Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens

EYE:AM presents NEW FILMMAKERS Women's Night ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN

2011-09-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

www.anotherexperimentbywomenfilmfestival.com
curated by Lili White
Program 6 – September 28, 2011 at 7:00pm – Anthology Film Archives

Please NOTE this CHANGE OF the AFTERPARTY VENUE-After the screening converse with us at LUNASA 126 First Avenue (bet 7th & St. Mark’s)–We’ll be at TABLE # 8, if you are a little late!

Future Anterior /(Instant); Muriel Montini; 6.00; S8 to Digi
Dream Of Me; Agnes Moon; 9.31; Digi
Land Of Mourning Calm; Jessica Bardsley; 15.00; Digi
Elinor Beauregard; Simone Bailey; 1.36; Digi
The Sin; Doris Neidl; 3.06; Digi
Trust; Tammy Kinsey; 7.41; Digi
Hatchet; Hilda Daniel; 0.29 Looped; Digi
------
Future Anterior /(Instant); Muriel Montini; 6.00; S8/Digi
A woman emerges from the shadows in slow motion. While approaching, we hear echoes of story. It might seem insignificant, but it’s the sort of story that haunts your thoughts for the rest of your life.

Dream Of Me; Agnes Moon; 9.31; Digi
Using images and testimony far removed from the life of its ostensible subject, the documentary attempts to imagine a sister, a relationship, and mixed-race identity.

Land Of Mourning Calm; Jessica Bardsley; 15.00; Digi
Land of Mourning Calm is an epistolary video essay that charts a long distance correspondence between two women–one American, the other South Korean. It is a work of experimental ethnography, which uses personal memory as a mode of exploring female intimacy, self-discovery, and issues of cross-cultural translation.

Elinor Beauregard; Simone Bailey; 1.36; Digi
Drawing from Gustave Calliebotte’s The Floor Scrapers, the video examines labor, bodies, and touch.

The Sin; Doris Neidl; 3.06; Digi
A video inspired by a poem of Iranian writer Forough Farrokzhad. It speaks about love, lust and desire. But it’s also highly mystical. For the video I used found footage (three of my favorite films: Hiroshima mon amour; La piscine, Jules et Jim) combined with new footage. The words are spoken in Farsi. I am borrowing excerpts from the films and transforming them into a new context. Therefore, on one side bowing to these films of “world cinema”, on the other side interpreting and visualizing Farrokzhad’s poem.

Trust; Tammy Kinsey; 7.41; Digi
TRUST uses digital and traditional elements chronicling the experience of traveling alone as a female, observations of the road, an internal and external journey measured in miles.

Hatchet; Hilda Daniel; 0.29 Looped; Digi
Phonetic sequences propel decapitated segments suggesting threat, violence – dv, stalking, rape – escape. Words are used linguistically, sonically and visually to convey meaning (“hatchet” is repeated in whispers chugging like a train or train of thought locked in a chant of madness or fear; letters move, are hacked, torn, peek and disappear…). The piece is a fright of fancy – a concrete poem part rage, part fear.

PROGRAM 5 — 67 min – July 27, 2011 8PM —

2011-07-21T07:19:00.001-07:00

SPECIAL THANKS to Kathryn Ramey for bringing her 16MM print to tonight's show!
8pm Anthology Film Archives
After the screening join us for conversation at White Rabbit – 145 East Houston Street

SORROW; Liliana Resnick; 13.40; 16mm

Every war has its end. Only, every war has its beginning too. In 2003 during the war on Iraq, an American reservist refused his wife’s advice to flee the country rather than being activated for duty in war. “I’ll come back” he said. When he returned he told to his wife, ”I trained for war, I was even looking forward to it. Now I wish I had never seen it. I cannot bare to be alive.”

“The footage for this film is in two parts: the documentary of demonstrations against the war in Iraq from 2003 in San Francisco, and a fictional story which depicts a woman losing her husband. I decided to make a short film which will tell a story of a journey which knows its end from its very beginning. Although demonstrations against the war were strong, focused, eloquent, and well organized, they did not change the course the U.S. government set up for the events to come.”-L.R.

EVERY MORNING WE WERE AWAKENED; Gia Michael; 4.32; digi

This work is part of a larger film entitled 'DISINHERITED EARTH.' this chapter is a reflection on notions of religion as motive and the construction of identity. The work is an investigation into the dichotomies of convention, ancestry, and cultural inheritance. The project blends factual and fabricated personal and collective histories to allow another layer of narrative emerge from the captured dialogue and poetry by the artist.

YANQUI WALKER & THE OPTICAL REVOLUTION; Kathryn Ramey; 33.00; 16mm

This film explores a now-obscure American expansionist and military dictator, William Walker, who through military force and coercion became president of Nicaragua in 1856. The film blends found footage, documentary photography, ethnographic inquiry, and personal travelogue with experimental film techniques such as hand-processing, optical printing, and time-lapse to detour and derail the various approaches to history-making that have been applied to this story. Yanqui WALKER as a contemporary work of film art, not only tells us something about history and how it connects to current political, social and economic situations but also how art and poetry can be a means to subvert and transcend even the most oppressive of narratives.

RICE RELIEF; C+A Projects (Carolyn Radlo & Alanna Simone); 2:52; Digi

C + A Projects is Carolyn Radlo & Alanna Simone live in San Francisco and collaborate on projects which deal with social and political situations through the lens of their own particular experience, communicating through sparse text and evocative imagery. Rice Relief is a stop-motion animation rumination about food, rank, and privilege. http://thecarolynandalannashow.com

A MOVIE BY JEN PROCTOR; Jennifer Proctor; 12:00; Digi

A loving remake of Bruce Conner’s seminal 1958 found footage film, “A MOVIE” uses appropriated material from YouTube and LiveLeak; and provides a parallel narrative that explores the changes in historical and visual icons from 1958 to 2010 – and those images that remain surprisingly, and delightfully, the same. It comments on the pervasiveness of footage available for appropriation in an online world, and the way disparate threads in the YouTube and LiveLeak databases can be assembled to create “a movie.”

Eye Am presents... Wonder Women

2011-06-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

Eye Am Screening
July 1st 7pm at:
The Women’s Building
373 Central Avenue
Albany, NY 12206
518.462.2871
www.thewomensbuilding.org/?page_id=75

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens presents…. “Wonder Women” with films by:
Zulma Aguiar
Vanessa Woods
M. Weimer
Oriana Fox
Annie Novak & Alexis Powell
Holly Clark
Naomi White
Monique Flynn
Sabrina Cardenales
Natalie Halpern
Total program run-time 60 minutes

DAILY PRACTICE by Naomi White (excerpt), 2006
Through the repetition of various everyday routines, we create images of ourselves. In Daily Practice, I employ video to explore issues of balance—the earnest and healthy desires for growth versus rituals that perhaps go too far, and instead consume our identities. Does 'practice' improve who we are, or diminish our reality and sense of self? When do repetition and imitation become obsession, and how do we gauge when a practice that may have once been beneficial has become destructive? By depicting different aspects of ritual /obsession this work investigates how the need to change ourselves can elevate ordinary practices into transformative spells in the drive to become something 'more.' Through imitation, conditioning and practice these characters attempt to create new instinctual behaviors through which they come to understand themselves and their world.

THE JUAREZ MOTHERS by Zulma Aguiar, 2006
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.

UPSTATE GIRLS SCRAPBOOKS by Sabrina Cardenales & Monique Flynn (local filmmakers), 2011
"Upstate Girls" share stories about the challenges in their lives, and the institutions with which they are entwined—including the legal, educational, healthcare and penal systems. Monique & Sabrina’s scrapbook videos are a piece of the story of the young women of Troy and these videos will be archived in the Rensselaer County Historical Society Archives.

THE TOUCH by Vanessa Woods, 2006
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.

PASSING> 13 THINGS ABOUT NELLA LARSEN by M. Weimer, 2005
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.

NARCISSIUS by Oriana Fox, 2003
Tale of Narcissus is the second in the series of videos in which I have set the words of the popular TV series Sex and The City into the mouths of 1970s feminists, all of whom are played by myself. In this mini-episode Samantha has nude photographs taken in which she poses with chewing-gum vulvas on her body, a gesture mimicking that of the artist, Hannah Wilke.

WE CAN SPREAD THE MESSAGE by Holly Clark (local filmmaker), 2010
Created in the “Trojan Herstories Digital Storytelling Workshop” funded by Holding Our Own, an audio/video oral history project designed to raise awareness about the disfranchisement of women; involving participants in the representation of their communities. This video is Holly’s portrait of CLUW (Coalition of Labor Union Women). For more info visit: www.mediasanctuary.org/node/1916 www.cluw.org

OUR HOPE by Natalie Halpern, 2006
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.

WEE DARK HOURS by Annie Novak & Alexis Powell, 2007
A stop motion animation about a mother's love, a singing moon and
stars and the magic of being born. Short and sweet and made with felt!
www.meerkatmedia.org

ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN curated by Lili White June 15 @ 7:15 PM— join us after the show at WHITE RABBIT 145 E Houston (between 1st & 2nd AVE)

2011-06-04T05:48:00.000-07:00

EYE:AM http://www.eyeamvideo.blogspot.com/ presents Women's Night at NEW FILMMAKERS —
ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN curated by Lili White
June 15 @ 7:15 PM— join us after the show at WHITE RABBIT 145 E Houston (between 1st & 2nd AVE)

*************************************************
CALL & RESPONSE; Ellen Lake; 3.30; 16mm / cell phone/digi
Vintage 16 mm film home movies from the late 1930s/early 40s combines with cell phone and digital media today to explore ideas about the evolution of technology, the relationship between past and present, and the perception of time and memory.

OPAL; Cara Marisa Deleon; 3.30; digi
An experimental nursery rhyme explores gender and power.
TILL THERE WAS YOU; Baba Hillman; 7.30; super8 to digi
Performers:Laura Diaz del Corral, Baba Hillman; Camera: Léna Rouxel, Fernando de Azevedo,
Baba Hillman; Music: Columb Farrelly.
I don’t know where my steps lead. But I am here through you, through my love for your eyes.

NEVER TOO LATE; Wendy Weinberg; 7.40; digi
Using images from vintage films and classic TV and replacing the soundtrack with contemporary dialogue, "Never Too Late" tells the story of two hotel maids who have lived together in San Francisco for 25 years. When the California courts grant same-sex couples the right to marry,
Stella and Rosie decide it’s time to tie the knot. But before they can hire a florist, Prop 8 is passed.
Must they head east in search of equality?

ORGASMATIQUE, DRAMATIQUE, HORROR; Melissa Bruno; 2.13; digi
A performance art video that critiques the exploitation of the female face in popular body genre films (pornography, melodrama, horror) and the role women have been burdened with in cinematic history as the sole bearer of emotion.

DINNER FOR 4; Ariane Loze; 7.00; digi
MÔWN (Movies on my own) is a series in which Loze plays with our reflex to interpret images and to associate them to create a coherent narrative. In these shorts, Loze plays all the parts, and she is also the director, the camerawoman, the scenarist and the editor. The edit constructs a relationship between 2 or more different characters and the architecture that surrounds them. By reducing the means to a minimum, one actress and a camera, the artifices of filmmaking become more visible and the spectator has to use his/her imagination to construct the story and to overcome the artificiality of this recomposed image of reality—Three women sitting around a dinner table, waiting.The atmosphere is tensed. The fourth one arrives, she will be the only one to eat, the others will observe her. Between these four women, a silent conflict develops and the gestures of each of them are judged by the others. Feelings of mistrust and anxiety grow. The outcome surprises them all.

PRICKTIC ; Hilda Daniel ; 0.51; digi
A nervous tic, a sinister twitch, a butterfly, beermat and desire edge inside a woolly slit of fluttering violence. In PRICKTIC, pressed seduction teeters and is dragged into a covert drama played out in non-verbal sound. The wrenching of audio clip and image from their original form into distressed violence is echoed in the narrative.

SEGMENT 38:07; Hilda Daniel; 0.38; digi
Experimental entomology, phonology-linguistics, power, abuse and sex in 38 seconds or less. In SEGMENT, I have taken a small bit of archival footage (a children’s science film from the great Prelinger Archive online) and, reprocessing sound from aged film and record, exposed an overlooked narrative from the original film and restructured a new narrative thread which may have broader implications.

HONEY BED; Syni Pappa; 4.08; Super 8
Honey Bed is an intimate portrayal of femininity and the act of subversion in the post modern times of depression. The film was shot in one Super 8 film cartridge with no retakes.
WEB: perfect-noise.tumblr; myspace/synipappa; dailymotion.comTHE_Real_Syni_Pappa

MILLING THE LIGHTS; Jelena Maksimovic; 15.50; digi
Lights, bodies, movements. Love story filmed by a broken web camera.

ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN FILM FESTIVAL (AXWFF.com)
juried by Lili White (http://liliwhite.com)

is looking for experimental shorts made by WOMEN that present your own vision of movie making —we want to see something different and unique-- challenge us to rethink what “experimental” means on your terms...By “film” we mean a moving image, made with any media, that presents some kind of transfor-mative action or thought. Preference will be given to short works around 3 minutes long (due to time), and local filmmakers. We are hoping to forge a yearly event and are looking for volunteer participation to help with logo design, and other tasks...
Different screenings will take place in New York City at MEDIA NOCHE Gallery in October and at NYC's premiere screening theatre, MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP in November 2011.
Accepted works will be screened on their original media (tape, film, or or DVD) if funds are available to cover the costs incurred.
NO FEE. Submit an online link or DVD. Must be Region 1, NTSC. Please no PAL discs.
All sent material will not be returned.
If your movie is not in English please provide subtitle if necessary.
POSTMARK DEADLINE: August 13, 2011-- we encourage early submission.
Each submitted work has to be labeled specifying title, artist and running time, and along with both a printed and e-mailed entry form. Upon mailing the e-mail form, the snail mail address will be sent

Eye Am Higlighted in Upstate Women's Art Blog~

2011-05-16T06:26:00.001-07:00

Check out the write up about Eye Am in "Artolution".

May 11, 2011 @ 7:30 ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN curated by Lili White

2011-05-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

EYE:AM presents Women's Night as part of NEW FILMMAKERS

MIRROR MOVES for PRIVATE EYES; Alice Cohen: Animation & Soundtrack (composer, performer, producer using
analogue synthesizer and voice); 13.42; digi
Animation exploring the idea of the Mirror as a psychic receptor; a magical portal to visionary and ecstatic states, thru
self-reflection and visualization. The ritual use of beauty tools such as make-up, hair brushes, perfume, and other trans-
formative implements, are infused with a symbolic charge. Spaces of movie theaters with lit-up marquees, and boudoirs
with mysterious dressing tables, act as portals as well - power sites where time is fluid, and past and future co-exist.
Auras of glamour, artifice and fantasy are used in a hypnotic, meditative way, creating pathways towards transcendence
and personal gnosis.

PURSUIT; Ariane Loze; 7.00; Digi
Loze is the director, camerawoman, scenarist, editor and plays all the actors parts. The edit constructs a relation-ship
between different characters and the architecture that surrounds them. By reducing the means to a minimum, one act-
ress and a camera, the spectator has to use their imagination to construct the story and to over-come the artificiality of
this recomposed image of reality.

STANDSTILL; Angeliki Malakasioti; 8.21; Digi
This video explores the architecture of 'stillness' in its physical, notional and emotional dimensions; a lonesome point
of view - the distorted time of a pause - the lubricity of endurance -- a cordial halt between sleeping and unsleeping.
It attempts to delve into the faulty experience of an intimate standstill, its ethereal but disquieting atmosphere and the
unearthly fears inhabiting it. Alice's Red Queen was tangled in a running-to-stand-still effort to keep her present alive.
Being life-like in deep stillness can be as erroneous as the motion-and-quiescence erotic battle. One cannot but violate
the intensity of a deep pause by 'rebooting' himself and living again. All elements are underpinned by a theoretical, but
still intimate, approach of the idea of 'stillness', in its conceptual, spatial and psychological dimensions.

SACRED; Tammy A Kinsey; 16.18; digi
A digital video piece that examines the concept of Meaning in our contemporary world. Sacred explores visual
notions of reverence through natural and man-made environments, from the commercial and flashy to the organic and
sublime. Light, memory and time are components of the filmmaker’s journey. As the artist travels from West to East
geo-graphically, she moves from the colors of Hollywood to those of her ancestral home. The piece simultaneously
investigates the relationship between digital and traditional means of imaging and representation. What is sacred has
always been that which is simple and comforting, evocative of a sense of belonging- reminder of our place in the world.

CHIROS; Melanie Crean; Computer Graphics by Luba Drozd; 7.50; digi
Chiros is based on interviews with HIV+ women speaking about how their perception of time has changed since
becoming positive. There can be an urgency related to chronological time: days are governed by medication schedules
and the pursuit of goals in a race against their body. This is often punctuated by welcomed interruptions from Chiros, a
perceived suspension of time during happy occasions, as when one loses oneself in moments with friends and family.
The experimental documentary contrasts the women’s descriptions of struggle with shimmering animated compositions,
that embody not only the complexities of their personalities, but the different forms of time they are grappling with.

teNtaCles of DiMenSions; Nandita Kumar;14.00; mini DV
Tentacles of Dimensions is a journey of a brain that decides to unplug its cultural programming(or awakens to the fact
of constant programming), and purely indulges in the senses. It accepts it sexuality and duality of existence and evolves
with each painful birth. It goes through acceptance of life as it is, in its naturalness, and lives in its totality. This journey
is the unlearning of fear and prejudices, and progressing past fragmentation and the acceptance of love. It is within this
body of blood, flesh and bones is hidden that is beyond the body. In the form lives the formless; in the visible lives the
invisible.

EYE:AM http://www.eyeamvideo.blogspot.com/ presents Women's Night part of NEW FILMMAKERS
June 15 @ 7:15 PM — ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN curated by Lili White
*************************************************
CALL & RESPONSE; Ellen Lake; 3.30; 16mm / cell phone/digi
Vintage 16 mm film home movies from the late 1930s/early 40s combines with cell phone and
digital media today to explore ideas about the evolution of technology, the relationship between
past and present, and the perception of time and memory.
OPAL; Cara Marisa Deleon; 3.30; digi
An experimental nursery rhyme explores gender and power.

TILL THERE WAS YOU; Baba Hillman; 7.30; super8 to digi
Performers:Laura Diaz del Corral, Baba Hillman; Camera: Léna Rouxel, Fernando de Azevedo,
Baba Hillman; Music: Columb Farrelly.
I don’t know where my steps lead. But I am here through you, through my love for your eyes.

NEVER TOO LATE; Wendy Weinberg; 7.40; digi
Using images from vintage films and classic TV and replacing the soundtrack with contemporary
dialogue, "Never Too Late" tells the story of two hotel maids who have lived together in San
Francisco for 25 years. When the California courts grant same-sex couples the right to marry,
Stella and Rosie decide it’s time to tie the knot. But before they can hire a florist, Prop 8 is
passed.
Must they head east in search of equality?

ORGASMATIQUE, DRAMATIQUE, HORROR; Melissa Bruno; 2.13; digi
A performance art video that critiques the exploitation of the female face in popular body
genre films (pornography, melodrama, horror) and the role women have been burdened with in
cinematic history as the sole bearer of emotion.

DINNER FOR 4; Ariane Loze; 7.00; digi
MÔWN (Movies on my own) is a series in which Loze plays with our reflex to interpret images
and to associate them to create a coherent narrative. In these shorts, Loze plays all the parts,
and she is also the director, the camerawoman, the scenarist and the editor. The edit constructs
a relationship between 2 or more different characters and the architecture that surrounds them.
By reducing the means to a minimum, one actress and a camera, the artifices of filmmaking
become more visible and the spectator has to use his/her imagination to construct the story and
to overcome the artificiality of this recomposed image of reality—Three women sitting around a
dinner table, waiting.The atmosphere is tensed. The fourth one arrives, she will be the only one
to eat, the others will observe her. Between these four women, a silent conflict develops and the
gestures of each of them are judged by the others. Feelings of mistrust and anxiety grow. The
outcome surprises them all.

PRICKTIE; Hilda Daniel ; 0.51; digi
A nervous tic, a sinister twitch, a butterfly, beermat and desire edge inside a woolly slit of
fluttering violence. In PrickTic, pressed seduction teeters and is dragged into a covert drama
played out in non-verbal sound. The wrenching of audio clip and image from their original form
into distressed violence is echoed in the narrative.

SEGMENT; Hilda Daniel; 0.38; digi
Experimental entomology, phonology-linguistics, power, abuse and sex in 38 seconds or less.
In Segment, I have taken a small bit of archival footage (a children’s science film from the
great Prelinger Archive online) and, reprocessing sound from aged film and record, exposed an
overlooked narrative from the original film and restructured a new narrative thread which may
have broader implications.

HONEY BED; Syni Pappa; 4.08; Super 8 to digi
Honey Bed is an intimate portrayal of femininity and the act of subversion in the post modern
times of depression. The film was shot in one Super 8 film cartridge with no retakes.

MILLING THE LIGHTS; Jelena Maksimovic; 15.50; digi
Lights, bodies, movements. Love story filmed by a broken web camera.

March 16, 2011 EYE:AM presents ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN

2011-01-19T07:18:00.001-08:00

*************************************************
EYE:AM presents ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN
at Anthology Film Archives
curated by Lili White http://www.eyeamvideo.blogspot.com/
PROGRAM 2 - March 16 7:15PM
*************************************************

CAUDA PAVANIS; Carolyn Radlo; 3.35; digi
Above and Below, Side to Side: The whole picture and everything possible. Cauda pavonis means peacock's tail, and in alchemy, it refers to a multicolored point of perfection in the long and magical work of transformation. This film is an experimental alchemical procedure (3 x 3) revealing the true likeness of the omphalos of the American continent, the mountain range we call The Grand Tetons.

RETREAT ; Katya Yakubov; 2009; 8.30; digi
Our acquaintance with Amy and with Tibetan Buddhism is limited to the glimpses of a curious outsider. Fragmenting images and sounds, the film explores and renders a snapshot of a day in the life of a Tibetan Buddhist nun. This is a subjective echo of our experience, being welcomed into a space by the people of Milarepa Center.

ECSTATIC VESSELS; Diane Kitchen; silent; 20.00;16mm @ 24fps
Blaze in the trees Blaze on the brow.
When walking in the deep woods and examining its details in close-up and wide-angle, the surroundings reveal moments that move rapidly. Transformations. The light does not stop changing. The elements nod and sweep and seem to signal to each other. Incidents occur. Spontaneity. Foreground and background, shifting perspectives. A vast scattered array pulls together and with it ideas of trees, wind, sun and relationships.
"All life is being lived.
Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?" --Rainer Marie Rilke, The Book of Hours

CONSIDERING AN EXHIBITION; Marta Renzi; 5.05; digi
A photographer wrestles with his conscience in his small attic studio at night. In a crisis of faith, he keeps returning to his stark black-and-white images for proof that what he does matters. After a bath, image and reality merge into a new beginning.

STILL LIFE: LONDON; Wyllie O Hagan (Denise Wyllie & Clare O. Hagan); 5.37; HD Video/animated still photography http://www.wyllieohagan.com
A quest for stillness in a hectic world made through quiet but voluble domestic vignettes and the abstraction of thought and reflection. One screen reveals a personal collection of still, quiet life objects, beautifully considered and composed, revealed at a reflective pace. The second screen features abstract energetic lines wildly drawn with light.

UNA SPORCA VACANZA (DIRTY VACATION); Cinzia Sarto; 7.00; miniDV
Documentary and fiction, join fragments of reality from different places and time. Inside a labyrinth of cement cubes, debris and water, humans distracted by the rituals of vacation seem indifferent to the world surrounding them. A veiled woman is searches for a way out.

ICELAND; Fabienne Gautier; 4.09; Super 8 to Digi
Iceland's landscape seemed to reflect a particular internalization of feeling. The piece was shot in B&W super 8 while driving across Iceland in 2004. This work speaks to this internal mind.

WHO IS EYE AM?

Victoria Kereszi
is an artist, photographer, documentary filmmaker, curator, community media organizer, and educator. Victoria has previously worked at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a flagship community television station, where she was the Director of Programming. In addition to her own video and photographic pursuits, she is the founder and curator of Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens, a women's memoir screening series and traveling festival. In 2003, Victoria received her MA from NYU with a concentration in Documentary Film and Gender Studies. She currently lives in Troy, New York where she makes documentary portraits about elderly women who live against the grain.

Contact info:
Email Address: vkereszi@gmail.com
Website: www.victoriakereszi.net

Lili White,
a graduate of University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy's four-year painting program, has curated several shows of experimental media and fine art works. After serving as a Steering Committee member and Public Relations Chairperson for The Armory Show:1990, a 4 day art show of 400 Philadelphia artists, she moved to NYC where she catalogued DCTV's library. Her installations with video and single channel works screened at several festivals and venues, including Queens' Museum of the Moving Image, Millennium FilmWorkshop, LePetit Versailles, and Jersey City Museum. Her feature, NY(see), premiered at Pioneer Theatre. In 2007 a fundraiser DVD for the NY Film-Makers Cooperative was successfully produced.

Contact info:
Email Address: lili@liliwhite.com
Website: www.liliwhite.com

January 12, 2011 EYE:AM presents ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN at Anthology Film Archives

2010-11-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

EYE:AM presents ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN
at Anthology Film Archives
curated by Lili White
PROGRAM 1- January 12, 2011 at 7PM
*************************************************
HER WORLD; Tova Beck-Friedman; 16.30; Digi; English & Hebrew with English subtitles
She was an enigma -- a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who arrived on U.S shores on the eve of the Great Depression. Employing a mix of home movies and Hollywood’s Golden Era clips, HER WORLD portrays a woman caught between an Old World and a new country, between reality, glamour and seduction.

SOMETHING STILL EXISTS; Ann Gusewelle; 6.00; Super 8/digi
Home movies “Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away.
It keeps things for you, or hides things from you, and summons them to your recall with a will of it's own. You think you have a memory, but it has you.” –John Irving

TO GO TO WORK AGAIN; Chloe Smolarski-Heims; 7.15; digi
An associative piece, exploring labor exploitation in the United States. A medley of audio and visual threads collocating gluttony and hardship. Lisa Lozano’s performance takes place at a society party where guests feast from a vat of honey enveloping the nude performer. The party, a symbol of excess is sharply interrupted by Nancy Mata’s verbal account of her family’s migration from Mexico to California. Mundane, labor motifs - a doorman who opens doors, the repeated scrubbing of a floor being sullied – punctuate the film, rhythmically.

ROGHIEH; Alysse Stepanian; 5:30; hdv ; http://alyssestepanian.com
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the filmmaker moved to the US. This video is based on her early dream journal. “Roghieh” paints a surreal picture of the early stages of the Revolution, when it empowered the underprivileged, who had a significant role in the overthrow of an elitist regime. A cleaning lady’s broom becomes a weapon symbolizing newly found strength. She jumps into the Revolution from the wall-less bedroom of a young girl caught in the middle of great social changes and role reversals.

PICTURE DAY: FLIP SIDE (short version); Hey Yeun Jang; 4.00; digi
The idea of the PICTURE DAY: FLIP SIDE started from my experience as a mom volunteering for Picture Day at my daughter’s elementary school. “Say cheese”, “No, no. Say money”. Each kid’s series of strained smiles and uneasy gazes, his/her endeavor to understand the directions given to him/her, all for the formal proof of happiness…. What I observed there led me to set my camera and document the Picture Day of the next year It is PICTURE DAY: FLIP SIDE that portrays how the traditional keepsake of the chronicle happy-face Picture Day photos have been manufactured and fabricated, and in a way it allows for deeper insight into humanity of both the students’ situation and of our own.

FAIR TRADE; Leslie Supnet; (Animation Director & Animator); Editing and sound design: Clint Enns; Music: Doreen Girard, Eric LaRoc, Teeth Mountain, Barn Owl; 4.38; digi
A young woman experiences heavy nostalgic trauma, as she purges herself from the materiality of her past. Fair Trade is a story of one woman's quest for a psychedelic transformation.

DON'T LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN; Kathy Rugh; 9.00; 16mm
Sunlight is abstracted and accentuated through alchemy. Through a pinhole lens, then hand-processed and toned, this film chases sunlight through its reflections in water and glass and streaming through branches and clouds.

CET AIR LA; Marie Losier; 3.00;16mm
Cet Air la is a famous french song from 1963, sung live by NY singer April March in acapela with Julien Gasc. The couple is singing while flying over a superimposed 16mm projection of a stop motion animation of a series of clouds, birds, bubbles, smoke machines and glitters…the song has the texture of a dream. (Part of Residency Unlimited Project)

October 12th 2010

2010-08-29T18:04:00.000-07:00

EYE AM: ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN--- juried by Lili White

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens-- www.eyeamvideo.blogspot.com -- is a screening series celebrating experimental, memoir, and documentary film by women. Eye Am's current home at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.
www.newfilmmakers.com

6:00pm
Special show, Curated by Lili White -- www.liliwhite.com -- for WOMEN's short movies that present their own personal vision of experimental movie making.

FONCTION PANORAMA LG KU990 — Caroline Bernard © 2009 video TRT- 5.48;
from: Migratory Project, with Michiko Tsuda, and Damien Guichard http://lilirangelechat.com/index.html
Poetic ribbon made by a succession of panoramas. The film time is produced by the scrolling image. The past goes out by the left of the image, whereas the future enters by the right. It's also a kind of timeline, the timeline of life, of feelings, feelings trapped in time and space, and it's also a metaphor of tired feeling in a love relationship… There is a kind of a loving duet between the cameraman, and the photographed character (it is true because it is me and my spouse). But of course, it's fictional, we are just in symbolical representations.

WHAT COMES BETWEEN — Cecilia Araneda © 2009 S8/16mm/digi; TRT-5.36 http://www.ceciliaaraneda.ca
An examination of personal memory and loss rooted in the filmmaker's birth place – Chile – and her departure from that country long ago. A collage film created with found footage from personal and historic sources, and original hand printed and tinted footage.

THIS KIND OF TOWN — Marcy Saude © 2010 16mm/digi; TRT- 5:30
http://threecolorsallblack.org
The frontier mythos of nature vs. civilization plays out against the landscape of a former gold rush boomtown of Ward, Colorado in the Rocky Mountains. Mining structures, abandoned cars, railroad remains; roadside junk sculptures, tie-dye and American flags; sights and sounds of “the West” then and now attempt to answer the question, “what kind of a town is this, anyway?”

LE MONDE EST IMMENSE/(THE WORLD IS VAST) — Muriel Montini ©2008 S8/digi; TRT- 9.05
A summer’s day in the countryside. A woman is sewing. A little girl tries to attrack her attention. A boy appears...A few images from a super 8 movie explored in detail and recomposed with a dramatic end in mind.

YOU CAN SEE THE SUN IN LATE DECEMBER— Sasha Waters Freyer ©2010; 16MM/HD; TRT- 6.40
Beautiful emptiness, anguish and calm, absence rendered visible and traces of presence in the winter light, all intensified by the damned (non) question of maternity. Filming every frigid day in the final month as a strategy for overcoming deflated motivation.

BODILY HEAVENS — Stephanie Wuertz ©2010; digi; TRT- 2.40
A whirl of whorls and dis-astral staccato, BODILY HEAVENS is a frenetic animation created under a microscope that evokes a nostalgia for the intimate sublime.

PARADISE — Noe Kidder ©2010; 16mm/digi; TRT- 10.00, Music by Chris Becker. http://noekidder.blogspot.com
Filmed between 2005-2007 on location in Lisbon, Kauai and at Catwalk Artist Residency in Catskill, NY. By using a kind of home-made optical printing technique and overlapping layers of sound, text and image in the edit, I wanted to experiment with abstraction in a way that would challenge the viewer as well as my own experience of loss.

THE DAUGHTER REMEMBERS TO FORGET — Sara Strahan ©2010; score: Melissa Grey; S8/ 16MM/ digi; TRT- 3.36
Home movies, found footage and hand-made elements are used to explore the complex mechanisms of perception, memory and recollection. Memory is not a conscious recollection of narrative, but textured and interspersed with media and non-linear traces of recollection that always result in an updated output of the past. Does this conception of memory imply a potential for re-making our own stories? Can the daughter forget to remember, or remember to forget?

5 LESSONS & 9 QUESTIONS ABOUT CHINATOWN — Shelly Silver © 2010; digi;
TRT- 10.00 http://www.5lessonsmovie.com
You live somewhere, walk down the same street … taking in fragments, but never fully register THE PLACE. Years, decades go by ... A building comes down, and before the next one is up you ask ‘what used to be there?’… since the 19th century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops…past, present, future, time…immigration, exclusion, gentrification, racism, history, China, America… 9 questions, 5 lessons, Chinatown

*****************************************************************************

7:15-8:30pm (including q & a with Giovanna and local actors) www.g6pictures.com

* The Works of Giovanna Chesler featuring the New York Premiere of "Bye Bi Love"

7:15pm BeauteouS: The Trilogy

Three portraits of three sisters and their relationships to beauty, including a campy fiction piece, a B&W experimental narrative and an abstract documentary portrait.

In Part 1 - BeauteouS - Chesler draws from her middle sister to construct the character Donatella, a Long Island beauty queen who realizes that she is more than just a pretty face. In the days leading up to her senior prom, where she has been nominated for prom queen, Donatella searches for herself in confusing and claustrophobic spaces: a Born Again Virgin meeting, her delinquent boyfriend’s hot rod, the dysfunctional dinner table, a Long Island mall, and finally, to the prom. Throughout her journey, Donatella finds refuge from these plastic surroundings in a poetic space of her own imagination where she freely expresses herself and her desires for Mina, a girl in her English class.

BeauteouS: Giovanna, the second part of the trilogy, focuses on the filmmaker, the oldest sister. In this film Giovanna presents the many ways she sees and understands her body. To do so she fragments parts of herself in grotesque and beautiful ways. The soundtrack contributes to the telling and retelling of the body.

Part 3 - BeauteouS: Stephanie is the documentary portrait of a the youngest sister who recounts the endless surgeries she endured to transform her disfigured face. Her reflection reveals beauty standards which may have required these surgeries. The film is crafted through interviews with Stephanie where she recounts her experience in school and in the hospital. Images avoid her face, focusing instead on abstract representations of beauty and her past.

*************** NEW YORK PREMIERE PRESENTATION **********************

"Bye Bi Love"
"How do you open an invitation to the wedding of your ex-girlfriend?" As Vera (Allison Findlater-Galinsky) asks this question, a calligraphed envelope lands with a thud. Her present girlfriend, Carla (Tisa Key), responds, "With your teeth." So opens Bye Bi Love, a short fiction film that doubles as a study of objects and their attendant memory. As Vera conjures her previous relationships over one sleepless night -- be they with her ex-husband Craig (Tobin Tyler) or with her ex-girlfriend, Felicia (Tatiana Dellepiane) -- that bygone time moves fluidly and impressionistically. Vera's memories of ex-lovers are evoked by the objects they bring with them, as they both enter into and depart from her home.

Relating to relationships both gay and straight, either legally recognized or else banned by the legislative state, Bye Bi Love bypasses the standard controversies of the matter to consider the very real trappings of marriage and relationships. We are left to ponder whether or not we ever let go of past loves so that we may truly embrace the present.

Shot by the renowned cinematographer Ann T. Rossetti (By Hook or By Crook, Go Fish) and art directed by Jessica Ennis, Bye Bi Love is a sumptuous film.

Credits:
Director, Producer, Screenplay, Editor - Giovanna Chesler
Starring - Allison Findlater-Galinsky
Co-Starring: Tatiana Dellepiane as Felicia,
Tisa Key as Carla & Tobin Tyler as Craig
Cinematography - Ann T. Rossetti
Casting Director - Katherine Hinchey
Sound Design - Allison Jackson
Music Composer - Ko Seungyeon
Production Deisgn - Jessica Ennis
Artwork - Pascal Folly
Trailer - Gina Tolentino

Call for WORK, EYE AM: ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN

2010-08-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

EYE AM: Women Behind the Lens — www.eyeamvideo.blogspot.com —is a screening series celebrating experimental, memoir, and documentary film by women. Eye Am's current home at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.
EYE AM will hold a special juried show for WOMEN's short experimental movies: EYE AM: ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN.
Looking for experimental shorts made by WOMEN that present your own vision of movie making —we want to see something different and unique-- challenge us to rethink what “experimental” means on your terms...
Accepted works will be screened on DVD format at Anthology Film Archives in New York City on October 13th, 2010.
NO FEE. DVDs must be Region 1, NTSC. Please no PAL discs. If your movie is not in English you should provide subtitles. The sent material will not be returned.
POSTMARK DEADLINE: September 6, 2010-- we encourage early submission.
SENT your short DVDs to: Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens c/o Victoria Kereszi, 167 9th Street, Troy, NY 12180
Each submitted work has to be labeled specifying title, section, director and running time, along with the following entry form:
ENTRY FORM INFO:
Title
Country
Year of accomplishment
Duration
Credits
Previous Screenings (venues and awards):
Medium: 35 mm ( ) 16mm ( ) 8mm and super8 ( ) digital ( )
Screen : 1:33 ( ) 1:66 ( ) 1:85 ( ) 2:35 ( )
Brief description and/or what do you want to say about this movie?:
CONTACT INFO:
Name
Tel
e-mail
Address

Signature

New Email Contact

2010-08-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

To reach Eye Am as of July 30th 2010, please contact:

vkereszi@gmail.com

and send all entries to 167 9th Street
Troy, NY 12180

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens Celebrates 4 Decades of Film by Su Friedrich

2010-04-01T08:04:00.001-07:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a screening series celebrating experimental, memoir, and documentary film by women. Eye Am's current home at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

* If you would like to submit work or host a screening please email vkereszi@earthlink.net. Lengths under 60 minutes are excepted, and there is no entry fee.

Wednesday, May 19th at Anthology Film Archives
32 2 Avenue
New York, NY 10003
(212) 505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

7:00-9:30pm
Su will be present for the screening!

Su Friedrich, the feminist film pioneer, will join the New Filmmaker's Series tonight showing a selection of her work that spans four decades. Friedrich's work has inspired both new and experienced filmmakers, and has helped define feminist, queer, and experimental cinema.

7:00 - 9:30pm including Q & A

Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979) 16 minutes
The film begins with a series of events on a crowded outdoor market street. Women on stages perform “private” rituals: shaving legs and armpits, fixing their hair, etc. A woman tries to disrupt their “work.” She struggles to set herself apart from them, to resist the forces of habit, but gradually becomes more involved than she is willing to admit. Although she sets in motion a chain reaction of rebellion, she isn’t able to keep the momentum going. She stops before carrying it to the logical conclusion, and ends up on the stage herself.

The Ties That Bind (1984) 55 minutes
An experimental documentary about the filmmaker's mother, who was born and lived in southern Germany from 1920-1950. Through a mixture of personal anecdote and social history, she describes the rise of Nazism, the war years, and the Allied occupation, during which she met her future husband, an American soldier.

******* 15 minute BREAK FOR Q & A ********

Rules of the Road (1993) 31 minutes
This films tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling.

Seeing Red (2005) 27 minutes
In Seeing Red, three elements run parallel, overlap, diverge, lock horns and in various other ways give voice to the notion that a color, a melody, or a person has multiple characteristics that cannot be grasped by, or understood within, a simple framework.
One element is purely visual.
One is very verbal and minimally visual.
One is purely musical.

Biography: www.sufriedrich.com
Su Friedrich began filmmaking in 1978 and has produced and directed eighteen 16mm films and videos, including From the Ground Up (2007), Seeing Red (2005),The Head of a Pin (2004), The Odds of Recovery (2002), Hide and Seek (1996), Rules of the Road (1993), First Comes Love (1991), Sink or Swim (1990), Damned If You Don't (1987), The Ties That Bind (1984), and Gently Down the Stream (1981). Her films have won many awards, including the Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival and Outstanding Documentary at Outfest. Friedrich has received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations as well as numerous grants from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, NYSCA and ITVS, and in 1995 she received the Cal Arts/Alpert Award. Her work is widely screened in the United States, Canada and Europe and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, The Stadtkino in Vienna, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, the National Film Theater in London, the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema, the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the First Tokyo Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Cork Film Festival in Ireland, the Wellington Film Festival in New Zealand, The Bios Art Center in Athens, Greece, and the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Friedrich is the writer, cinematographer, director and editor of all her films, with the exception of Hide and Seek, which was co-written by Cathy Quinlan and shot by Jim Denault. Her work is screened and distributed widely throughout the US, Canada and Europe. She teaches film & video production at Princeton University. Her DVD collection is distributed by Outcast Films.

News from Eye Am

2010-01-30T02:39:00.000-08:00

~New Year News from Eye Am~

Eye Am will no longer air on Manhattan Neighborhood Network regularly. Instead we are focusing our efforts on further developing the screening series that we curate at Anthology Film Archives.

* If you would like to submit work or host a screening in your community please email vkereszi@earthlink.net. (Lengths under 60 minutes are excepted, and there is no entry fee.)

photo: Lisa Kereszi

March 2nd 2010 @ 7pm
www.victoriakereszi.net/steadygrind
www.newfilmmakers.bside.com/2010/schedule/day/2010-05-19#tabs

A STEADY GRIND (digital video, 60:00) is a portrait of Eloyse Kereszi, a fiery grandmother with a mouth like a sailor, who runs Joe's Junkyard in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Eloyse inherited her husband's 54-year-old business in 1991 when he died of a heart attack on the junkyard soil. He was preparing to have heart surgery, but walked out of the hospital with his IV still attached and went to the junkyard for his final day of work. At this time Eloyse was 60 years old, but retirement was not an option due to thousands of dollars of tax debt, her failing health, and her living son's financial dependence on the business. For over a decade, she maintained faith in the family's ability to overcome these hardships, but as she slipped further into tax debt and ill health, Eloyse began to come to terms with the traumatic loss of her husband and sons, and was faced with the decision to sell the junkyard.

Eloyse is my grandmother.

*******************
Edited by Victoria Kereszi & Penny Lane
Still Photography by Lisa Kereszi
Sound mix by Jesse Stiles
Music by Chuck Stern, C. Ryder Cooley, & The Darklings

*******************

5/19/10 Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens Celebrates 4 Decades of Film by Su Friedrich

2010-01-26T10:55:00.000-08:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a screening series celebrating experimental, memoir, and documentary film by women. Eye Am's current home at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

* If you would like to submit work or host a screening please email vkereszi@earthlink.net. Lengths under 60 minutes are excepted, and there is no entry fee.

Wednesday, May 19th at Anthology Film Archives
32 2 Avenue
New York, NY 10003
(212) 505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

6:30-9:30pm
Su will be present for the screening!

Su Friedrich, the feminist film pioneer, will join the New Filmmaker's Series tonight showing a selection of her work that spans four decades. Friedrich's work has inspired both new and experienced filmmakers, and has helped define feminist, queer, and experimental cinema.

6:30 - 9:30pm including Q & A

Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979) 16 minutes
The film begins with a series of events on a crowded outdoor market street. Women on stages perform “private” rituals: shaving legs and armpits, fixing their hair, etc. A woman tries to disrupt their “work.” She struggles to set herself apart from them, to resist the forces of habit, but gradually becomes more involved than she is willing to admit. Although she sets in motion a chain reaction of rebellion, she isn’t able to keep the momentum going. She stops before carrying it to the logical conclusion, and ends up on the stage herself.

The Ties That Bind (1984) 55 minutes
An experimental documentary about the filmmaker's mother, who was born and lived in southern Germany from 1920-1950. Through a mixture of personal anecdote and social history, she describes the rise of Nazism, the war years, and the Allied occupation, during which she met her future husband, an American soldier.

******* BREAK FOR Q & A ********

Rules of the Road (1993) 31 minutes
This films tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling.

Seeing Red (2005) 27 minutes
In Seeing Red, three elements run parallel, overlap, diverge, lock horns and in various other ways give voice to the notion that a color, a melody, or a person has multiple characteristics that cannot be grasped by, or understood within, a simple framework.
One element is purely visual.
One is very verbal and minimally visual.
One is purely musical.

Biography: www.sufriedrich.com
Su Friedrich began filmmaking in 1978 and has produced and directed eighteen 16mm films and videos, including From the Ground Up (2007), Seeing Red (2005),The Head of a Pin (2004), The Odds of Recovery (2002), Hide and Seek (1996), Rules of the Road (1993), First Comes Love (1991), Sink or Swim (1990), Damned If You Don't (1987), The Ties That Bind (1984), and Gently Down the Stream (1981). Her films have won many awards, including the Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival and Outstanding Documentary at Outfest. Friedrich has received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations as well as numerous grants from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, NYSCA and ITVS, and in 1995 she received the Cal Arts/Alpert Award. Her work is widely screened in the United States, Canada and Europe and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, The Stadtkino in Vienna, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, the National Film Theater in London, the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema, the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the First Tokyo Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Cork Film Festival in Ireland, the Wellington Film Festival in New Zealand, The Bios Art Center in Athens, Greece, and the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Friedrich is the writer, cinematographer, director and editor of all her films, with the exception of Hide and Seek, which was co-written by Cathy Quinlan and shot by Jim Denault. Her work is screened and distributed widely throughout the US, Canada and Europe. She teaches film & video production at Princeton University. Her DVD collection is distributed by Outcast Films.

Tuesday October 13th 2009 Women Behind the Lens: A Night of Women's Film

2009-08-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

Women Behind the Lens: A Night of Women's Film @ Anthology Film Archives
(32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003)
Tuesday, October 13th 2009 from 6:15-8:30pm

http://newfilmmakers.com/NewFilmmakers%20Schedule%200910.htm

*still from Kim Hall's film "Uprush"

6:15pm
Eye Am
Experimental, narrative and documentary shorts made by women that deconstruct the notion of Self and Other.
Featuring the works of Naomi White, Oriana Fox, Alana Kakoyiannis, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Kim Hall, and Nait Gamez.

Curated by Victoria Kereszi
Victoria Kereszi is a photographer, filmmaker and educator living in Troy, NY. Her work celebrates the ways women represent the Self from breaking out of the margins.

See below for full program and filmmaker bios:

"The Difference" (2009) 3:36 minutes
A meditation on the experience of existing in two places inspired by Andre Aciman’s essay “Pensione Eolo.”

Bio:
Alana Kakoyiannis is a filmmaker based in New York City and Nicosia, Cyprus. Her work ranges from interview-based documentary to abstract, image-dominated experimentalism. She has worked independently to produce several short films that have been broadcast nationally and screened internationally, including Current TV, The Anthology Film Archives and the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. Her most recent film “Cosmopolis” garnered the Grand Jury Prize for Best International Documentary in the Migr@tions Online Festival held by Radio Canada International. Originally from Pennsylvania, she earned her M.F.A from Hunter College, CUNY in Integrated Media Arts and her B.A. in Communications from Denison University. In her professional experience, she has worked with various networks including MTV, NBC and CBS as well as regional film production companies in Greece and Cyprus.
*****
"Baroness" 3:00
The Baroness Elsa von Freytag Lorignhoven (1874-1927) was a gender-bending, poetess, artist and fashionista, creating costumes from found objects including birdcages for hats, postage stamps for beauty marks, spoons for earrings and soup cans for a brassiere. She was written about by both Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams who said he drank “pure water from her spirit.” The photographer Bernice Abbott said “The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled intone!”

Elsa's defiance in the wake of extreme hostility for being an artist, a rebel, a woman, and a German ex-patriot during WWI, coupled with her commitment to making art, is fascinating to me. Her will to survive is permanently linked to her art. She is as relevant now as she was in 1915 and her work continues to influence artists, writers and thinkers. My sister Molly and I read everything we could to discover more about this courageous, charismatic, resourceful, penniless Baroness. Molly wrote a song about her and we used my photographic recreations of her life in the video. The video uses the surrealist genre’s playful layering of imagery to tell several stories at once to bring Elsa - and all that she has inspired - into life.

Bio:
Naomi White grew up in Los Angeles, California before moving to New York in 1998 to pursue an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts. Since graduating in 2000 she has worked as a video editor, interactive producer and photographer while continuing to create and exhibit artwork. Last year Naomi exhibited The Liberator, a series of photographs, videos and installation pieces based on the work of Rene Magritte, in collaboration with the crochet-artist Olek (read the review here). Her photographs were also featured in a group show About Face: Portraiture Now curated by Paddy Johnson. This year she published a two volume book of photographs The Peggy Rice Collection of Little Red Riding Hoods and was featured in an artist series about SVA Alumni by filmmaker Hillman Curtis. Naomi is currently working on a photographic portrait series about people in Los Angeles called Driving In The Sun. She lives with her husband in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. www.naomiwhite.com
*****
"Uprush" (2009) 7:00
When Rosie returns home to discover some troubling news about her older sister, swimming with her best friend and two boys becomes the scariest thing in the world.

Bio:
Originally from Santa Cruz, CA, Kim Hall made her first documentary about low rider bicycle builders when she was 16 years old. Since then she’s worked variously as a director, cinematographer, and editor on award winning films in New York, Mexico, Texas and Canada. Her most recent film, UPRUSH, screened at the 2009 SXSW and Cinevegas film festivals. She is currently pursuing her MFA in film production at the University of Texas, Austin where she’s been nominated for a full Eastman Scholarship. www.kimhallfilms.com

*****
"Intermittent Delight" (2006) 4:20
INTERMITTENT DELIGHT explores the sexist mores of textile production in Ghana in parallel with a mid-1960s commercial aimed to instruct women on the how-to-decorate your-1960s refrigerator. The soundtrack pulls the images together with traditional Afrobeats and field recordings.

Bio:
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a conceptual installation artist and an independent film director. She has worked on production teams for HBO Films including the Sundance critically acclaimed documentary, Good Hair (2008) Executive Produced by Chris Rock. Owusu is a recent MFA graduate at California Institute of the Arts in Fine Art and Film and Video. She received her BA in Studio Art & Media Studies at the University of Virginia, during which she participated in the Distinguished Majors in Studio Art Program and was honored the first UVA Alumni Art Award. She is also an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Campus for the Berlin International Film festival in 2008.

Her film, ME BRONI BA (my white baby), a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi, Ghana premiered at the Museum of Modern Art Documentary Fortnight and Visions du Reel Nyon International Film Festival. It won 2nd prize Best Documentary Short at the 2008 Athens International Film Festival and was officially selected in competition at prestigious film festivals including AFI/Discovery Channel SilverDocs, San Francisco, and London Film Festival among many others. Owusu, though the first baby born in Northern Virginia January 1, 1984, is of Ghanaian descent. She currently lives and works in Washington D.C.
*****
“All My Life” (2007) 20:00
Part coming-of-age story, part personal mythology. In it I recreate dance scenes from films such as Dirty Dancing, Grease, and Saturday
Night Fever with myself as the heroine. A soundtrack based on a positive affirmation self-help tape and autobiographical anecdotes tells
the story of the evolution of my choice of love objects. Through identification and embodiment I give depth to the most superficial of
characters, and I become the star of my own Hollywood movie.

Bio:
Oriana Fox is an American artist based in London. She received her BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 and went on to obtain a Masters in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London. Since graduating in 2003 she has shown her video and performance work to acclaim in the UK, Europe and the US. In 2007 she was an artist-in-residence at Triangle France located in Marseille. Fox works primarily in video and performance, using parody and appropriation to tackle subjects such as the self-representation of women and cinema’s role as mythmaker. www.orianafox.com
*****
"Love, Sadie"
(s16mm / rt 12:07)
- A nuanced & impressionistic look at isolation and adolescence.

Bio:
Naiti Gámez is a filmmaker willing to call anywhere "with a flexible approach to language" home. Her latest film, Love, Sadie, was awarded a Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund Grant (Austin Film Society) and was a semi-finalist at the 2008 Student Academy Awards. As a cinematographer, her film credits have screened at dozens of festivals worldwide, including Clermont-Ferrand, Tribeca, SXSW, Festival du Cinema de Paris, Woodstock Film Festival, Hampton's International Film Festival, Festival de Cine Internacional de Barcelona and Taos Talking Pictures. Her film and TV credits have aired on television networks such as Showtime, MTV/MTV2, & tuTV. Naiti has also worked at non-profit organizations in the U.S. and abroad. As a youth-media educator, she's collaborated with young people to produce videos about social issues that affect them. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Smith College, and an M.F.A. in Film Production (Cinematography concentration) from the University of Texas at Austin. www.marielita.net
*****

7:15pm (including Q&A with Filmmakers)

"Chaos/Peace"
The work in this bill explores the various ways we process the chaos within that can stem from personal relationships, societal pressure and global concerns with different approaches ranging from the conceptual to the completely absurd.

Artists include: Marianna Ellenberg, Hyung Sung, Liz Haley, Julie Perini, Cat Tyc, Victoria Fu, Virginia Valdes & Kitty Green.

Curated by Cat Tyc
Cat Tyc is a video artist/director whose work has screened in a variety of places like the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Camac d’ Art in Paris, PDX Fest in Portland, the Kassel Experimental & Documentary Film Festival in Kassel, Germany and the High Energy Constructs gallery in Los Angeles.

6/07/09 Eye Am Episode 21

2009-05-19T17:49:00.000-07:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a short film series showcasing women's memory and experience spanning across all genres of film and video.

EA airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

* This month's Episode Features the work of EE Miller, Bernadine Mellis, Samuael Topiary, and Kathy High.

The makers:
EE Miller is an interdisciplinary conversationalist who makes video,
radio, and installation. Her current broadcasts, DEATH JEWEL RADIO, invite guests to consider funeral arts and utopia with music, sound arts and storytelling.
eemiller.wordpress.com

Bernadine Mellis' short films include BORN, THE GOLDEN PHEASANT, and FARM-IN-THE-CITY, a collaboration with EE Miller. Bernadine's father's role as lead attorney in Earth First! activist Judi Bari's civil case against the FBI prompted her to make THE FOREST FOR THE TREES, her first documentary. Bernadine also directed THE ODYSSEY, a collaborative adaptation of Homer's 24-chapter epic, made up of 24 shorts by 24 different mostly queer/trans/lady filmmakers. She is currently in production on a documentary about children of the New Left tentatively called STRUGGLE BABY. Bernadine teaches film and video in the Five Colleges. www.redbirdfilms.com

The Videos:
Farm-in-the-City
A collaboration between EE Miller and Bernadine Mellis. 8mm footage from the 1930s edited with EE Miller’s interview with Corinna Press, an artist who imagines giant possibilities, ecstatic collaboration and struggle. Screenings include MadCat Women's International Film Festival, MIX NYC, SF's The Lab, and Third Street Gallery in Philadelphia.

Gum and Tea
EE Miller began Gum and Tea as a piece for radio, but took a detour into Samuael Topiary's video laboratory where it inspired animated collages. It is a collaborative meditation on intimacy and US currency.

Samuael Topiary is a Brooklyn-based video artist and performer. Her single-channel video works have screened in many festivals including at Lincoln Center and the Walker Art Center and have been broadcast on WNET Channel 13. She has created music videos for the band Le Tigre and video designs for dance pieces by Miguel Gutierrez and David Dorfman Dance Company. Residencies include: MacDowell Colony and Media Arts Fellowship at Dance Theater Workshop. Her character, “Technopia” was the host of Shtudio Show at Chez Bushwick from 2006-07. Topiary has also curated video programs for MIX/NY and toured the US with SF's Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Road Show in the 90's. She holds an MFA in Film/Video from Bard College and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts. For more info: www.topiaryfilms.org

**************

KATHY HIGH is Head and Associate Professor of Video and new Media at the Department of the Arts at Rensselaer Polyechnic Institute in Troy, NY. She teaches digital video production, history and theory and has been working in the area of documentary and experimental film, video and photography for over twenty years. She produces videos and installations posing queer and feminist inquiries into areas of medicine/bio-science, science fiction, and animal/interspecies collaborations. She has also recently started the BioArts Initiative at Rensselaer, a collaboration between the Arts Department and the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Her Videos:
EVERYDAY PROBLEMS OF THE LIVING
2000-05 (12 part series, video, 26 min.)

Project about anxieties surrounding living and dying – a meditation on mortality. High, thinking that she might die at 45 in the year 2000, decided to “perform her death,” recording a tape around the topic each month. Her own pets also play a major role in the events that occur each month, as she projects her own fears and anxieties onto them.

SHIFTING POSITIONS
1999 (video, 28 min.)

SHIFTING POSITIONS is a semi-autographical/fictional trilogy, exploring becoming queer later in life, my father's dementia and our mid and end-of-life crises.

THE ICKY & KATHY TRILOGY
1999 (super 8 film to video, 9 min)

This trilogy is about twin sisters who “act out”. At the age when a young girl might discover her own sexuality, they explore themselves in their "games" and playtime together. In a study of adolescent sexuality, the girls engage in slightly illicit acts together.

If you are interested in hosting a screening or submitting work to Eye Am, please email eyeam@earthlink.net

April 14th Eye Am Screening @ Anthology Film Archives

2009-01-27T14:44:00.000-08:00

April 14th - 'Night of Women's Film' @ Anthology
This program will air as Episode 20 on MNN.org on Sunday May 3rd 2009

6:00pm-
Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens
A cable tv series and traveling festival showcasing women's memoir spanning across all genres of film and video.
Tonight's short films feature women confronting their identity and the notion of Other.
Featuring films by Sarah Klein, Ruth Hererra, Zulma Aguiar, Oriana Fox, & Diana Arce.
EA airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on:
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)
www.eyeamvideo.blogspot.com

7:00pm -
Death Jewel (Film and) Video curated by EE Miller
A cross-genre program of shorts featuring film and video gems which respond to death
with reflections on mortality, intimate and communal loss, human ritual, and violence.

Where is There Room? Sonali Gulati, Antonio Paez, & Byron Karabatsos (16mm to video, 2003)
What I Love About Dying Silas Howard (video, 2006)
Brighter Death Now Jennifer MacDonald (hand drawn animation, 2002)
Violet Akiko Hatakeyama (video, 2008)
Chapter 22 (The Odyssey) Eileen Myles (video, 2007)
Strange Miss Otis Kara Lynch (video)
The Moon’s Pyramid Venus Sobranes (super 8, 2003)
The Sky Will Save Us? Miatta Kawinzi (video, 2008)
I Remember Now, We Never Danced, I Miss You, Goodbye. Diane Bonder (16mm, 2006)

8:00pm -
Bernice Perry: Queen of Sinatraland (2008, 17 minutes)
Bernice Perry is an 83 year-old songwriter who has been producing her own public access television show for 37 years. Her life and work, inspired by Frank Sinatra has a haunting quality that forces us to ask questions about definitions of celebrity, nostalgia, and reality.
Film by Victoria Kereszi
www.victoriakereszi.net

SITTIN' ON A MILLION (2008, 26 minutes) presents these stories in all their contradictory glory, alongside vintage erotica, reenactments, and street performances asks us to consider the role of memory and imagination in creating history, and reminds us about all those ordinary, extraordinary people erased from the official record.
Film by Penny Lane & Annmarie Lanesey
www.mamefaye.com

********
Curators:
Victoria Kereszi is a photographer, filmmaker, curator, and media educator. Her video and photo portraiture explores the ways women living on the margins of society take control of their own representation.
EE Miller is an interdisciplinary conversationalist who makes video,
radio, and installation. Her current broadcasts, DEATH JEWEL RADIO, invite guests to consider funeral arts and utopia with music, sound arts and storytelling.
eemiller.wordpress.com.

Eye Am Filmmakers Screen At Anthology Film Archives Tuesday November 11th~

2008-11-06T09:45:00.001-08:00

still from Breath on The Mirror
(V. Woods & S. Friedland)

6:00PM TUESDAY November 11th, 2008
NEWFILMMAKERS WOMEN BEHIND THE LENS
Curated by Victoria Kereszi
Find full schedule at www.newfilmmakers.com/NewFilmmakers%20Schedule%200810.htm

Featured Filmmakers~
~Emily DeGruchy FRENCH LADIES (2006, 1 Minute, Video)
~Abigail Feldman THE YEAR OF THE CORRESPONDENT (2004, 10 Minutes, 2004)
~Sarah Friedland & Vanessa Woods BREATH ON THE MIRROR (2008, 10 Minutes, Video)
~Oriana Fox OUR BODIES, OURSELVES (2003, 2 Minutes, Video)
~Victoria Kereszi THE DEPARTURE (2008, 4 Minutes, Video)
~Lili White PROVIDING NOURISHMENT (1996, 3 Minutes, Video)
~Vanessa Woods FIVE CENTS A PEEK (2007, 7 Minutes, Video)
~Caroline Koebel HOLE OR SPACE (2006, 3 Minutes, Video)
~Sophie Peer TURNED ON (2006, 6 Minutes, Video)
~Oriana Fox TALE OF NARCISSUS (2003, 5 Minutes, Video)
~Penny Lane & Jessica Bardsley THE WREN (2008, 4 Minutes, Video)
~Hilda Daniel NATURE NATURE (2005, 2 Minutes, Video)
~Devorah Hill I LOVE YOU (2006, 3 Minutes, Video)

still from I love You
(D. Hill)

Please spread the word and join us to celebrate women's film!

Sunday October 5th ~ Episode 19

2008-10-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

Sunday October 5th 2008 8:30-9:30pm

The works, the makers:

Out of Reach, 2004 EE Miller with Samuael Topiary
1967 super 8 safari footage from the archives of Aimee Louise Worms
Hirshberg meets Millicent's "The Terrible Zoo".
Flights of Fancy 1, 2003
The first of eleven shorts about the uses of history. Filmmaker Paul
Grandsard recalls his grandmother, Aimee Louise Worms Hirshberg,
featuring footage found twenty years after her death.

EE Miller creates across disciplines in conversation with the dead and the living. Recent collaborations include Cash Free, a video with Bernadine Mellis and Colony Collapse Radio with Ryder Cooley.
*****
nature nature, 2005
Based on haiku by Simon F. Baron (1970-2006), nature nature portrays a very real, present and no less natural underside of existence that remains outside the embrace of those who declare a “reverence for nature.” A graphic image of the aftermath of “cutting” (self-mutilation) is softened, prettified then bloodied again with rudimentary, unreal digital effects; a mechanical songbird on the floor and in a poem; a dash of Hitchcock and the brothers Grimm; Marianne Faithful sings.

Hilda Daniel is a multi-media artist based in New York City (having immigrated from Singapore and Los Angeles). She did her undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate studies at UCLA and New York University and is the recipient of competitive fellowship, academic and art awards. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and festivals in New York, London, Berlin and other cities in Europe, the US and Mexico; included in internet festivals and projects, most recently as a finalist in the SXSWclick film festival; in international print projects; broadcast on cable television; and reviewed in the New York Times, Performance Art Journal, New Art Examiner, artnet.com and other publications.
*****
Sea Lion, 2007
This hand processed Super 8 film marvels at the beauty of the movement of the sea lion. It reflects the fascination of the filmmaker's two-year-old son with this animal new to his world.

Caroline Koebel is a filmmaker who has exhibited in the US at Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Film Forum, Other Cinema, and elsewhere, and internationally, including in Brazil, Cuba, Ireland, Thailand, and Poland. Transmissions of conceptual art, feminist film and literary theory, and punk d.i.y. ethos guide her in work that embraces pleasure and desire as tactics to displace authoritarianism, commodity culture, and the endangerment of subjective experience. Drawing breath from experimental film pioneers such as Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren, Koebel situates writing and curating firmly within her creative practice, and she has recently published the catalogue essay "Color the Shadow" on Carolee Schneemann. She holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from UCSD, and teaches in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. She lives in Brooklyn.
Sea Lion
*****
The Wren, 2007
A little thing about certain qualities shared by Emily Dickinson and
Troglodytes troglodytes (the winter wren). Made by two women on
opposite coasts searching for elusive things.

Penny Lane is an independent filmmaker and video artist living in Troy, NY. She is currently cultivating her birdwatching hobby while
teaching video at Williams College. Jessica Bardsley is a video artist who recently relocated to New York City after graduating from the New College of Florida. She is presently working on combining her interests in independent film and activism.
*****
Untitled #1, 2008
In the spirit of collage filmmaking, Untitled #1 (from the series Earth People 2507) is an enchanting mediation on an ancient species from the future. Bustamante uses found footage, cell phone video and crude chroma-key effects to create a coherent and petite spell. The hilarious rendition of buffalos made from a "herd" of toy poodles tweaks at our understanding of the symbolic world.

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance and video artist originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California. Her (often precarious) work encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation and video. Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. Currently Bustamante holds the position of Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Animal Films is an ongoing project of short films produced with various animals and Kathy High imaging and articulating their fears and fantasies. 2002-04
-The Big Push, collaboration with Push Cat.
Working with facilitator, Kathy High, this is the first video made by Push, the cat. In this project Push continues his battle of the species.-Miss Piggie
Momentarily inhabiting a pig’s body -Fresh Kill A citizen performs a ritual of burying road kill. -Lily's Nightmare, collaboration with Lily Dog.
Working with facilitator, Kathy High, this is the first video made by Lily, the dog. In this project her fears of lightning storms are explored. -Voices from the Other Side, collaboration with Ernie Cat. Working with facilitator, Kathy High, this is the second video made by Ernie, the cat. In this sensual meditation Ernie explores the ways cats speak to each other about dying: thoughts are exchanged from those still living to the "other side" through a strange language of cat howling. It is a language of pre-death, preparing for dying, of the aging. -Soft Science: Embracing Animal, What is our animal nature? Embracing Animal is a multi-media/ inter-species ersatz scientific installation of exchanges between people and animals. This video is documentation of the installation showing animal/people transformations – werewolves, vampires, and the shifting space between human and beast.-Everyday Problems of the Living, A year-long project about anxieties surrounding living and dying – a meditation on mortality. High, thinking that she might die at 45 in the year 2000, decided to "perform her death," recording absurd tapes around the topic each month. Her own pet animals humorously thwart her attempts to “die”, as she projects her own fears and anxieties onto them. (This video has been released after a waiting period of five years. It was previously concealed due to superstitious reasons.).
-Rat Play Recordings of daily play time with HLA-B27 transgenic rats Matilda, Tara and Star. This play was part of their healing ritual.

Kathy High is a media artist, curator, and teacher living and working in New York state. Her single-channel videotapes include both documentary and experimental forms, and touch upon topics including body politics, science fiction, and the paranormal. Her work frequently incorporates archival footage, interviews and fictional footage, and a sense of irony.
*****
Untitled (turtle), 2008
Depicts a captive snake-necked turtle swimming in a zoo aquarium. The viewer hears the sound of splashing as though underwater. The sounds and movements are slowed down, evoking the reptile;s un-natural life cycle slowly played out in a man-made environment. The work is intended to loop.
Untitled (goat), 2008
Set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, a petting zoo goat morphs into the scene while an omnious presence off camera paces nearby.

Allison Hunter is a visual artist who over the past twenty years has worked in photography, performance, video, painting, drawing, and installation. Hunter earned her first MFA at the Cantonal Art School of Lausanne, Switzerland (1990), and her second MFA at RPI, New York (1997). Hunter participated in international video and sculpture art residencies in europe and Canada. Hunter's photographs are collected by museums in New York and texas and numerous private collections.
******
Le Lapin, 1998
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

Dara Greenwald is a media artist and PhD Candidate in the Electronic Art Department at RPI. Her collaborative work often takes the form of video, writing, and cultural organizing around themes of social movement histories and presents. She co-curated the exhibit Signs of Change which opens at Exit Art, Sept 20, 2008. She worked at the Video Data Bank from 1998-2005 and taught DIY exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2003-2005.
*****
Primate Cinema is a series of video experiments that translate primate social dramas for human audiences. The first experiment, Baboons as Friends, is a two channel video installation juxtaposing field footage of baboons with a reenactment by human actors, shot in film noir style. A tale of lust, jealousy, sex, and violence transpires simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds. Beastly males, instinctively attracted to a femme fatale, fight to win her, but most are doomed to fail. The story of sexual selection is presented across species, the dark genre of film noir re-mapping the savannah to the urban jungle.

Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. She programmed a DVD of videos by artists and scientists entitled Soft Science www.soft-science.org, which is distributed by Video Data Bank. Shown at The Getty Museum, ZKM in Karlsruhe, and P.S.1/MoMA in New York, Mayeri is a guest curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Associate Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College.
*****
Wee Dark Hours, 2007
A stop motion animation about a mother's love, a singing moon and stars and the magic of being born. Short and sweet and made with felt!

Annie Novak & Alexis Powell are both member of the Meerkat Media Collective. Annie Novak is an artist, farmer, and adventurer who is teaching folks across the globe the importance of

Eye Am Makers at Animalia September 19th 2008

2008-09-14T20:48:00.000-07:00

"Animalia: Stories of Collapse, Calamity, and Departure" will feature the works of Eye AM filmmakers Kathy High, Penny Lane, Jessica Bardsley, The Meerkat Media Collective's Annie Novak & Alexis Powell, Dara Greenwald, Caroline Koebel, & Hilda Daniel. Exhibit starts at 5pm.
~ Curated by Victoria Kereszi.

For performance times and details, please visit
www.proctors.org and www.carolynrydercooley.com

Eye Am Episode 18 July 6th 2008

2008-05-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a short film series showcasing women's memoir spanning across all genres of film and video.

EA airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

Episode 18 Sunday July 6th 2008 9:30-10:30pm MNN.org/TWC 34/RCN 82 (in Manhattan)Worldwide at www.MNN.org

Featuring work by Vanessa Woods, Sarah Kriely, Emily DeGruchy, Judith van der Made. Victoria Kereszi, Sophia Peer, Kristi Ryba, Lili White, Penny Lane & Jessica Bardsley

Passing , 2007, 1:20 minutes
A short film that explores the idea of passing (passing time, passing histories, and passing away). To create the film, self-portrait photographs of the filmmaker taken in an abandoned home were used as a stage to re-inhabit and reinvent through single frame animation. Mark making, collage and sound engender a new history in the spaces of a vanishing home.

Filmmaker Biography:
Vanessa Woods graduated with an MFA in film, with honors, from the San Francisco Art Institute. 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 from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institutes's MFA Film Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at the Headland Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Woods has produced eight films that have been broadcast nationally and screened internationally, including the Education Channel, the Centre International d'Art (France), The Anthology Film Archives (New York), the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany) and San Francisco International Film Festival. Woods is currently working on several new films, including a feature-length documentary titled Mimita, (www.Mimita.com)) which follows a family of women raising their adopted child in Bronx, New York.
www.vanessawoods.com

Che Lake, 2007, 14 minutes
A visual soundscape of NYC and the places that exist close to our hearts.

Filmmaker Biography
Sarah Kriely

French Ladies, 2006, :40 seconds
Animated ladies dancing.

Filmmaker Biography
Emily DeGruchy
www.elimenop.com

Fitna (Feminin Chaos), 2006, 12:40 minutes
I am... who? Many... one. I dream free... imprisoned? A nightmare... reality alone.

Filmmaker Biography
Judith van der Made also known as Skills Ltd. Is a performance artist, video artist and musician residing in the Netherlands. After various studies (social studies, physical theater) she started making videos in 2000. It started out of frustration of not being able to put all ideas into live performance; discovering video as the the best thing that ever happened to her.
www.antenna.nl/barleyqueen

For My Country, 2007, 4:00 minutes
An experimental Super 8 found footage composition of American girls dancing, stripping, and boxing from the 50's re-mixed with sound by 'Miss Pocono Idol'.

Filmmaker Biography
Victoria Kereszi is an artist, photographer, documentary filmmaker, curator, community media organizer, and educator. For the past three years, Victoria worked at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a flagship community media operation, where she began as the Youth Programming Coordinator and eventually became the Director of Programming. In addition to her own video and photographic pursuits, she is the founder and curator of Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens, a women's memoir television series and traveling festival. Victoria's arts and education work has taken her to Costa Rica and Cuba to work with youth to document their experiences of friendship and culture. In 2003, Victoria received her MA from NYU's Gallatin School with a concentration in Documentary Film and Gender Studies. She currently lives in Troy, New York where she is attending RPI's iEAR program in the Fall.
www.victoriakereszi.net

Turned On, 2006, 5:51 minutes
A teen couple's relationship comes to an electric conclusion in this video. A circuit of trials and tribulations leads them to plug into one another as a way to find an outlet for their curiosities. The anxiety and tenderness the two are experiencing is shown through odd pacing and colorful situations. They are fumbling in the dark trying to communicate and connect in a way that noth frightens and excites them. The strange language of attraction and intimacy creates a difficult situation for the couple as they explore themselves and each other.

Filmmaker Biography
Sophia Peer New York based video artists and filmmaker Sophia Peer was born in Queens, NY, in 1980. She received her BA from SUNY Purchase (2002) and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts . Her short narrative videos juxtapose the banal with the absurd. Whether urine and potato salad, mice and agoraphobics, senior citizens and Jane Fonda, or young love and audio equipment, the result converts anxiety and sadness into comedy. Peer irreverently pokes fun at the world and its quirks. Her fictional characters embody the surreal aspects of reality as she presents us with a very oblique sense of the ridiculousness in everyday life.
www.sophiapeer.com

Babydoll, 2006, 3:00 minutes
Using dolls, the embodiment of all that is female, to serve as standardized human forms, Ryba’s work examines cultural roles, relationships and common experiences such as growth, transition and change. Her primary interest lies in exploring the traditional gendered roles of women, principally motherhood and the domestic sphere. Drawing her ideas from personal experience and cultural influences, her focus is to question how in our society these gendered roles have become and remain so trivialized and devalued.

Filmmaker Biography
Kristi Ryba received her BA degree in painting and printmaking from the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC in 1989; and her M.F.A. in Visual Art degree from Vermont College in 2006. Since 2002, she has been making stop frame video animations that have expanded on the themes from her earlier paintings, prints and books. Her stop frame video animations have shown in New York, Atlanta, Boise, ID, Cranbrook MI, Greenville and Charleston, SC.
www.kristiryba.com

Providing Nourishment, 1996, 3:05 minutes
THE HOUSE OF THE GENTLE one of eight houses from the I Ching, an augury, also know as The Chinese Book of Changes; which describe sixty-four different but archetypal forms of energy. The “gentle” refers to the elemental nature of wind or wood: both are considered soft, yet they are penetrating forces.
In #27: Providing Nourishment, the I Ching advises to
“Pay heed to the providing of nourishment and to what a man seeks to fill his own mouth with.” The rose is the symbol of beauty, love and eternity.

Filmmaker Biography
Lili White has been exhibiting her works in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad since before moving to New York. In Philadelphia she received at B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a four-year painting certificate. Her interest in the moving image and multimedia, lead her to perform, write, produce, direct several live multi-media pieces, each of which included the performance participation of over a dozen actors, poets and dancers. Upon the introduction of computer digital editing programs, she made several videos, that featured her gestural performances as well as others that were based upon poetry and documentary subjects. These are often seen as a continuation of her earlier Super 8 film work and lead to screenings at numerous cultural centers, including the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia and The Newhouse Center in Staten Island, New York.
www.liliwhite.com

Faded Glamour Trailer, 2008, 5 minutes
A documentary about three eccentric women who have been producing their own television shows for cable access in Manhattan for the past 15-37 years. The piece is an attempt to challenge the stereotypes of women in the media, deconstruct the notion of celebrity, and define nostalgia.

Filmmaker Biography
Victoria Kereszi is an artist, photographer, documentary filmmaker, curator, community media organizer, and educator. For the past three years, Victoria worked at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a flagship community media operation, where she began as the Youth Programming Coordinator and eventually became the Director of Programming. In addition to her own video and photographic pursuits, she is the founder and curator of Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens, a women's memoir television series and traveling festival. Victoria's arts and education work has taken her to Costa Rica and Cuba to work with youth to document their experiences of friendship and culture. In 2003, Victoria received her MA from NYU's Gallatin School with a concentration in Documentary Film and Gender Studies. She currently lives in Troy, New York where she is attending RPI's iEAR program in the Fall.
www.victoriakereszi.net

The Wren, 2007, 3:53 minutes
A little thing about certain qualities shared by Emily Dickinson and Troglodytes troglodytes (the winter wren). Made by two women on opposite coasts searching for elusive things.

Filmmaker Biography
Penny Lane is an independent filmmaker and video artist living in Troy, NY and Northampton, MA. Her collaborative and solo experimental, narrative and documentary videos have screened at AFI FEST, Int'l Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco Int'l Film Festival, Images Festival, Seattle Int'l Film Festival, Women in the Director's Chair, Santa Fe Art Institute, MOMA, and DUMBO Art Under the Bridge. Her award-winning documentaries The Abortion Diaries and Independent Media in a Time of War (the latter made with Hudson-Mohawk Indymedia) are regularly screened in classrooms, community centers and microcinemas across the U.S. and internationally on Free Speech TV and Yes! Television. The Abortion Diaries has screened in 40 states at over 170 different community venues, ranging from bars to art centers to clinics to colleges. From 2003-5 she was a core producer of the Hudson-Mohawk Independent Media Center, a group dedicated to challenging the assumptions of the mainstream media. She has also worked extensively with youth in community centers such as Children's Media Project and The Ark, Inc. She earned her MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her BA in American Culture at Vassar College. Currently she is a visiting assistant professor of video and new media at Hampshire College and is working on a documentary about a Depression-era madam.
And yes, that is her real name.
www.p-lane.com

Jessica Bardsley is a Cultural Studies major in her last year of college at New College of Florida. She likes feminism, Anne Carson, bike rides, blue whales, monsters, video, and hanging out with her friends.

Eye Am Episode 17 Sunday June 1st 2008

2008-05-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a short film series showcasing women's memoir spanning across all genres of film and video.

EA airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

Episode 17 Sunday June 1st 2008
Featuring work by Abigail Feldman, Sophia Peer, Vanessa Woods, Lili White, Tala Dowlatshahi & Stephanie Sigs

The Year of the Correspondent, 10 minutes, 2004
A woman's journey post 911 through her letters to a war journalist.

Filmmaker Biography:
Abigail Feldman was born in 1974, and grew up in Kingston, NY.
She graduated from Bard College in 1996, and recently received her
MFA from the School of Visual Arts Photography, Video and Related
Media Department. She has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY for
the past ten years. Abigail Feldman has been a passionate observer
since she was introduced to the medium of photography, and has
photographed all over the country, as well as in many parts of the world.
Besides photographing the interiors of the homes of friends and family,
she photographs everything from obscure corners to Jazz musicians to
what is right in front of her.
www.abigailfeldman.com

Out of Breath, 2006, 15:30 minutes
A confused five-year-old girl becomes a threat to those around her as she tests life's limitations. While discovering her relationship to the world, she learns what she cam expect from it. Out of Breath is a surreal thriller in which reality is fleeting and the simplest if life's lessons can leave you gasping for air.

Filmmaker Biography:
New York based video artists and filmmaker Sophia Peer was born in Queens, NY, in 1980. She received her BA from SUNY Purchase (2002) and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts . Her short narrative videos juxtapose the banal with the absurd. Whether urine and potato salad, mice and agoraphobics, senior citizens and Jane Fonda, or young love and audio equipment, the result converts anxiety and sadness into comedy. Peer irreverently pokes fun at the world and its quirks. Her fictional characters embody the surreal aspects of reality as she presents us with a very oblique sense of the ridiculousness in everyday life.
www.sophiapeer.com

Five Cents a Peek, 2007, 6:33 minutes
A filmic interpretation of a poem by Sharon Olds wherein the circus becomes a metaphor for a woman's performance in, and for, the world. The film incorporates animation, archival circus footage and distortions of the female form to explore ideas of performance, spectatorship and the male gaze. The eye is a reoccurring trope in the film, referencing the spectator/audience looking the the subject and the subject looking inward at herself. Because the circus is a spectacle whose very existence derives from performance and illusion, the performative and illusory aspects fo the film are exaggerated. The audio of the film draws upon this concept, wherein the narrator stops ans starts the poem over and over thereby making the practice and performance of the poem evident.

The Stillness in the Room, 2007, 8:30 minutes
A memento of sorts, the film explores explores 19th century English death and the mourning rituals within a framework of time, growth and decay. The film draws upon the regimented mourning procedures set forth by Queen Victoria, characterized by a strict dress code which included the black “weeping veil” - a veil of black crepe worn during the first year of grieving. In the film, the veil is a dominant trope that serves to reveal fragments of imagery, ritual, and emotive experience. The film edits are fluid and malleable like the veil. Much of the film was put through various processes of decay, thereby physically implicating the subject of the film in its physical structure. The “Stillness in the Room” is generated though a subtle, quiet soundtrack that incorporates components of Emily Dickinson's funeral poems.

Filmmaker Biography:
Vanessa Woods graduated with an MFA in film, with honors, from the San Francisco Art Institute. 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 from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institutes's MFA Film Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at the Headland Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Woods has produced eight films that have been broadcast nationally and screened internationally, including the Education Channel, the Centre International d'Art (France), The Anthology Film Archives (New York), the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany) and San Francisco International Film Festival. Woods is currently working on several new films, including a feature-length documentary titled Mimita, (www.Mimita.com) which follows a family of women raising their adopted child in Bronx, New York.
www.vanessawoods.com

Words on Peace Piece, 2006, 1:32 minutes
In 2006 the NY Filmmakers Co-Op put out a call for filmmakers to create a piece as a response to the current war in Iraq. This was a made for that call. Words on Peace Piece was inspired by the following references:

"in Flanders field where poppies grow"

. Flower chain made by children at Ljubljana's National Gallery. Slovenia is the only nation where "Culture Day" is a national holiday.

C.G. Jung's thought: only by dealing with one's "shadow" side can one arrive at peace.

NY(See), 2005, excerpt 6:45 minutes
[a pun substituting the word "see" for the letter "C"] captures today's zeitgeist and is White's first feature-length movie. Eschewing the documentary films' standard of expressing opinion, and made without a script, storyboard or an editing plan, NY (see) reflects what New York stands for: America's cradle of immigration; the site of the 9/11 Disaster; the platform of a genuine international city.

At one time New York was considered to be the center of the art world. What does it mean to be an artist-immigrant in New York after 9/11 when the whole world is on the verge of major change?

Filmmaker Biography:
Lili White has been exhibiting her works in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad since before moving to New York. In Philadelphia she received at B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a four-year painting certificate. Her interest in the moving image and multimedia, lead her to perform, write, produce, direct several live multi-media pieces, each of which included the performance participation of over a dozen actors, poets and dancers. Upon the introduction of computer digital editing programs, she made several videos, that featured her gestural performances as well as others that were based upon poetry and documentary subjects. These are often seen as a continuation of her earlier Super 8 film work and lead to screenings at numerous cultural centers, including the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia and The Newhouse Center in Staten Island, New York.
www.liliwhite.com

Veiled Stories, 4:30 minutes
Through the eyes of a Muslim woman in the U.S.

Filmmakers:
Tala Dowlatshahi
Tala Dowlatshahi is a US Representative of Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontieres)-the Paris-based media watchdog organization. More than a third of the world’s people live in countries where there is no press freedom. Reporters Without Borders works constantly to restore their right to be informed. Eighty-one media professionals lost their lives in 2006 for doing what they were paid to do– keep us informed. Today, more than 120 journalists around the world are in prison simply for doing their job. In Nepal, Eritrea and China, they can spend years in jail just for using the “wrong” word or photo. Reporters Without Borders believes imprisoning or killing a journalist is like eliminating a key witness which threatens everyone’s right to be informed. It has been fighting such practices for more than 17 years.
www.taladowlatshahi.com

* To submit work to Eye Am, please email eyeam@earthlink.net for details~
* Next Episode Sunday, July 6th 2008 Featuring the works of Vanessa Woods, Sarah Kriely, Emily DeGruchy, Judith van der Made. Victoria Kereszi, Sophia Peer, Kristi Ryba, Lili White, Penny Lane & Jessica Bardsley.

EA Program Featured at the 2008 Female Eye Film Festival

2008-03-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

Saturday March 29th 2008
8:30pm
Canada Square Cinemas, 2190 Yonge Street, Concourse Level, (Yonge & Eglinton) Toronto

*52 Bis 2006 minidv/super8, experimental, 1:55 min.
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: www.vanessawoods.com
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.

*Hail the Failure of Urban Planning (2007), minidv, experimental, 2:07 min.
A possibility of creation and constraint through a visual movement as an urban dweller. Accompanying the visual movement is a text of tenets of urban practice, both sincere and ironic.

Filmmaker Bio: www.giantpixie.com
Kim Khielhofner is an artist living and working in Montreal. She works across the mediums of video, drawing, installation, and sound. She has produced over 30 art book editions and exhibited across Europe and North America.

*Go Global 2007, minidv, experimental/doc, 5:45 min.
What happens when consumerism starts close to home and travels over distant lands only to come back to haunt us?

Filmmaker Bio: www.rpi.edu/~milleb
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.

*She used to see him most weekends, 2007, experimental., 4:07 min.
A short story about growing up, a certain love song, and the apocryphal memories of childhood. Simple animations create a picture book whose story is scrambled by time and loss.

Filmmaker Bio: www.p-lane.com
Penny Lane is an independent filmmaker and video artist living in western Massachusetts. Her collaborative and solo experimental, narrative and documentary videos have screened at AFI FEST, Int'l Film Festival Rotterdam, 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. Her award-winning documentaries The Abortion Diaries and Independent Media in a Time of War (the latter made with Hudson-Mohawk Indymedia) are regularly screened in classrooms, community centers and microcinemas across the U.S. and internationally on Free Speech TV. The Abortion Diaries has screened in 37 states at over 170 different community venues, ranging from bars to art centers to clinics to colleges. She earned her MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her BA in American Culture at Vassar College. Currently she is a visiting assistant professor of video and new media at Hampshire College and is working on an experimental documentary about a Depression-era madam with support from the LEF Moving Images Fund and the Experimental Television Center. And yes, that is her real name.

*Consciousness, Understanding 'N Trust (2005), minidv, experimental, 5:50 min.
Ventriloquism, lip-syncing, and appropriation all play subversive roles in the post-feminist retro-spoof, Consciousness, Understanding 'N Trust. In it, Oriana Fox plays a quirky cast of characters including Betty Crocker brunettes, soap opera blonds, and airhead redheads, as they become aware of their collective subjugation as women. The consciousness raising dialogue comes from varied sources ranging from Laura Cottingham's feminist documentary Not For Sale to 60s musical Bye Bye Birdie.

Filmmaker Bio: www.orianafox.com
Oriana Fox was born in New York in 1978, she currently lives and works in London. She received a BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 and went on to earn her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London in 2003.Since graduating she has shown her work in galleries and film festivals throughout the UK and US including the Tate Modern and Photo Miami. She received an award for Best Experimental Video Art at the Short Ends World Film Festival held at the ICA in London. Currently, Fox works primarily in video, using lip-syncing and appropriation to tackle subjects such as the self-representation of feminist artists and TV's roles as mythmaker.

*Wee Dark Hours 2006, animation, 1:52 min.
A stop motion animation about a mother's love, a singing moon and
stars and the magic of being born. Short and sweet and made with felt!

Filmmaker Bio: www.meerkatmedia.org and www.growingchefs.blogspot.com
Annie Novak & Alexis Powell are both member of the Meerkat Media Collective. Annie Novak is an artist, farmer, and adventurer who is teaching folks across the globe the importance of local farming and a field-to-fork philosophy. Alexis Powell is a member of the Meerkat Media Collective, an arts collective dedicated to non-hierarchical art-making, and is also a member of the band festival. Together they are superheroes.

March 2nd 2008 Episode 16

2008-02-20T07:39:00.000-08:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a short film series showcasing women's memoir spanning across all genres of film and video.

EA airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

Sunday March 2, 2008 Selected works from the 2007 Female Eye Film Festival.

About FeFF~
The Female Eye began in 2001 and celebrates International independent films by women
and is now in its 6th year.
femaleeyefilmfestival.com

Episode Breakdown~

Dance 2006
A study of choreography and friendship.

Filmmaker Bio:
Natasha is an Italian-Canadian who grew up in the suburbs, north of Toronto. At three years of age, she began and avid study of dance. She later graduated from the Ballet School of Woodbridge and became a certified teacher. Her love of dance was key in the development of many other of her artistic abilities, including painting, acting and writing. High school introduced her to new mediums, when she learned to shoot on 35 mm film and develop her pictures in the darkroom. Natasha was always an avid player in her school’s drama program, and in 2003, when Woodbridge College unveiled a revolutionary new film program, she was able to take her artistic passions to the next level. Two years after the programs initial year, Natasha travelled to Japan with the intentions of creating a short documentary on her travel companions, shot with her digital, hand held video camera. This documentary, entitled “Woodbridge College Invades Japan” was later showcased and viewed by the students, teachers and mayor of Sanjo City in 2005. In 2006, she was given the opportunity to create an experimental film on Super8, a medium she had never previously used. Under the guidance of Edie Stiener, independent film maker, photographer and environmental studies doctorial candidate at York University, Natasha created “Dance”, to be shown at the Female Eye Film festival in Toronto. She later spent a year in Ottawa, studying film and journalism at Carleton University. Natasha is currently completing a Bachelor in English Literature at the University of Toronto.

Beautiful, I guess 2006
A young girl's vision of beauty and all of the contradictions that come with it.

Filmmaker Bio:
Natasha Mariani (Dance) and Suneet Pabla (Beautiful, I guess) were both youth participants in the 2006 Female Eye Film Festival workshop series that gives young women the tools to create their visions in film form.

More Sensitive 35mm 2003
Life threatens to annihilate art as a performer sings his heart out to a less than attentive audience in a bar.

Filmmaker Bio: www.cartoonan.com
Gail Noonan’s life has consisted of a slow westward migration from the east to the west coast of Canada with a sojourn in the middle. She grew up in Nova Scotia , went to art school in Winnipeg and lived there for a number of years as a printmaker. A move to Vancouver prompted her to make a lateral transfer to film animation after a compressed two years of study at the Emily Carr Institute. She abandoned the city a number of years ago to live on Mayne Island, a move that has allowed her to focus on making her films. "More Sensitive" is the latest of seven animated films produced so far. Along with filmmaking Gail has also programmed animation screenings and taught various aspects of film animation. Currently she is exploring a new interest in songwriting combined with experimental animation.

Scoff 2006, 9mins by Renee Webster
A rural woman breaks out of isolation and finds herself in a familiar place.

Beyond the Pearly Gates of Ill Repute 2006, 9mins. Super 8mm
An innocent young girl rents a room in a shady boarding house only to discover she is being held prisoner in a brothel! When her cash runs out, the callous Madame forces her to pay her rent by catering to the needs of her insalubrious clientele. The pious girl tries to defend her purity by exploiting the religious eccentricities of her customers... but will Jesus forgive her ultimate sin?

Filmmaker Bios:
Montréal born Elza Kephart graduated in Film Production from Emerson College in 1998. She then returned to her hometown where she wrote and directed her first feature GRAVEYARD ALIVE - A ZOMBIE NURSE IN LOVE, produced by Bastard Amber Productions. Since its premiere in 2003 the film has screened in over 20 international film festivals and garnered numerous awards, as well as being picked up for distribution and international sales. She is currently developing several feature projects.

Born in Chicago, Elizabeth Lawrence graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a Bachelors degree in film and video production. She has since been consistently working on both studio films and independent productions both in the Us and Canada. She has assisted the CEO of Lakeshore Entertainment on The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Underworld Evolution, The Last Kiss, and The Covenant. She has also coordinated, production managed and line produced several films including Boricua, Torte Bluma, The 5:22, Kosmos, among others. She has written and directed numerous shorts, including the award-winning Nightmarecrawlers. She is currently finishing a musical documentary.

Mrs. William Dixon 2001, 8:37 mins.
A housewife's intense fears are confronted at a simple dinner party.

Filmmaker Bio:
Elizabeth Edwards grew up in San Antonio, Texas then moved to New York City to attend college at Columbia University. She was a member of Choreotectonics, a professional dance company in Manhattan, and choreographed works for the Barnard College Dance Department. She won the Monticello Choreography award from Dance Magazine and her work was selected to attend the National College Dance Festival. She graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Film and Dance from Columbia before moving across the country to attend USC graduate film school. Elizabeth’s thesis film Mrs. William Dixon played at over a dozen film festivals including Deauville, Cinema Jove and the Houston International Film festival where it won the platinum award. Elizabeth also edited the award winning documentary Free a Man to Fight! Women Soldiers of World War II for the History Channel, feature films The Graffiti Artist and Eban and Charley and numerous reality television shows. While editing she started writing her the psychological thriller Hysteria. An early draft earned her a staff writing job on Fox Television’s “Rules of Deception.” After writing eight one hour episodes, Elizabeth completed Hysteria where it found its home with High Treason Productions. It is scheduled to go into production in 2008. Elizabeth is a mentor for the Young Storyteller’s Program which matches screenwriters with elementary school children from Los Angeles public schools. She has been a big sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program for six years.

The Barrows 2006, 10:06 mins.
A timeless love story in an unexpected place.

Filmmaker Bio: Tori Garrett
www.twolittleindians.com

Rock Garden: A Love Story 2007, 10:27 mins.
A Story about a lonely farmer named Ugg whose rocks are his pride and joy. Amidst a landscape of grey fields, he wakes with the sun to tend to them. Every evening he sits at home with his best ones and cleans them. Life is perfect - til Farmer Ugg meets his neighbour farmer Merr. He too wants to be a good farmer and plants his own rocks. The two men compete, side by side. until Farmer Ugg walks into his field one morning and finds a little red flower. And suddenly both men are transformed. Ands two men who were enemies finds themselves doing a slow waltz into the sunset.

Filmmaker Bio: www.rockgardenfilm.com
Born in Seoul, Korea, Gloria U. Y. Kim emigrated to Canada when she was three years old. Soon after graduating from the University of Toronto with her degree in English literature, she has written for Maclean’s as well as worked for such magazines as National Post Business, Report on Business, Canadian Living, Chatelaine and Canadian Business. Gloria found her true love when she started attending Ryerson for film. She has just completed her short film Rock Garden: A Love Story, which has been described by Oscar-nominated director Atom Egoyan as “absolutely beautiful” and “stunning”.

February 3rd 2008 Episode 15

2008-01-28T11:38:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year from Eye AM~

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a short film series showcasing women's memoir spanning across all genres of film and video.

EA airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

Episode 15 - Sunday February 3rd/TWC 34/RCN 82 (in Manhattan)

Episode Breakdown~

Der Gruß von meiner Mutter (The Greeting from my Mother)
(2006 )12:25min
A liturgy, a litany, a laud, THE GREETING FROM MY MOTHER traces the sublime and almost invisible bonds of motherhood, daughterhood and sisterhood over "one hundred years and two world wars." Familial rites and rituals converge in the form of nebulous belief (sometimes objectively, sometimes as metonymy). Images whisper by, like rosary beads, pointing to an underlying message, a personal conclusion: the specifics are secondary, it is in reverence and repetition that salvation can be found, that an anchor can be grasped, that a weather candle can be lit.

Biography
Katja Straub is a native of Southern Germany and is currently pursuing her MfA in Film Production at the University of Texas at Austin. Before moving to Texas, Katja spent 10 years in Berlin freelancing as an art designer and painter for films and music videos. She also held an apprenticeship as a scene painter for the German Opera. She is a graduate of the University of the Arts in Berlin, where she received her Master in Experimental film. Her films have been screened in numerous festivals around the world including the Images Festival in Toronto, the Viper Basel in Switzerland and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For her film “All White People Are French” she received the Special Jury Award at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin in 2005.
www.rocketfilm.de

Western (2007) 11:09 minutes
American morality tale, with a female reporter’s voiceover about disguising herself as a soldier, takes place in a typical motel room. Appropriated cinematic images mix with landscapes of New York, Monument Valley, and Tombstone. The historic gunfight at the O.K. Corral, portrayed in numerous films, has come to symbolize the struggle between law-and-order. Stories about “how the West was ‘won’” parallel those about conquering “the enemy”. If this was the television/entertainment staple for the American public what effect did its continued broadcast have in shaping our society’s mindset?

Biography
Lili White has been exhibiting her works in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad since before moving to New York. In Philadelphia she received at B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a four-year painting certificate. Her interest in the moving image and multimedia, lead her to perform, write, produce, direct several live multi-media pieces, each of which included the performance participation of over a dozen actors, poets and dancers. Upon the introduction of computer digital editing programs, she made several videos, that featured her gestural performances as well as others that were based upon poetry and documentary subjects. These are often seen as a continuation of her earlier Super 8 film work and lead to screenings at numerous cultural centers, including the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia and The Newhouse Center in Staten Island, New York.
www.liliwhite.com

Troubadour (2007) 27:14 min.
A psychedelic journey of self-discovery through virtual space of the imagination, a landscape of the mind- and of the unknown. Our heroine Metalmags is a wandering minstrel, a lost soul, glam rocker,a psychonaut, a superhero, a mime, a depressed 20-something – any and all apply. At first, she is without hope – stranded in an alien world- haunted by memories of another time and place. But with the aid of a self-help tape, her persepctive and the course of her path are transformed. Troubadour's hand-crafted lo-fi sounds and visuals offer an intimate view of the emotional realms of consciousness and creativity. A meditation on soul-searching in an age of anxiety, Troubadour is on your side.

Biography
Erica Magrey is an artist and musician exploring the ways in which fantasy shapes reality and identity. Much of her video work takes a cue from sci-fi and kids' TV shows, employing costumes and handmade miniature sets to portray alien worlds and beings. Erica often uses the perosna Metalmags, a kind of caricature of her music project of the same name, in her work. Erica has a BFA in Photography from Hartford Art School in Bloomfield, CT and an MFA is Photography, Video, and Related Media from SVA in NYC. Erica lives and works in New York.
www.ericamagrey.com

nature nature (2005) 1:57 min.
Based on a haiku by Simon Baron, nature nature portrays a very real, present and no less natural underside of existence that remains outside the embrace of those who declare a “reverence for nature.” A graphic image of the aftermath of “cutting” (self-mutilation) is softened, prettified and bloodied again in unreal computer graphication; a mechanical songbird is the subject of a childlike poem and sweet Grimlike unjust desserts in reverent uneven burlesque of Hitchcock and horrorfilm. Marianne Faithful sings.

Biography
Hilda Daniel is a multi-media artist based in New York City (her permanent home after a childhood in Singapore and adolescence in Hollywood). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and festivals in New York, London and other cities, included in internet and print projects, broadcast on cable television and reviewed in the New York Times, Performance Art Journal, New Art Examiner, artnet.com and other publications.

Don't Miss~
Episode 16 - Sunday March 2nd MNN.org/TWC 34/RCN 82 (in Manhattan):
Selected works from the Female Eye Film Festival
www.femaleeyefilmfestival.com

January 6th 2008 Episode 14

2007-12-16T14:47:00.000-08:00

December 2nd 2007 Episode 13

2007-11-03T20:55:00.000-07:00

November 4th EA Re-airs Episode 12

2007-10-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a short film series showcasing women's memoir spanning across all genres of film and video.

EA now airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)
& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

Please tune in on Sunday for a re-airing of Epsiode 12 (See last posting for episode breakdown).

This episode is a web of video poems, narrative film, video art, documentary, and stop motion animation! Tune in for the work of Devorah Hill, Nancy Montuori Stein, Kim Hall, Natalia Surmiak, Sofia Hericson, Sarah Friedland, Vanessa Woods, Penny Lane, and Annie Novak & Alexis Powell of Meerkat Media Collective.

Also stay tuned for a brand new Winter season beginning Sunday, December 2nd 2007!

*Submission info? Please email eyeam@earthlink.net for details.

September 2nd Eye Am Episode 12

2007-08-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens is a short film series showcasing women's memoir spanning across all genres of film and video.

EA now airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)
& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

This episode is a web of video poems, narrative film, video art, documentary, and stop motion animation! Tune in for the work of Devorah Hill, Nancy Montuori Stein, Kim Hall, Natalia Surmiak, Sofia Hericson, Sarah Friedland, Vanessa Woods, Penny Lane, and Annie Novak & Alexis Powell of Meerkat Media Collective.

Episode Breakdown

I Love You
This photo essay discovers love and respect among three generations of women in one family.

Filmmaker Biography
DEVORAH HILL currently teaches video editing at MNN, Manhattan's public access television center and lives in Brooklyn. She is also a self-taught, erotic illustrator who began her journey by lending her talents to friends when their romantic exploits needed assistance. Over the years, through discreet word of mouth, her work has been solicited and collected. Where Cyrano utilized words to conjure images Devorah uses images to convey the lyricism of Jean Toomer, the intimacy of Zora Neal Hurston and the eroticism of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Sidonie-Cabrielle Collete and Anise Nin.

Stealing Innocence
A gripping portrayal of the ongoing hostilities in the Middle East seen though the eyes of two girls – Rachel and Ayat. Rachel and Ayat are best friends even though one is Israelu and one is Palestinian. Unfortunately events spin out of control, testing their friednship to destruction. This is tragedy that leaves its victims without dignity and hope, and gives human dimension to the violence in the Middle East.

Filmmaker Biography
Nancy Montuori Stein started making films in 2002 after she quit her career of many years as an executive in the music business where she worked with big name artists such as Joni Mitchell and REM. Always passionate about social issues, Nancy immediately began producing and directing the award winning short narrative film, 'Stealing Innocence”, a story about a special friendship in the Middle East between two young girls. The film has been screened in over 100 film festivals and has won 20 awards and was featured in the Los Angeles Times Calendar section. In 2004, Stein finished shooting a documentary short “Joey” on children growing up amid gangs and violence in South Los Angeles which is currently screening in film festivals all of the world. Nancy is currently producing commercials and documentaries for MTV, ESPN, and PBS, and is directing her first feature film “All Ages Night” a music driven teen comedy about the independent rock scene. Nancy's company, American Girl Productions just launched a full service multimedia company that creates unique content for handheld devices including live music video podcasts and mobile shows.
www.americangirlproductions.com

Picture Book
Old pictures of sorority girls and beauty queens come to life in this short documentary exploring gender and representation in the pages of archival yearbooks. Hearing stories and reflections of life in the mid 1950's at the University of Texas, we discover who these women were beyond their beauty and poise.

Filmmaker Biography
KIM HALL is originally from Santa Cruz, CA, Kim made her first documentary about low rider bicycle builders when she was 16 years old. After receiving her B.A. in Theatre from Smith College in 2001, she moved to New York and began working in film programming at Film Forum. She continued on to work as an educator in community and youth media at organizations such as Educational Alliance, Global Action Project and Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Currently Kim is pursuing her MFA in film production at the University of Texas at Austin.

Everybody Loves Lucy
Lucy runs a dive bar in New York City's East Village. She is a legend and an idol to those who have known and respected her for years. Behind her smile though, there are worries and hopes and questions that no customer would ever think to ask.

Filmmaker Biography
NATALIA SURMIAK was born 1978, in Poland. In 2002, graduated from Jagiellonian University in Cracow with M.A. in Film Studies. In 2005 completed TV and Film Directing at Krzysztof Kieslowski Radio + TV Dept of University of Silesia. In 2004, together with 4 other young directors, made a debut as director for Polish National TV, with SCENES FROM WARSAW UPRISING.

My Woollen Scarf
'Saudade” - Portuguese word for the feeling of missing something or someone. IN times of sadness we can only turn to Mother Nature and embrace the warmth of her love. My Woollen Scarf is a film about losses, finding, happiness, and love; it's the return to our origins looking for our place in the World.

Filmmaker Biography
SOFIA HERICSON was born in 1983 in Espinho, Portugal and attended the Cine-video course at Escola Superior de Artes do Porto in Portugal. After struggling as a creative person rather than a technical one, she decided to come to England where she could grow artistiacally and enrolled in Moving Image BA at UCLan. Since 2005, Sofia has directed four short films and worked in various areas of the film field. “My Woolen Scarf” was nominated for Carolina Hererra's National Film and Television School's 212 Innovation Awards in November 2006. She is currently co-directing two shorts films with two directors from Northwest England.

Breath on the Mirror (Souffle Sur le Miroir)
Explores the notion of reflexivity, of the dream as a fundamental reflection of the internal. The mirror reflection is the paradigm of an imaginary order. The labyrinth of images in Breath on the Mirror pus the idea of how varied human dreams are, seeking to conflate the space between lived reality and dream; or what is real (breath) and what is a reflection (the mirror).

Filmmaker Biography
New York based filmmaker, SARAH FRIEDLAND received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003 where she studied film and sociology. She also attended the International School o Film and Televisio in San Antonio de los Banoes, Cuba. She has worked as an editor with several filmmakers in the New York area to produce socially minded and creative films. Among other projects, she was principal editor on the award- winning documentary, Free to Fly US/Cuba Link by Estella Bravo. She also worked as an assistant editor on the Emmy nominated film “The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo” by Amy Stechler. Friedland's work have been screened in many venues including MOMA and the Biennale of the Caribbean among others. Friedland is currently working on a feature length documentary which follows two HIV+ women in rural South Africa, their families and their struggles to survive in the midst of and unspoken epidemic.

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.vanesswoods.com

She used to see him most weekends
A short story about growing up, a certain love song, and the apocryphal memories of childhood. Simple animations create a picture book whose story is scrambled by time and loss.

Filmmaker Biography
PENNY LANE is an independent filmmaker and video artist living in western Massachusetts. Her collaborative and solo experimental, narrative and documentary videos have screened at AFI FEST, Int'l Film Festival Rotterdam, 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. Her award-winning documentaries The Abortion Diaries and Independent Media in a Time of War (the latter made with Hudson-Mohawk Indymedia) are regularly screened in classrooms, community centers and microcinemas across the U.S. and internationally on Free Speech TV. The Abortion Diaries has screened in 37 states at over 170 different community venues, ranging from bars to art centers to clinics to colleges. She earned her MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her BA in American Culture at Vassar College. Currently she is a visiting assistant professor of video and new media at Hampshire College and is working on an experimental documentary about a Depression-era madam with support from the LEF Moving Images Fund and the Experimental Television Center. And yes, that is her real name.

Wee Dark Hours
A stop motion animation about a mother's love, a singing moon and
stars and the magic of being born. Short and sweet and made with felt!
www.meerkatmedia.org
www.growingchefs.blogspot.com

Filmmaker Biography
ANNIE NOVAK & ALEXIS POWELL are both member of the Meerkat Media Collective. Annie Novak is an artist, farmer, and adventurer who is teaching folks across the globe the importance of local farming and a field-to-fork philosophy. Alexis Powell is a member of the Meerkat Media Collective, an arts collective dedicated to non-hierarchical art-making, and is also a member of the band festival. Together they are superheroes.

2007-08-25T19:19:00.001-07:00

Click To Play
Eye Am promo for air on MNN
created by Rahim Brown & Stefanie Alleyne

August 5th Eye Am Episode 11

2007-07-26T20:23:00.000-07:00

EA now airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)
& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

Episode 11 August 5th @ 9:30pm: The works of Esther May Campbell

TRIPTYCH of short shorts (On Ice, In the Dark, and Mum) were written as a bouncy, funny, sad triptych that used dramatic irony in voice over and lyrical film making to create small narratives with big emotions. The stories were devised using real testimonials of young girls and teens posted online on the BBC’s website www.bbc.co.uk/slink.

Poppy
Explores grief in a lyrical short film. Sangeeta has traveled to be with her husband in England; on arrival she discovers that he has taken a lover. Betrayed and alone in an alien world, she struggles against barriers of language and cultue. Finally retreating into memories of India, increasingly distanced from the world around her she relives a past in the hope of changing her fate. This is a film saturated with colour, allusion and a haunting sound design. Sad and happy memory dreams filter into the raw melodrama of the present.

Girl Tactics
A documentary about an all girls football team in Bristol’s Southmead Estate.

Delilah
One day, a familiar face from long ago walks into Pam's hair salon. It's her old schoolmate, Debbie, who still sports the long golden hair she had as a child – and still looks remarkably like the same Debbie who used to humiliate Pam in the playground. The question is, will Pam still hold a grudge?

Charley Harry's Wondrous Nothing
A portrait of a memory, where the past is briefly present. Nestling in the sand dunes and long grass is a dilapidated caravan, within which a young boy's ghost contemplates the stars and his relationship to them. The wind blows ad the sea laps at the shore as time is gently eroded.

Filmmaker Biography
Esther May Campbell worked in theater and as a photographer before moving into film and television. Early credits include dirty, low budget music videos for the Oil Factory and Sony Records, health and safety videos for and about randy sailors, hard hitting sex ed films in South Wales' valleys and documenting an all girls football team in Bristol's Southmead Estate. Her shorts have been commissioned by or received funding from various film councils and television stations in the UK. With experience ranging from directing full 35mm drama productions to digital shotting and editing herself, Esther's captivating cinematic life affirming stories tell of lost souls, tragic lovers, abandonned children, day dreamers and door slammers – raw celluloid magic. Esther continues to direct soaps, is working on her first feature, and has recently been selected to for the WOMEN IN FILM mentoring award. Her aim is to create a unique cinematic vision, pushing formal cinematic boundaries and bringing her own peculiar take on contemporary characters and landscapes.
www.esthermaycampbell.com

Upcoming EA Episodes!

~September 2nd @ 9:30pm: The work of Penny Lane, Sofia Hericson, Devorah Hill, Natalia Surnmiak, Nancy Montuoristein, Kim Hall, Eliza Jane Curtis, Naomi White, and Alexis Powell & Annie Novak of The Meerkat Media Collective.

Thank you for watching!
* If you are interested in organizing an EYE AM screening or submitting work to EA, please email eyeam@earthlink.net

July 1st Eye Am Episode 10

2007-06-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

SUMMER 2007~

EA now airs @ 9:30-10:30pm the 1st Sunday of the month on...
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Time Warner #34/ RCN #82 (in Manhattan)
& Streaming Live Online at www.mnn.org (Worldwide)

Visit www.eyeamvideo.blogspot.com for complete episode rundown!

Episode 10 July 1st @ 9:30pm: The work of Tova Beck Friedman ~

The Portrait of An Artist as an Old(er) Woman
Three octogenarian women artists whose art informs their identity: Margaret K. Johnson, Printmaker; Hannah Eshel, sculptor and Hava Mehutan, sculptor, examine the development of their artistic vision and touch on the subject of age and its effect. Their on-camera interviews are woven together with archival films, home movies and images of their art, to tell the story of life wrapped around art: childhood, art studies, marriage, raising a family, and how those have affected their artistic development. We are given insight into creative energy and vitality that is not hampered by age.

The Altar of Her Memories
At age 17, following her liberation from Bergen-Belsen, Bracha Ghilai came to Israel to start her life over. As part of her healing process she established a puppet theater. Sixty years later, surrounded by her puppets Bracha recalls the dire events of her youth. Through a mix of storytelling, puppetry and archival photographs, we experience the anguish of her narrative while she unlocks chapters from her painful past. Her stories range from the heart wrenching description of her separation from her nephew Nisan, to the powerful and poignant account of incredible power of endurance, survival and the guilt that accompanies, it.

Tova Beck Friedman is an artist working in the mediums of video, photography and sculpture. Her work has been widely exhibited in the US, Israel, Australia, Europe and Japan. Her films have been screened in various places including, The Jerusalem Cinematheque, Israel Television, Channel 10: The Center for Jewish History in New York, Maison de la Culture Plateau Mont-Royal, Montreal, the Athens Film Festival, In Flux Video Art Festival, Thessaloniki, Greece and Cinematic Film, Paris.
www.tbfstudio.com

*****************************
Upcoming EA Episodes!

~August 5th @ 9:30pm: The work of Esther May Campbell.

~September 2nd @ 9:30pm: The work of Penny Lane, Sofia Hericson, Devorah Hill, Natalia Surnmiak, Nancy Montuoristein, Kim Hall, Eliza Jane Curtis, Naomi White, and Alexis Powell & Annie Novak of The Meerkat Media Collective.

Thank you for watching!
* If you are interested in organizing an EYE AM screening or submitting work to EA, please email eyeam@earthlink.net

Eye Am Filmmakers Screen at Rooftop Films~

2007-06-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

Announcing:
Vanessa Woods' The Touch & Elizabeth Henry's Through These Trackless Waters screen at Rooftop Films ~
http://www.rooftopfilms.com/show_07-trapped.html

Trapped Inside the Machine
Self-fulfilling prophecies and inescapable stories. Beautiful, funny and weird short films about falling toward your fate.

FRI., JUNE 29, 2007
8:30 - Live Music by A Three Ring Circus
9:00 - Movies Begin
11-1AM -After Party: Open Bar at Bar Matchless
(557 Manhattan Avenue @ Driggs)
Courtesy of Dewar's Scotch Whisky and Martin Miller's Gin

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.

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.

Through the Trackless Waters
Ecology of Film meets ecology of mind meets ecology of earth. Or vice-versa.

Elizabeth Henry has been working in film for the past ten years as a filmmaker, cinematographer, writer and editor. She is a film professor at the University of Denver and is currently on leave to teach film at Eastern Oregon University. Elizabeth's previous films have appeared in over forty different film festivals around the country.

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens presents...Not AnOther's Fantasy

2007-05-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

~ Women exploring the Self through fact, fantasy, and fiction.

Join us on Tuesday, June 5th 7pm @ The Two Boots Pioneer Theater (free pizza & beer reception to follow)

www.twoboots.com/pioneer for tickets! (advance tickets recommended)

featuring film, video, animation by:

~Anna van Someren
Certain Things- Anxiety and disorientation increase as technology is used to fine-tune personality. The gulf widens between a mother and daughter struggling to understand medicated female identity.

~Lili White
Treasure- My place is your place... — I was here. Hoover Dam, located outside Las Vegas Nevada, was developed to supply hydroelectricity for Arizona, Nevada and California, including the city of Los Angeles, and its surrounding areas. Dam projects in the American West disrupted the communal life of Native Americans and other peoples by forcing dislocation upon families who knew no other way of life. Destruction of their land and submersion of ancient rock art carvings of religious and archeological interest are also by-products of these ventures. The character in TREASURE builds a new city while searching for water by the seaside. Eerie sound and composite images of Hoover Dam, Las Vegas Nevada, and defunct water springs with Indian petroglyphs present an ominous mood.
www.liliwhite.com

~Naomi White
Daily Practice- Through the repetition of various everyday routines, we create images of ourselves. In the four vignettes (#4 screened tonight) that comprise Daily Practice, the filmmaker employs video to explore issues of balance—the earnest and healthy desires for growth versus rituals that perhaps go too far, and instead consume our identities. Does 'practice' improve who we are, or diminish our reality and sense of self? When do repetition and imitation become obsession, and how do we gauge when a practice that may have once been beneficial has become destructive? By depicting different aspects of ritual /obsession this work investigates how the need to change ourselves can elevate ordinary practices into transformative spells in the drive to become something 'more.'
www.naomiwhite.com

~Oriana Fox
Consciousness, Understanding 'N Trust- Ventriloquism, lip-syncing, and appropriation all play subversive roles in the post-feminist retro-spoof, Consciousness, Understanding 'N Trust. In it, Oriana Fox plays a quirky cast of characters including Betty Crocker brunettes, soap opera blonds, and airhead redheads, as they become aware of their collective subjugation as women. The consciousness raising dialogue comes from varied sources ranging from Laura Cottingham's feminist documentary Not For Sale to 60s musical Bye Bye Birdie.
www.orianafox.com

~Pavitra Chalam
Anamika- A reconstruction of the story of a young Devadasi brought to New York. The filmmaker's access to her has been limited. We don’t know of her pain, happiness or her loss. This much we do know, she has been taken to a foreign land to continue an ancient tradition. The film is a quest is to raise questions about different women and the different paths they choose to follow.

~Natalia Surniak
Sylvia & Iga- During one summer day at the lake, two girlfriends encounter a moment of infatuation that tests both their relationship and illusions. From now on nothing will be as it was imagined... Inspired by a short story from Sylvia Plath.

~Irina Patkamian
All Mine Carry With- The filmmaker inter-cuts home movie footage shot in Russia when she was a child with the rehearsals of Chekhov's "The Seagull," that was staged in East Village by Slava Stepnov. Working on this production in New York made the filmmaker remember her childhood, re-cognize herself in Chekhov's protagonist and reflect on the fate of many who choose to leave behind the comfort of predictability, templets, traditions of their homeland and come to the Big Apple to become co-authors of their fate. It combines Video, super-8 mm, and 16mm film.
www.inparentheses.org/amcw

~Kristi Ryba
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.

~Vanessa Woods
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.
www.vanessawoods.com

~Lani Sciandra
Moon of Honey-
a day in the field
the microcosm of marriage
cloud and sunshine
ebb...
and flow
tea and pee and sympathy
seeds to sow.
A girl
a boy
growing pain
growing joy

~Maya Weimer
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.

& Sneak Previews from next season with pieces by
*Devorah Hill and Annie Novak & Alexis Powell of the Meerkat Media Collective!!! www.meerkatmedia.org

Please SPREAD THE WORD!

***********************************************************************************
For more info email eyeam@earthlink.net
www.eyeamvideo.blogspot.com

The Spring '07 Archives: Episode Eight aired on Wednesday April 4th 2007

2007-02-03T13:35:00.001-08:00

Click To Play

Monthly series trailer~
Memoir, experimental, documentary film and video made by women around the world. Featuring works by Oriana Fox, Victoria Kereszi, Lani Sciandra, Sally Grizzel Larson, Anne Haydock, Lili White.

Episode Description

Consciousness, Understanding 'N Trust (2005) 5minutes 50seconds
Ventriloquism, lip-syncing, and appropriation all play subversive roles in the post-feminist retro-spoof, Consciousness, Understanding 'N Trust. In it, Oriana Fox plays a quirky cast of characters including Betty Crocker brunettes, soap opera blonds, and airhead redheads, as they become aware of their collective subjugation as women. The consciousness raising dialogue comes from varied sources ranging from Laura Cottingham's feminist documentary Not For Sale to 60s musical Bye Bye Birdie.

Embodiment Workout (2005) 6 minutes 30 seconds
Oriana Fox's new fitness video is not only a sweatily satisfying workout for the body, but it is a sumptuous feast for the eyes. With a head of chestnut curls, Fox, resplendent in scarlet lycra, takes a merry band of followers through their paces in a state-of-the-art studio with a kitcsh retro look. So up beat are the tunes, so dazzling the smiles in this video, that a better body at the end of it seems almost irrelevant. The five exercising goddesses are really one of a kind and there is only one true star of the show.

Filmmaker Bio
Oriana Fox was born in New York in 1978, she currently lives and works in London. She received a BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 and went on to earn her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London in 2003.Since graduating she has shown her work in galleries and film festivals throughout the UK and US including the Tate Modern and Photo Miami. She received an award for Best Experimental Video Art at the Short Ends World Film Festival held at the ICA in London. Currently, Fox works primarily in video, using lip-syncing and appropriation to tackle subjects such as the self-representation of feminist artists and TV's roles as mythmaker.
www.orianafox.com

Second Hand Rose (2006) 3minutes
Found/amateur 8mm film reels of amateur/found women boxers performing in a motel. Soundtrack by the winner of the 2006 Pocono Idol contest in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

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 using media to address 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 where she curates Eye Am and makes short video documentaries and collaged animations.
www.victoriakereszi.net

Writer's Block (2006) 2minutes 23seconds
I wood. Therefore I am.

Lookout (2006) 3minutes 30seconds
Please pick up your socks.

Filmmaker Bio
Lani Sciandra~ goodlovingwOMan@yahoo.com

Incidental Melodies
A woman fantasizes about her life through the familiar refrains of desire and possibility, giving in to melodrama, but adamantly refusing an unhappy ending. She reminds us of the fact that when we dream- and in real life- we get to star and direct.

Filmmaker Bio
Sally Grizzell Larson is a visual artist based in Philadelphia. She has traveled extensively all over the world including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Egypt, China, Hong Kong, Europe, England, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, as she has had long term stays in Kenya and Ireland from 1987-1988. Her videos have been screened all over the World from New York City and Berkeley to Tokyo. Larson's photographic work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery in the US, and at Galleries in Malaga, Spain and Cachan, France. Her work has also been written about in various publications.

Eaten
A game of dress-up: windows and wallpaper, hawks and moths, olive loaf and tinfoil. The sounds and gestures of the everyday gather to become the pre-articulated vocabulary of desire, anxiety, and basic human needs.

The piece uses rephotography to incorporate elements from a site-specific installation with additional super-8 footage, combining direct animation, timelapse photography, and choreography for the projector with found and foleyed non-sync sound to create a sometimes lyric but often jarring meditation on what it can mean to eat and be eaten.

Filmmaker Bio
Anne Haydock is a M.F.A. candidate in Film & Video Production at the University of Iowa, and has screened at festivals and curated events in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the U.K. She is interested in housecoats, hybrids, transgendered images of femininity, steganography, and dead and dying mediums. A recent transplant from Philadelphia, she now lives in Iowa City with her large cat, Chairman Meow.

NY(see)
This piece was made without a script or an editing plan. Reflecting what New York stands for: America’s cradle of immigration; the site of the 9/11 Disaster; the platform of a genuine international city it asks “What does it mean to be an artist-immigrant now when the whole world is on the verge of major change?” Three immigrant artists intersect with their own artwork; New York’s cityscapes and White’s performative actions referring to the shared energy fields between them all. Part home-movie, part city-symphony, NY(see) straddles the borders of an autobiographical document and documentary movie-making, imparting the archetype of “the artist”. She is currently in pre-production for her next feature length movie, based on “greed’.

Filmmaker Bio
Lili White has been exhibiting her works in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad since before moving to New York. In Philadelphia she received at B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a four-year painting certificate. Her interest in the moving image and multimedia, lead her to perform, write, produce, direct several live multi-media pieces, each of which included the performance participation of over a dozen actors, poets and dancers. Upon the introduction of computer digital editing programs, she made several videos, that featured her gestural performances as well as others that were based upon poetry and documentary subjects. These are often seen as a continuation of her earlier Super 8 film work and lead to screenings at numerous cultural centers, including the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia and The Newhouse Center in Staten Island, New York.
www.liliwhite.com

The Spring '07 Archives: Episode Seven aired on Wednesday March 7th 2007

2007-02-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

Click To Play

Monthly series trailer~
Memoir, experimental, documentary film and video made by women around the world. Featuring works by Ellen Lake, Dina Williams, Oriana Fox, Sarah Klein, Jennifer Beth Guerin, Lora Alaniz, Caroline Koebel, Cara Marisa Deleon, Lili White, & Elizabeth Henry.

Episode Description

Ann's Hoard (2003) 7minutes 30seconds
Confessions of a hoarder. Ann collects vases the way Imleda Marcus collects shoes. This short documentary explores the compulsion to collect, keep, and hold onto things that others may have long discarded. In Ann's case, she collects vases, covered glass dishes, hats, wigs, clothes, and loads of junk jewelry from eBay. She stashes these purchases in her garage, attic, under beds, and in closets.

Filmmaker Bio
Ellen Lake received her MFA in Mills College in Oakland, California in 2002, where she studied sculpture, film and video, and installation. She is currently working on a series of experimental documentaries about collecting. She is the recipient of Bay Area Video Coalition's 2005 Mediamaker Award. Lakes' work has screened in the Bay Area, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New York City.
www.ellenlake.com

Domesticated Home
The Domesticated Home holds up a mirror to the gendered practice of domestic labor. Inspired by the proliferation of gender-specific, fetishized, idealized home-improvement and decorating magazines and TV shows, the arts examined the gender roles and spaces of the home: the man as master of the exterior domain; the woman as gentle mistress of the home's interior.

Filmmaker Bio
Dina Williams is a multimedia artist and educator, working primarily in photography, web and video. She has worked with youth and adults in several schools, arts centers and afterschool programs including the Ark, Inc. and The Arts Center for the Capital Region. Williams is a member of the Hudson-Mohawk Indy Media Center video collective. She has worked in production, post-production and graphic design on projects such as “Voices Against War: F15 NYC” and “Ararat in Troy: A Celebration of Armenian Culture”. Williams is a 2002 recipient of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
www.aneclecticoffering.ne1.net

3 into 1 (2004) 6minutes 30seconds
The most self-referential work Oriana Fox has made, she interviewed her parents, her mother, father and stepmother, asking them to speak about her, her personality and their relationships to one another. In the video, Fox acts as them, wearing their clothes, mimicking their gestures, and sitting in their respective homes. Most importantly, she lip-syncs their words as they describe her both with candor and humor. Switching roles between the three, Fox attempts to find the truth of the self, ending up in an almost hysterical flipping between them.

Filmmaker Bio
Oriana Fox was born in New York in 1978, she currently lives and works in London. She received a BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 and went on to earn her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London in 2003.Since graduating she has shown her work in galleries and film festivals throughout the UK and US including the Tate Modern and Photo Miami. She received an award for Best Experimental Video Art at the Short Ends World Film Festival held at the ICA in London. Currently, Fox works primarily in video, using lip-syncing and appropriation to tackle subjects such as the self-representation of feminist artists and TV's roles as mythmaker.
www.orianafox.com

Escape Episode (2003) 8minutes
During a trip to meet the past in Fallon Nevada, a grandmother and granddaughter, find their destination is similar but their reality is decidedly different.

Filmmaker Bio
Sarah Klein is interested in the contrast between the domestic world and the public world. In her videos, drawings, and performances she explores the conducts and codes that define these two realms. Sarah has exhibited her work across the US and around the globe in galleries, museums, on television and in film festivals. Klein received her BA and MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. Klein has screened her work all over California, New York City, Spain, and Germany.
www.sarahklein.com

Bed Ballet (2005)
Bed Ballet is a collaborative video exploring notions of the everyday (beds and bodies). Through a lens of enchantment, it evokes a feeling of connection and play, while simultaneously suggesting birth, death, intimacy, loss, and grief. Ultimately, the Bed Ballet offers a stage for women to relate, to be seen, hopefully hinting at ways that other women can create environments in which to celebrate themselves and others.

Filmmaker Bio
Jennifer Beth Guerin received a Master of Fine Arts in New Genre at the University of Arizona (May 2004). Her emphasis includes video production, installation, and performance. She received her BFA in Studio Art (Dec. 2000) from the University of Texas at Austin. Her teaching experience includes private, public and alternative educational settings, serving students of all ages. She has participated in exhibitions throughout the United States. Internationally, her work has been shown in Albania, Argentina, Canada, China, England, Germany, India, and Slovenia. Resides in Austin, Texas where she is a working artist and is conducting sculptural research by fabricating custom mattresses with her father.
www.pluggedvideocollective.com

Music Composition and Sound Editor:
Lora Alaniz, a Mexican-American native of South Texas, received her BFA from the University of Arizona (2000). Her work has been exhibited recently at PlaySpace in San Francisco, Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater in New York, Prenelle Gallery in London, and Arroyo Arts Collective in Los Angeles. She received a grant from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council for her work in the Arizona Biennial ‘05 at the Tucson Museum of Art, curated by Siri Engberg from the Walker Art Center. In December of 2005 she was invited to be in the group show She Objects, curated by Simon Donovan at the Conrad Wilde Gallery in Tucson. Lora has also been in numerous video screenings and film festivals internationally, is a founding member of the all women Plugged Video Art Collective, and is currently a working artist in Austin, Texas.
www.pluggedvideocollective.com

Single (2006) 3minutes 16seconds
A short experimental nursery rhyme explores possession and loss.

Filmmaker Bio
Cara Marisa Deleon received her MA in film studies from the University of Iowa and her MFA in film production from Savannah College of Art and Design. She is an experimental artist who explores the body, women and ideology within time-based media. Her work has been shown throughout North America and Europe. She currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina and is an Assistant Professor of Film and Video and Johnson C. Smith University.

Hole or Space (2006) 3minutes 23seconds
Pricks, gaps, dots, openings, hole or space takes its cue from contortionists of the early screen in spiraling out from conceptions of the body as whole. The film is based entirely on archival material: Luis Martinetti, Contortionist (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1894)
Crissie Sheridan Serpentine Dance (Edison, 1897), Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, 1924)/An Optical Poem (Oskar Fischinger, 1938)/Tarantella (Mary E. Bute & Ted Nemeth, 1940)

Filmmaker Bio
Through an expanded arts and cultural practice infused by experimental film, Caroline Koebel problem solves relations of form and content anew in each project with the intent to create participatory audienceship. In addition to single-channel cinema, she uses film and digital video as key components of installation and performance. Transmissions of conceptual art, feminist film and literary theory, and punk d.i.y. ethos guide Koebel in work that embraces pleasure and desire as tactics to corrupt commodity culture, authoritarianism, and the endangerment of subjective experience. For a handful of years, the global movement for progressive social change has inspired her to place greater focus on questions of political agency, while continuing to examine how individual artworks are themselves agents of power. Drawing breath from pioneers such as Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren, Koebel situates writing and curating firmly within her creative practice. She holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from UCSD, and teaches in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo.

Departure (2003) 10minutes 20seconds
DEPARTURE (definition):
a departing; going away; leaving
a starting out, as on a trip or new course of action: as, political action is a new departure for labor.a deviation or turning aside (from something.)
[archaic] death. in nautical usage,
a) the distance of a ship due east or west from the meridian of its starting point.
b) a ship’s position in latitude and longitude at the start of a voyage from which the dead reckoning is begun.

Departure’s visual and conceptual foundation is rooted in the four Chinese characters for “to depart” and was inspired by the myriad meanings that define the word “departure.” Filmmaker

Filmmaker Bio
Lili White has been exhibiting her works in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad since before moving to New York. In Philadelphia she received at B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a four-year painting certificate. Her interest in the moving image and multimedia, lead her to perform, write, produce, direct several live multi-media pieces, each of which included the performance participation of over a dozen actors, poets and dancers. Upon the introduction of computer digital editing programs, she made several videos, that featured her gestural performances as well as others that were based upon poetry and documentary subjects. These are often seen as a continuation of her earlier Super 8 film work and lead to screenings at numerous cultural centers, including the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia and The Newhouse Center in Staten Island, New York.
www.liliwhite.com

Through the Trackless Waters
Ecology of Film meets ecology of mind meets ecology of earth. Or vice-versa.

Filmmaker Bio
Elizabeth Henry has been working in film for the past ten years as a filmmaker, cinematographer, writer and editor. She is a film professor at the University of Denver and is currently on leave to teach film at Eastern Oregon University. Elizabeth's previous films have appeared in over forty different film festivals around the country.

The Spring '07 Archives: Episode Nine aired on Wednesday May 2nd 2007

2007-02-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

Click To Play

Monthly series trailer~
Memoir, experimental, documentary film and video made by women around the world. Featuring works by Naomi White, Lani Sciandra, Lili White, Caroline Koebel, & NMASS Video Project.

Episode Description

Daily Practice
Through the repetition of various
everyday routines, we create images of ourselves. In the four vignettes that comprise Daily Practice, I employ video to explore issues of balance—the earnest and healthy desires for growth versus rituals that perhaps go too far, and instead consume our identities. Does 'practice' improve who we are, or diminish our reality and sense of self? When do repetition and imitation become obsession, and how do we gauge when a practice that may have once been beneficial has become destructive? By depicting different aspects of ritual /obsession this work investigates how the need to change ourselves can elevate ordinary practices into transformative spells in the drive to become something 'more.' Through imitation, conditioning and practice these characters attempt to create new instinctual behaviors
through which they come to understand themselves and their world.

Filmmaker Bio
Naomi White is a photographer and video editor. She has worked for such companies as Dadamobile, A&E, Discovery Channel, Lifetime, ABC, as well as directing and editing music videos and documentaries. Recently she co-edited a feature film called "Mo" for director Brian Lederman. White's career began as a photographer and videographer, probing narrative ideas through autobiographical vignettes which formed her fascination with the storytelling process. Her recent photographic series "The Ironclad Lover" was featured in a group show at the Redhead gallery at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.
www.naomiwhite.com

Moon of Honey (2006) 4minutes 6seconds
a day in the field
the microcosm of marriage
cloud and sunshine
ebb...
and flow
tea and pee and sympathy
seeds to sow.
A girl
a boy
growing pain
growing joy
Filmmaker Bio
Lani Sciandra

Treasure (2006) 3minutes 30seconds
My place is your place... — I was here
Hoover Dam, located outside Las Vegas Nevada, was developed to supply hydroelectricity for Arizona, Nevada and California, including the city of Los Angeles, and its surrounding areas.
Dam projects in the American West disrupted the communal life of Native Americans and other peoples by forcing dislocation upon families who knew no other way of life. Destruction of their land and submersion of ancient rock art carvings of religious and archeological interest are also by-products of these ventures. The character in TREASURE builds a new city while searching for water by the seaside. Eerie sound and composite images of Hoover Dam, Las Vegas Nevada, and defunct water springs with Indian petroglyphs present an ominous mood.

Peace Piece (2006) 2minutes 33seconds
(MADE AS A RESPONSE TO WAR)
“in Flanders field where poppies grow”
Flower chain made by children at Ljubljana’s National Gallery — Slovenia is the only nation where “Culture Day” is a national holiday.
Jung’s thought: only by dealing with one’s “shadow” side can one arrive at peace

Filmmaker Bio
Lili White has been exhibiting her works in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad since before moving to New York. In Philadelphia she received at B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a four-year painting certificate. Her interest in the moving image and multimedia, lead her to perform, write, produce, direct several live multi-media pieces, each of which included the performance participation of over a dozen actors, poets and dancers. Upon the introduction of computer digital editing programs, she made several videos, that featured her gestural performances as well as others that were based upon poetry and documentary subjects. These are often seen as a continuation of her earlier Super 8 film work and lead to screenings at numerous cultural centers, including the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia and The Newhouse Center in Staten Island, New York.
www.liliwhite.com

Berlin Warszawa Express (2006) 19minutes
In Berlin Warszawa Express a disappearance becomes a departure, but rather than attempting to reconstitute what is lost, the filmmaker follows the clues and signs framing the site and scene with an anticipatory gaze. She performs the kino eye, meeting the same train day after day, yet here the eye is aligned with not just any body, but with the distinctly maternal body. Her pregnant self a decoy, the filmmaker takes in the world around her, and makes contemporary the tradition of the city film.

Tracking shots, the Lumière brothers, animation, structural film, light and reflection, protofilmic toys such as the zoetrope, sprocket holes—cinema itself is a main line for Berlin Warszawa Express. The live-ness and intersections of all the film’s rails depend on who’s traveling.

Filmmaker Bio
Through an expanded arts and cultural practice infused by experimental film, Caroline Koebel problem solves relations of form and content anew in each project with the intent to create participatory audienceship. In addition to single-channel cinema, she uses film and digital video as key components of installation and performance. Transmissions of conceptual art, feminist film and literary theory, and punk d.i.y. ethos guide Koebel in work that embraces pleasure and desire as tactics to corrupt commodity culture, authoritarianism, and the endangerment of subjective experience. For a handful of years, the global movement for progressive social change has inspired her to place greater focus on questions of political agency, while continuing to examine how individual artworks are themselves agents of power. Drawing breath from pioneers such as Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren, Koebel situates writing and curating firmly within her creative practice. She holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from UCSD, and teaches in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. She has exhibited in the US at Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Film Forum, Other Cinema, and elsewhere, and internationally, including in Brazil, Cuba, Ireland, Thailand, and Poland. In January 2007, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center hosted the premiere of Berlin Warszawa Express and a retrospective of 16mm films in a program called “Shots & Cuts: Films by Caroline Koebel.”

Ruth's Story (2005) 16minutes
This piece follows a young woman in New York City as she struggles
with her relationship with her mother, who emigrated from Mexico to
the United States in search of a better life. Ruth relates her hopes
and dreams, even as she grapples with her mother's illness, caused by
years of working in a garment factory in Brooklyn.

Filmmaker Bio
This is the work of the NMASS Video Project. The National Mobilization Against Sweatshops is a workers membership organization with centers in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. NMASS brings working people from many different communities together to fight for control of our work, our health, our time and our lives.
www.nmass.org

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

2006-09-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-26T19:48:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

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

The Spring '06 Archives: Episode One aired on April 5th 2006

2006-04-03T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Spring '06 Archives: Episode Two aired on May 3rd 2006

2006-04-03T18:29:00.000-07:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens a monthly show that highlights women's memoir film and women's exploration of the Self from behind their cameras.

Airing on MNN from 8-9 pm on Time Warner #34/RCN #83 (in Manhattan), and WORLDWIDE at www.mnn.org (just click on the #34 icon during the time of the broadcast.)

Films~

Gloria’s Party: Acted by young teenagers from the White Bird Productions' Performance Team, "Gloria's Party" is the result of a workshop blending the boundaries of improvisation, fiction and documentary. Exploring the themes of image, belonging and adolescence in Brooklyn, “Gloria's Party” portrays the tensions and expectations that emerge from nine girls suddenly forced to interact at their common friend's surprise party.

Filmmaker Biography: Delphine Dhilly is a documentary filmmaker from Champagne, France. After studying Film Theory and French Literature in Paris, she moved to New York to learn Film Production. She received her MFA in Television Production at Brooklyn College in 2004 and lives now in Paris. The short documentaries she directed, The B68, Gloria’s Party, and Unearth, have played at various venues and festivals, and aired on New York and French cable television. She is currently editing her feature-length documentary There’s still a Girl Crying, exploring the emotional and political journeys of four American soldiers’ wives and girlfriends whose husband and partner were recently deployed in Iraq. Welker White is an actress and teacher living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Welker has worked in theater, television and film for over twenty years in notable productions On and Off-Broadway, roles in films such as Goodfellas, Dead Poet’s Society, and This Is My Life and numerous guest roles on television series such as Sex and the City, Law and Order, and Spin City. As a teaching artist, Welker has created theater workshops in public schools as well as working with students from Creative Theatrics, an after-school and summer theater program in Park Slope.

Tu Me Souviens (Remember Me): Part-fiction, part-love story, this piece delves into the chaotic world of a woman who is rapidly losing her memory. To retain some sense of her identity, she hires a photographer to follow her and document her life. Narrated and shot from the perspective of the photographer who falls madly in love with his subject, the film paints a landscape of growing obsession. Ultimately the story is one of a woman who chooses not to descend into existential trauma, but instead turns her illness into a work of art. Composed largely of still photographs, the film finds poetic balance between documentary, narrative, and experimental modes.

Filmmaker Biography: Isabel Sadurni has written, produced, and directed fictional narrative and non-fiction documentary films in the US and France. Her films range in subject from love stories to war documentaries. Her work has been aired on regional television in California and New York, has been screened in festivals around the world and is a part of the permanent collection of the videothèque of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Her films have been selected by numerous international festivals including Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival and Market, Films des Femmes of Crèteil, France, the Latino Film Festival of California, and Festival International de Cinéma in Monterrey, Mexico. She currently lives in New York, New York and is working on her next film set in Spanish Harlem.

Carla Cope: A story of life, love and loss during the 9/11 tragedy in New York City. The film follows Carla through the city as she looks back on all she has lost while grappling with the uncertainty of her future.

Filmmaker Biography: Alak Films has been producing underground short films for the last two decades. A family venture whose hands-on approach infiltrates every aspect of filmmaking from conception to completion. Alak’s trademark style incorporates super-8 film and archival stock which is assembled together at a fast and furious pace creating new stories out of old footage.

Anamika: A reconstruction of the story of a young Devadasi brought to New York. My access to her has been limited. We don’t know of her pain, happiness or her loss. This much we do know, she has been taken to a foreign land to continue an ancient tradition. The film is a quest is to raise questions about different women and the different paths they choose to follow.

Filmmaker Biography: Pavitra Chalam is a graduate student at the New York Film Academy's Filmmaking Program. She received her B.A. in History, Political Science and Economics in 2002 from Mount Carmel College (Bangalore University). In July 2003, Pavitra was privileged to represent India at the Youth Initiative for Peace in Pakistan where she made her film debut with "Bus" – a cinematic exposition of the shared ideals of the youth of both nations. In August 2003, as a journalist at the World Youth Congress in Morocco, Pavitra contributed to the creation of the Casablanca Declaration presented to the UN. Enriched by her international experiences, Pavitra returned to India to pursue her passion for documentary filmmaking. Pavitra's compassion for trafficked women and children, intellectual curiosity about the legalities of the institution of prostitution and need to create awareness about the current state of Indian female sex workers led to the creation of "Bound By Us". This film was screened at schools and colleges all over India and at two international film festivals. Over the course of her research for "Bound By Us", she developed a fascination for the ancient and glorious South Indian Devadasi tradition. "Anamika" marks the beginning of her quest to understand the transformation of the Devadasi from the revered patron of the arts (in the second to the eighteenth centuries in India) to the wronged, fallen woman of today.

A Steady Grind: Another American Family Portrait is a portrait of a grandmother’s life as the head of the family’s 53-year-old junkyard business in Chester, Pennsylvania. As she falls further into tax debt and ill health, Eloyse Kereszi comes to terms with the loss of her husband and sons, and is faced with the decision to sell the junkyard. Through the documentary and memoir film forms, the filmmaker explores this matriarchy as her grandmother looks back on her life and negotiates the sale of the family business. This presentation is the filmmaker's thesis project. A final version is in the works.

Filmmaker Biography: 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 received her B.A. in Psychology and Women’s Studies from West Chester University of Pennsylvania where she worked as a hotline counselor at a women’s domestic violence shelter. She is currently working in 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. In Victoria’s personal documentary work, A Steady Grind: Another American Family Portrait, she addresses issues of class and gender as she filmed the sale of her grandmother’s 53-year-old junkyard business in Chester, Pennsylvania.

The Spring '06 Archives: Episode Three aired June 7th 2006

2006-03-30T20:42:00.000-08:00

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens a monthly show that highlights women's memoir film and women's exploration of the Self from behind their cameras.

Airing on MNN from 8-9 pm on Time Warner #34/RCN #83 (in Manhattan), and WORLDWIDE at www.mnn.org (just click on the #34 icon during the time of the broadcast.)

Films~

Certain Things: Anxiety and disorientation increase as technology is used to fine-tune personality. The gulf widens between a mother and daughter struggling to understand medicated female identity.

Filmmaker Biography: Anna Van Someren began making videotapes as a student at Colgate University and earned her M.F.A. in Video Art from Massachusetts College of Art in 1998. She creates visually stunning and intensely felt video spaces, often combining bits of recorded personal life with found images from scientific and medical footage. Her work is concerned with the dynamics between physical and mental health, and the vague boundaries between the two. Her tapes have shown in festivals in North America and Europe, including the New York Video Festival and Bandits-Mages Audio-Visual Festival. She currently lives in Boston where she teaches video production to teens. She has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Williams College.

All Mine Carry With- The filmmaker inter-cuts home movie footage shot in Russia when she was a child with the rehearsals of Chekhov's "The Seagull," that was staged in East Village by Slava Stepnov. Working on this production in New York made the filmmaker remember her childhood, re-cognize herself in Chekhov's protagonist and reflect on the fate of many who choose to leave behind the comfort of predictability, templets, traditions of their homeland and come to the Big Apple to become co-authors of their fate. It combines Video, super-8 mm, and 16mm film.
www.inparentheses.org/amcw

Filmmaker Biography: Russian born, Irina Patkanian is an experimental filmmaker who lives and works in New York City. Patkanian’s films and videos have been shown at various festivals and at the Tenement Museum in New York City. Patkanian is the founder and the president of a non-for-profit film and theater company “In Parentheses”. Most recently Patkanian wrote/directed and produced a documentary "My American Neighbor" about the perception of America from the other side of he Atlantic and a digital short “Second Egyptian”, based on a novella by Marina Palei. Irina Patkanian is a professor of Media Production at Brooklyn College/CUNY.

The Hours After the Fight with Myself: In this video, the artist uses the symbolic visual language of a corner along with natural video deterioration to convey her struggle to find clarity and express her inner voice.

Filmmaker Biography: Courtney Rile is an international video artist and curator living and working in Syracuse, NY. She has shown her video art extensively in Syracuse and recently at Swarm Gallery in London, UK and as part of Zemos98 in Sevilla, Spain. In 2005, she curated"Videohm," an international moving imagery videoprogram at an upscale downtown lounge in Syracuse. Rile graduated from Syracuse University with a B.F.A. in Art Video and currently works at Delavan Art Gallery in Syracuse.

Other Tongue: When Vera Szeto, an American-born Chinese, and Corgan Long, a Chinese-raised Caucasian, fall in love, tensions rise as Vera’s traditional Chinese mother disapproves of their relationship. What starts as a typical mother-daughter dispute culminates into a question of what it means to be authentically “Chinese” and “American.” Can you replace your mother tongue with an“other tongue”?

Filmmaker Biography: A native of New York City, Win-Sie Tow holds a B.S. in Radio/TV/Film and a minor in Asian American Studies from Northwestern University. She has worked for the IFP Market, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and was a production assistant on Michael Hoffman’s Game 6 and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. Other Tongue was her senior thesis film and is scheduled to air on New Screen Television and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. She currently works for the Tribeca Film Festival.

Superhero: This self-portrait, employs the metaphor of a being a superhero to ponder the artist’s identity and who she would like to be along with larger issues about our purpose and nature as humans.

Filmmaker Biography: Video is the culmination of Anne Catherine’s lifelong interest in storytelling. Her background in dance and musical theatre has led her to improvisation and video, where she has become the storyteller, rather than the instrument through which the story is told. Anne Catherine has been making her own video work for the past few years and has recently begun studying media arts at Hunter College. Several of her recent works have been exhibited including Soundtrack, which was included in the Integrated Media Arts Spring Show at Hunter College in May 2004, and Cadillac Man, a video portrait, which was selected for showing at the 2005 CUNY Arts Festival. Her self-portrait, Superhero, was also recent screened at the CUNY Docworks Festival in March 2006.

Sylvia & Iga: During one summer day at the lake, two girlfriends encounter a moment of infatuation that tests both their relationship and illusions. From now on nothing will be as it was imagined...Inspired by a short story from Sylvia Plath.

Filmmaker Biography: Natalia Surmiak - Born in 1978, in Poland. In 2002, graduated from Jagiellonian University in Cracow with M.A. in Film Studies. In 2005 completed TV and Film Directing at Krzysztof Kieslowski Radio + TV Dept of University of Silesia. In 2004, together with 4 other young directors, made a debut as director for Polish National TV, with SCENES FROM WARSAW UPRISING.