is currently working on three new films, including a feature-length documentary titled Mimita, which follows the lives of a family of women raising their adopted child in Bronx, New York.
www.vanessawoods.com

The Fall '06 Archives: Episode Six aired on Wednesday December 6th 2006

Le Lapin
A whimsical, drunken journey through a small French village in the foothills of the Pyrenees with an adult human size rabbit. (With a cameo appearance by art rock legend Kevin Ayers of Soft Machine and original score by Mary Hansen (RIP) and Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab and John McEntire

Filmmaker Bio:
Dara Greenwald is an interdisciplinary artist with an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Women's Studies from Oberlin College. She was part-time faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Film/Video/New Media department from 2003-2005 and worked as the Distribution Manager at the Video Data Bank from 1998 – 2005. She currently lives and studies in Troy, NY.

daragreenwald.com
















Trina's Collections
This short documentary celebrates Trina Robbins (writer/producer of Go Girl! Comics) and her eclectic collections: girl action figures, super heroines, vintage aprons, rubber bath tub toys, saints, tikis, hawaiiana, and more.

Filmmaker Bio:
Ellen Lake received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California in 2002, where she studied sculpture, film & video, and installation. She is currently working on a series of experimental shorts about collecting. She is the recipient of Bay Area Video Coalition’s 2005 Mediamaker Award. Trina’s Collections has been shown at the Lab and Roxie Cinema (21st Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema) in San Francisco, Works Gallery in San Jose, Spark Contemporary Art Space in Syracuse, Arizona State University Short Film and Video Festival, Reel Venus and 24 Hour Film Festivals in NYC, has toured the county with the Gadabout Traveling Film Festival and was recently given a “Juror’s Award” at the California State Fair in Sacramento, California.

ellenlake.com















Secrets of Cindy
Remember your junior high diary? The discovery of boys, written in one endless breathy run on sentence? “I was kissing Gary and it was really romantic it was like a dream, he was feeling my bra strap but I didn’t care it made me feel feminine…” Kleine’s “Secrets” starts with two totally embarrassed college girls reading from their Archie and Veronica accounts of sixth grade adventures, then little by little it intersperses Cindy’s more recent images and journal entries as she moves through her relationship with the current guy in her life, juxtaposing the first strong passions of a 12 year old girl with the more complex passions of a young woman. As it turns out: things haven’t changed all that much!














Passage
This video emerged out of a period in my life marked by emotional crisis brought on by the dissolution of a long love relationship. Feeling myself falling into a deep abyss of fear and darkness, I sought to record what was taking place and document it, as though the act of doing so would tether me to the world and keep me from drowning. I experienced many phases of shock, disbelief, and grief. The ideas and images arose from these intense states of emotion. I stared my deepest fears of solitude and abandonment in the face and in those moments, the clearest thoughts and images arose. The piece is a testament to faith. Cindy Kleine is a film and video artist whose work has been exhibited in many venues, including The Telluride Film Festival, The Seattle International Film Festival, the Vancouver International Film Festival, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Knitting Factory in NYC, The ICA in London and The Center d’art Contemporain in Lyon, France. Her film, Doug and Mike, Mike and Doug, about the Starn Twins, was broadcast on PBS’s POV, The Independent Film Series.

Filmmaker Bio:
Ms. Kleine has received awards and fellowships from The American Film Institute, The U.S. S-8 Film and Digital Video Festival, The MacDowell Colony, The Bard College MFA Fellowship Program, and The New England Regional Fellowship Program. She has taught filmmaking for many years at Boston College, Harvard University, The Museum School, Boston, and The New School for Social Research in New York. She currently lives with her husband, theatre director and actor Andre Gregory, and their two cats, in New York City and on Cape Cod.














The Touch
A meditation on Anne Sexton’s poem of the same name. The film examines melodies within spoken, written and visual language and how they can interact. By juxtaposing text, image and sound, the viewer is asked to contemplate disparate forms of human response and emotion regarding language and imagery. In The Touch, the text from the poem is first given life through single-frame animation, then layered audio recording and finally through animated visuals that reinterpret it. Language and image investigate feelings of disembodiment, isolation and absence punctuated by sound and silence. Because the subject of the poem deals specifically with the idea of touch, the film sustains a highly tactile, textural quality wherein the filmmaker’s hand is overtly present.














On Alzheimer’s
An experimental animation piece that explores my grandmother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. The film was created by animating photographic stills taken in my grandmother’s apartment in Corsica, in combination with old family photographs, her physical objects (pearls and gloves), my own diary text, and various other collected imagery (brain diagrams, etc.). The film is sustained by two melodies—text and imagery—that repeat themselves, unfolding in alternate rhythms to emulate the mental obfuscation and confusion of Alzheimer’s.

Filmmaker Bio:
Vanessa Woods graduated with a BA in art history and visual arts, cum laude from Barnard College. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship for Film, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute’s prestigious MFA Film Fellowship, where she is currently pursuing her MFA degree. Woods has produced five short films that have been screened internationally including the Centre International d’Art in France, The Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. Woods is currently working on three new films, including a feature-length documentary titled Mimita, which follows the lives of a family of women raising their adopted child in Bronx, New York.

www.vanessawoods.com














Happily Ever After
As an attempt to understand the tragedies and contradictions within my family’s past, I examined my family through our old home movies. By filming my childhood dollhouse that had not been played with in over a decade, I tried to capture the anxiety I was feeling by growing older and discovering the truth about the deaths of the men in my family- the most tragic being the suicide of my closest uncle.

Filmmaker Bio:
Victoria L. Kereszi, is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a Master’s degree in Documentary and Women’s Memoir Film. She is currently the Director of Programming at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, New York City’s community access center. She has also taught video production at public schools around New York City. Her teaching artist experience extends to Global Action Project, a youth media organization, where she worked with youth in Washington Heights on teen issues of sexual health and anti-tobacco campaigns. She has also traveled to Costa Rica and Cuba to work with youth and co-directed, Cuba Beside Us, a video documenting the experiences of Cuban and American youth during the summer of 2002. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

victoriakereszi.net